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Game Reviews S

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

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

The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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

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    Table of Contents
    Saied
    Sangraal
    Sanity Clause
    Sardoria
    Save Princeton
    Savoir-Faire
    Scapeghost
    Scavenger
    Screen
    Seastalker
    Shade
    Shades of Grey
    Shadowgate
    Shadows On The Mirror
    She's Got A Thing For a Spring
    Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
    Shogun
    Shrapnel
    A Simple Theft
    Sins Against Mimesis
    Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla
    Sir Ramic Hobbs and the Oriental Walk
    Six Stories
    Skyranch
    Slouching Towards Bedlam
    Small World
    Snatches
    The Snowman Sextet
    So Far
    Solitary
    Son of a...
    Sorcerer
    The Sound of One Hand Clapping
    South American Trek
    Space Aliens Laughed at my Cardigan
    Space Horror I: Prey for Your Enemies
    The Space Under the Window
    Space War! ...and the PDP-1
    The Spatent Obstruction
    SpeeedIF 8: A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless
    Spellbreaker
    Spider and Web
    Spiritwrak
    Splashdown
    A Spot of Bother
    Spur
    Square Circle
    Starcross
    Stargazer
    Stationfall
    Sting of the Wasp
    Stone Cell
    Stranded
    A Sugared Pill
    Sunset Over Savannah
    Suprematism
    Suspect
    Suspended
    Swineback Ridge
    Sylenius Mysterium

    Saied
    From: Jarvist Frost <BOBFROST SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998

    NAME: Saied
    AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
    E-MAIL: robb_sherwin SP@G juno.com
    DATE: 6/8/98
    PARSER: Slightly below Inform Standard
    SUPPORTS: ZCODE interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/chicken.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    { Editor's note: this was one of the entries of the 1998 Chicken Comp
    (see the NEWS section above), hence the reference to chickens crossing
    the road. The file chicken.zip contains not only this game, but the
    other entries as well. }

    In this game you play the role of the spurned lover (male). Your Ex
    has left you for someone else 18 months ago (while you were standing
    there at 3am waiting for her in the freezing cold). Now, she has
    phoned you and asked you to come round and comfort her since she has
    just been arguing with her new lover, your replacement. You start this
    game in your bed, and have to get up and decide whether you are going
    to respond to your Ex's call for help.

    This game has more bugs than a tropical swamp. Instead of typing
    'stand' or 'get out of bed' you have to type 'pump it up' to get out
    of bed. The direction of your door (the only exit from your apartment)
    is not actually mentioned in the room description and so you have to
    guess wildly by typing in directions at random until you realise that
    it is towards the east. This game hardly recognises any of the items
    mentioned in the room description. The main way that the story
    progresses is through people phoning you up. After you finely decide
    to get out of bed and exit the house you find yourself faced with a
    decision (which will, either way, end the game). Should you go to your
    Ex lover's house you should you cross to the other Saied to see your
    close (female) friend?

    This game had some _very_ infuriating parser problems. The two items
    (of which only 1 can be picked up) served no purpose other than to be
    looked at. Only the second of the 2 locations contains any information
    about the exits from it. The telephone calls are hard wired in, where
    ether you are, you still get the telephone calls (which occur at 'so
    many turns').

    From the last two paragraphs of complaints you would expect the
    writing to be terrible and the game to be boring, frustrating and
    excessively hard to understand. It wasn't. The writing was of a very
    high standard throughout and both endings seemed very fitting, in
    particular I liked the joke about why the chicken crossed the road
    (and no it isn't "to get to the other side"(TM) but it is something
    similar).

    As a whole, this game was good fun and I would heartily recommend it
    to anyone with experience with bad parsers (i.e. all you Speccy Ifers
    out there). Once the parser bugs have been navigated, this game turns
    into a fun, short game and I found it well worth the download time. I
    will certainly look forward to the 1998 i.f. competition entry from
    Robb Sherwin.

    Inform .z5 file, bundled with other chicken-comp games (.zip)

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

    TITLE: Sangraal
    AUTHOR: Jonathan Partington, ported to Inform by Adam Atkinson and Graham
    Nelson
    E-MAIL: (Adam's) ghira SP@G mistral.co.uk
    DATE: 1987 (ported 1999)
    PARSER: Two-word
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/phoenix/games/zcode/Sangraal.z5
    VERSION: Release 1.18 of the original, release 1 of the port

    Sangraal is one of the three Topologika games recently ported to
    Inform--the others are Fyleet and Crobe--and it's an odd experience in
    several respects for present-day IFers. While it doesn't meet the
    fairness and friendliness standards that latter- day IF has developed,
    the overall level of literacy and wit is high enough to make it worth a
    look.

    The parser represents the biggest adjustment. It's a two-word parser
    that simply ignores anything after the first two words, so GIVE X TO Y
    will generally work, but PUT X IN Y will not. This requires some fairly
    tortured inferences at times--DROP is sometimes taken as the equivalent
    of PUT, improbably--and on the whole it's not a major highlight. EXAMINE
    is disabled--the "initial" description of each object has everything
    that's relevant--and other standbys like ENTER and WEAR aren't on the
    scene either, and nor are meta-commands like UNDO and OOPS. (On the
    other hand, lots of highly unusual verbs are recognized, and there's no
    way of guessing what the game does and doesn't allow as a verb.) There
    are other, smaller differences--abbrevations like I and L aren't
    provided for--but the parser is the biggest adjustment, and whether it
    drives the modern player completely insane depends in large part on
    whether the player grew up on Infocom (whose parser was never limited to
    two words) or discovered IF only recently (and therefore never
    encountered the earlier, cruder days of IF parsing).

    As you might guess from the above, the puzzles don't, by and large,
    involve particularly subtle object manipulation--i.e., discovering
    subtle hidden properties of objects generally isn't key to solving the
    puzzles. They do, however, involve some baffling logical leaps, and it's
    possible to solve some of them without figuring out the key, so to
    speak. Moreover, a few are simply infuriating--there's a maze that ranks
    with the most annoying in the history of IF, which is saying quite a
    bit, and an extended one-of-these-three-doors-is-telling-the-truth
    sequence. Some are more creative, admittedly--there's a "seven deadly
    sins" puzzle that would feel quite original if the idea hadn't been done
    several times in recent years (i.e., long after Sangraal was
    released)--but few are real highlights. Supposedly, Sangraal is the
    easiest of the three ported Topologika games; if so, that should give
    IFers pause, because in no sense are the puzzles in Sangraal easy, nor
    is the game design particularly forgiving. It's not at all hard to close
    off the game without realizing it, and some of the puzzles don't allow
    for trial and error. The game itself is fairly wide--lots of puzzles are
    available for most of the game--but many of the available puzzles aren't
    initially solvable, and solving them in the wrong order can render the
    thing unfinishable.

    Sangraal's saving grace is its literacy and cultural acumen. The game is
    littered with references to various authors--Keats, Poe, Shelley, Homer,
    the Bible several times over, and many, many more. Some of the digs are
    rather subtle--there's a Wailing Wall that, initially, you get driven
    away from because you don't belong there, and you (minor spoiler) evade
    getting driven away by changing your appearance so that you look the
    part, a barbed reference to the ongoing controversy in Jerusalem over
    Orthodox Jews refusing to allow Reform and Conservative Jews to pray at
    the Wailing Wall. Equally subtle is the following:

       There is a five-foot high pillar of salt here, which looks a bit like
       a running woman. But not a lot.

    Sangraal abounds with humor along these lines, and while not all the
    jokes work--one sequence involving the "Eleventh Commandment" and a
    bunch of computer programmers feels rather forced--most of them are
    funny enough to make the game consistently amusing. The drawback,
    however, is that much of the humor requires that the player think in the
    same bizarre and subversive way as the author does, and Sangraal is
    hence best played with the aid of a walkthrough or a helpful friend
    who's already finished it. Particularly difficult in this respect are
    the puzzles that draw on certain poems by Keats and Shelley--the logical
    progression is highly obscure.

    Sangraal occupies such an odd niche that it's hard to liken it to any
    recent work of IF. There's no plot, really--the initial premise
    (retrieving the Holy Grail) is entirely irrelevant, as with most fantasy
    quests--and neither is there anything binding the game's world together.
    (I.e., the world depicted feels less like a setting than an excuse for a
    lot of silly puzzles.) The puzzles have a way of disappearing once
    they're solved, and most of them either give the player a treasure-type
    object or simply award points; none, as far as I can recall, changed the
    game's landscape, and not many even opened up new territory to explore.
    No doubt this is a function of the memory limitations of the day, which
    made it difficult to code for both a solved and unsolved state of a
    puzzle, but the effect is to magnify the random-collection-of-puzzles
    feel.

    While it's an uneven work in several respects, there's plenty of wit in
    Sangraal, enough to overcome the clumsier bits, and if you enjoy rather
    obscure satire, you may well enjoy this.

    Inform .z5 file

    Source code

    Sanity Clause
    From: Audrey A. DeLisle <rad SP@G crl.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #1 -- May 15, 1994

    NAME:  Sanity Clause            PARSER:  AGT Standard
    AUTHOR:  Mike McCauley          PLOT: Excellent
    EMAIL:  ???                     ATMOSPHERE: Funny
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive S10           WRITING: Excellent
    PUZZLES: -                      SUPPORTS:  AGT Ports
    CHARACTERS: Good                DIFFICULTY: -

            You are Santa Claus and you must deliver all the presents before
    midnight in each time zone.  This can be done in five trips.  When you have
    to go to the same place, you will find a different puzzle.  It is tedious,
    but fun if you have the patience.  The author wrote S.O.S. (Son of
    Stagefright, both with AGT.)  Understand that each trip will be shorter
    than the previous one.  Your elf is a delightful companion.
    Author--Mike McCauley, has MAC version, sends map and hints on reg.

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)

    Source (.zip)

    Sardoria
    From: J. Robinson Wheeler <jrw SP@G jrwdigitalmedia.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: Sardoria
    AUTHOR: Anssi Raisanen
    EMAIL: anssi.raisanen SP@G cop.fi
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: ALAN standard
    SUPPORTS: ALAN interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/alan/sardoria
    VERSION: 1.0 (competition release)

    Normally, I don't play ALAN games, mostly because they're a lot of extra
    trouble. There doesn't seem to be a way (and I might be wrong about
    this) of automatically saving a transcript, and that's something I like
    to do when playing comp games, so that I can refer back to it when
    writing reviews. [Editor's note: Apparently, ALAN games can in fact
    generate a transcript when they are started at the command line with the
    -L switch. This fact does not necessarily overturn Rob's point about
    these games being "a lot of extra trouble." --Paul] As a result, I ended
    up doing this very tedious thing of copy-and-pasting a screenful of text
    at a time from the ALAN terp window into a text editor every twenty
    seconds. This has served to make me grumpy and irritable and likely to
    rate the game more harshly than I would have if it had been an Inform or
    TADS game, which isn't really fair. Maybe I'll add a point at the end to
    try to compensate, but that isn't really fair, either, I suppose.

    This is a fairly standard and fairly short old-school type game set in a
    castle with dining halls, secret passages, a bearded old wizard, and a
    king who's in trouble. That sort of thing. You start out in a locked
    room, and figuring out how to get out of there was, to me, the most
    troublesome puzzle of the game. I went to the hints fairly quickly, and
    all they did was suggest that something else was hidden in the room with
    me. Given the extremely limited set of things to interact with, I
    eventually found it, but it was a total read-the-author's-mind type of
    situation.

    The next puzzle after that was equally perplexing. I guess if I'd really
    taken the time to examine everything (which I was steered away from
    doing, because it was a kitchen full of knickknacks, the first dozen or
    so of which yielding nothing more than a note saying that they're not
    worth playing with), I might have figured it out on my own. Instead, I
    used the WALKTHROUGH command.

    After that, things went a little better. I'm an old hand at looking
    behind things and finding secret passages and so forth. There was a
    curious cultural gap that made one puzzle here a bit more of a stumper
    than it was supposed to be, I think. You have a clue sheet of abstract
    concepts, and then a grid of icons you have to touch, matching the
    concepts. Two of the concepts were "night" and "wisdom". One of the
    icons was an owl. The mismatch and the correct solution are left as an
    exercise for the reader.

    Later on, I unintentionally found the solution to a puzzle because an
    NPC blurted out the solution, due to a bug, as if I'd already stumbled
    on it and was showing him the results. Oh well, whatever works. Just
    after this, there was something that I guess was a bug -- I was told to
    proceed through a set of color-coded doors in a certain order, and that
    order was incorrect: two of the colors needed to be swapped in order for
    me to get to the end. I don't know what that was about, but it seems
    like a beta-tester should have found that. Unless it was deliberate, in
    which case, it was just weird.

    Right after that, there was a puzzle that reminded me of something I
    made fun of in one of last year's games. It's the equivalent of going
    into a room with a gigantic vault safe, with a description saying, "Oh
    no! How will you ever get this open? Also, there's a note attached to
    the safe." Examining the note says, "The combination is 59-73-102."
    Makes you wonder whether it even qualifies as a puzzle at that level.

    Following one more read-the-author's-mind puzzle, the game suddenly
    ended, and I had won. Uh -- okay. Well, that was, hmm, brief, I guess.
    There is nothing especially bad about the game, but nothing especially
    unique about it, either. Sometimes I like old-school games like this,
    but this one left me kind of wishing for more in the way of
    entertainment value. My natural reaction would be to rate this one a 4,
    but is that because I was grumpy about the lack of a logging feature?
    Hmm, nah, I think it's because that's the proper rating to give it.

    RATING: 4

    Zip archive with Alan files (updated version)

    Directory with Alan .acd and .dat files (competition version)

    Save Princeton
    From: Brian Reilly <reillyb SP@G gusun.georgetown.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

    NAME:  Save Princeton               PARSER:  TADS
    AUTHOR:  Jacob Weinstein            PLOT:  Rescue Princeton from
                                               terrorists.
    EMAIL:  jweinste SP@G alcor.usc.edu      ATMOSPHERE:  Good
    AVAILABILITY:  IF Archive, shareware,$10   WRITING:  Good
    PUZZLES:  FAIR                      SUPPORTS:  TADS Ports
    CHARACTERS:  FAIR                   DIFFICULTY:  Moderate

    Egads!  Gun-toting radicals have infiltrated the Ivy League.  Nope, it's
    not Columbia of '69, but Princeton of today.  As a mild-mannered
    perspective Princetonian, you duck away from your tour of Princeton
    out of boredom and begin to explore the the campus on your own,
    only to be startled by the sounds of gunfire erupting in the usually
    tranquil Princeton, NJ.  When you come out of hiding, you can tell that
    something has gone drastically wrong.

    Your explorations around Princeton soon lead you to discover that the
    Administration Building has been seized, and the President of Princeton
    is being held hostage.  Now, it's up to you to oust the terrorists, and
    rescue President Shapiro.  The puzzles in this game are done fairly well,
    but some tend to be rather illogical or bizarre.  The game is full of a
    good amount of humor, although a lot of it is dependent on Princeton
    history or a familiarity with the campus.  The characters add to the
    humor of the game, although many of the characters could have been more
    developed.  I do have to add though, that I was ecstatic when I realized
    that the maze was a non-maze, and did not have to spend hours mapping.
    All in all, Save Princeton is a fun, enjoyable game.

    TADS .gam File

    Macintosh (.hqx)

    DOS executable (.zip)

    Solution (text)

    Savoir-Faire
    From: Daphne Brinkerhoff <cendare SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002

    TITLE: Savoir-Faire
    AUTHOR: Emily Short
    EMAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: April 2002 (original)
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/savoirfaire.htm
         http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Savoir.z8
    VERSION: 6 (most recent)

    (Note: I have recently moved, and my computer is still in pieces in
    boxes, so I am not able to replay the game to get exact details. Also, I
    played an older release (not sure which one).)

    Savoir-Faire is an excellent game, featuring a strong sense of place, an
    innovative backstory & magic system, and a protagonist whose
    idiosyncrasies are charming in a way that reminds me of Varicella.

    Place: The opening "room" is so present and alive that I spent many
    turns there before even going inside. Throughout the house, the
    furniture, doors, molding, and knickknacks all contribute to a feeling
    of really being there. But what would you expect from the author of
    Pytho's Mask and Best Of Three -- both games which focus on conversation
    and still have room for books, costumes, inlaid tiles...? "Place" also
    encompasses the idea of culture. With sausages strung up on the rafters
    and seven planets in a model of the solar system, it's clear that we
    aren't in Kansas any more. So *this* is "old skool"? I don't remember
    Zork and Advent being quite like this.

    Backstory: Obviously, I can't say much about this without giving away
    the plot. But even the brief opening text raises a number of questions:
    Where is everyone? What is your relationship to them? To this house? Who
    are you, that you can so blithely gamble away your life savings and
    assume someone else will bail you out? Like so many games, Savoir-Faire
    has a subplot about discovering your true identity, but it's low-key: no
    melodramatic scenes of revelation.

    The magic system: Figuring this out is one of those "aha!" moments, so
    again I can't go into great detail.

    In some ways, though, I felt frustrated -- the magic seemed to be so
    powerful that the limitations felt arbitrary at times. The thought "If
    action A works, why doesn't action B?" crossed my mind many times.

    If I may digress briefly, I think this is a universal problem with
    powerful characters in general. It could be called the Commander Data
    problem (after the Star Trek character). If you have an exceptionally
    able character, plots tend to fall apart. "A heavy bulkhead? Data can
    lift it. An encoded password? Data can decrypt it. A rescue in the
    vacuum of space? No problem!" So the writer ends up inventing more or
    less believable reasons why this power can't be used to solve this
    problem. For me, this *mostly* works in Savoir-Faire, but there are
    occasions when I just rolled my eyes and went to the walkthrough. Of
    course, this can be written off as more of that "old skool" atmosphere.

    I should add that another alternative (severely limit your character's
    powers) is the more usual way of handling things -- hence the numerous
    magic systems with equivalents of "fnord: create illusion of blue
    antelope", and similar very specific powers. What Savoir-Faire attempts
    is more interesting, and mostly more intuitive -- if I *had* magic
    powers, this is how I would both prefer and expect them to work.

    Protagonist: A bit prissy, a bit amoral (breaking and entering starts
    the game, after all!), a bit noble -- yeah, kinda like Varicella. I
    particularly enjoyed being hungry and eating. This guy is *serious* (and
    seriously vivid) about his food. Fortunately, he does care about
    something other than himself. And there is evidence (especially if you
    play it right) that he has a strong sense of humor and self-mockery.
    Basically, I enjoyed being Pierre.

    Other: I especially enjoyed the memories that pop up from time to time
    (they reminded me of an aspect of L. Ross Raszewski's Moments Out of
    Time. My only quibble is that there weren't quite as many of them as I
    wanted, and they seemed to cluster in the beginning parts of the game.

    And now I've gotten through a whole review without mentioning the
    puzzles! Isn't that why people play "old skool" games? I had fun with
    some of them (finding a light source and exploring the cellars,
    particularly). Mostly the puzzles are tied up with the magic system
    described above. If you like the magic system, you'll like the puzzles
    (and mostly, I did).

    To sum up, while this game may claim to be "old skool", that doesn't
    mean Yet Another Dungeon Crawl. There's atmosphere & polish which bring
    Savoir-Faire to a higher level than that.

    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G mts.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #32 -- March 20, 2003

    The type of IF I've always preferred has been more puzzle-based than
    story-driven, and as a result, I've always enjoyed the old Infocom games
    because, if anything, they erred on the puzzle side of that spectrum.
    They typically featured mazes, colour-based puzzles, hunger and weight
    restrictions, and a whole host of other implements we just don't see in
    modern IF today (albeit in most of those cases, for very good reasons).
    With the lack of many truly puzzle-oriented games lately, I have been
    longing for a big puzzlefest-type game reminiscent of an Infocom classic
    and I'm happy to say I've found one in Savoir-Faire.

    Savoir-Faire comes out and blatantly calls itself a piece of old-school
    IF; a throwback, if you will, to the days of Infocom and perhaps more
    recently to the days of Curses and Delusions.

    When a game comes out and patently calls itself old school, comparisons
    to some of the more popular Infocom classics and early shareware games
    will be drawn. So the question is, does Savoir-Faire succeed in
    replicating the old Infocom standard? As far as I'm concerned, it
    doesn't just succeed in replicating it; it's better in every respect I
    can think of while still maintaining the illusion that the game could
    have been created in Infocom's heyday.

    For example, Savoir-Faire implements many common design strategies used
    in Infocom games that are now considered designing no-no's
    (encumbrance-based carrying systems, hunger restrictions, the opening of
    doors before you go through them), but does so in a much more
    contemporary and less threatening fashion. There are different
    light-based puzzles for example, a maze of sorts, and an abundance of
    locked doors, yet Ms. Short seems to reluctantly (and thankfully) only
    put a half-hearted attempt into creating an authentic old-school system.
    The hunger restriction, for example, is only that in name and serves
    more as a reminder of what goals you should be focusing on as opposed to
    a rigid hurdle that has to be traversed (which is to say you can never
    die of hunger). Unlocked doors open automatically once unlocked, and any
    encumbrance issues are nicely done away with, with a sack that can carry
    pretty much anything. It probably grated on a game designer as strong as
    Ms. Short in the first place to have to implement so many old-school
    faux pas, let alone make them completely unuser friendly. Fortunately
    for the player, it appears that her innate sense of good game design
    prevailed.

    Continuing on with the puzzles, Savoir-Faire again throws up some old
    Infocom tropes without the typical old school constraints (i.e.,
    unwinnable game states). The credits list the game as cruel, which makes
    me typically feel that there are many opportunities to put the game into
    an unwinnable state. Actually, when I see a cruel rating for a game
    followed by the word 'unwinnable' I get that eerie chill down my spine
    that I got so often while playing So Far, where every turn seemed
    destined to limit my possibilities. Although some of the puzzles were on
    the tougher side, none were unachievable without a little lateral
    thinking, and I can't think of one that would be considered truly cruel.
    On the contrary there are plenty of ways to solve the same puzzle unless
    you go about willfully destroying things (and even then you might find
    some possible avenues). At one point, while I was stumped, I attempted
    an action that involved the destruction of an item (an action which I
    was sure would lead me to an unwinnable state). To my surprise, an
    alternate solution that I'd thought of but which I felt unlikely to be
    implemented, turned out to work. To my further surprise, upon reading
    the verbose walkthrough, I discovered many other solutions for that
    particular puzzle and was duly impressed.

    Once again in defiance of most classic-IF axioms, there is very little
    linearity in this game. As I mentioned, alternate solutions abound and
    the puzzle-solving process is aided by a whole plethora of parsed verbs
    to choose from. Savoir-Faire is a game that understands the following
    sentences equally:

       >get water from well with teapot.
       >fill teapot with water from well.

    And Savoir-Faire also provides for many rare but useful verbs as well as
    verb synonyms.

    Also remarkable are the impressive bits of programming involved in the
    game. There is a magical set of physics to Short's world that the player
    learns through flashbacks and bits of backdrop, and the macroparsing
    involved in setting up this particular magic system is impressive; all
    the more so as the game was originally released in .z5 format (as
    opposed to the .z8 of later releases.) When things work as smoothly as
    they do in Savoir-Faire, you know there's a lot going on behind the
    scenes that makes the game work as efficiently as it does. For the
    average author this means adding libraries, extra classes, and more
    often than not ugly, redundant bits of programming. But for the true
    artist, efficiency is what's important and nowhere is efficiency more
    apparent in any recent game in memory, than it is with Savoir-Faire.
    Sure, in terms of gameplay I guess it ultimately doesn't matter how big
    or small a game is, but as a hack programmer myself, I really do
    appreciate the elegance and efficiency with which Ms. Short constructed
    her universe, as I know how difficult it is to make it so.

    Anyway, all these positives and I haven't even talked about the writing.
    Ms. Short, a former winner of an XYZZY for best writing, has an
    economical and beautifully descriptive way about her prose. It's
    effective and lasting and brings every piece of scenery to life. The
    writing is such a pleasure to read that one could still enjoy the game
    greatly just playing it strictly with a walkthrough and reading the
    responses the game spits back at you. So to sum up, Savoir-Faire is a
    great game, and I don't have many complaints about it. Since this is a
    critique of the work, however, I feel obliged to talk a bit about
    something I wasn't overly fond of in the game, and surprisingly (when I
    think back to Short's other works), what I wasn't overly impressed with
    was the story. Well that's not true exactly. I thought the story and
    background were great up until the ending, after which I felt
    differently about the story as a whole.

    The plot starts off with the PC, a minor noble in financial difficulty,
    returning to the house of his youth where an adoptive family had once
    raised him. Upon finding the manor abandoned, the PC decides to ransack
    it for profit (and so begins a classic treasure hunt, albeit with a lot
    more backstory than the Infocom standard). The story to this point is
    fine, but as bits of background became more and more available
    throughout the game, it seems obvious that the protagonist was treated
    quite fairly by his adoptive parents and their daughter (who it appears
    also had a crush on him) despite his poorer upbringing and what you
    could only assume was a lower status in their household. I therefore
    found it extremely jarring that he would go back and pillage the home of
    the people who showed him so much kindness growing up. Other factors
    contributed to my growing disdain for the protagonist as well. For
    example, the constant reminders of his hunger (as illustrated by his
    constant yearnings for different exotic foods) that I had mentioned
    earlier, while important to the plot as it focuses the player on the
    task at hand, also reinforced, to me at least, the PC's selfishness. I
    mean really, worrying about gourmet cuisine when it was becoming readily
    apparent that a dear friend was in trouble? These are not the thoughts
    of a modern day IF hero. As a result, by the time the ending rolled
    around, I didn't have a great deal of respect for the protagonist and
    hoped all the while that he would receive an 'appropriate' reward for
    his violations and selfishness.

    In this respect, the game's PC reminded me a lot of the protagonist from
    Infidel (an Infocom classic for those who don't know). Infidel featured
    a protagonist who was a self-centered excavator and treasure seeker,
    committed to running through anything and everyone in his pursuit to
    achieve his goals. Fittingly, he receives a 'reward' worthy of his
    self-absorption upon reaching Infidel's conclusion. I was hoping for a
    similar result in Savoir-Faire but found none. No ending that befitted
    the crimes I'd committed, no slap on the wrist, no scolding, no guilt;
    Just some tacked-on sugary sweetness that completed the fairy tale in a
    typical and (at least for me) unsatisfying way.

    Interestingly enough, Infidel's original ending was very similar to
    Savoir-Faire's. I remember reading an interview with Infidel's author
    Mike Berlyn, and he alluded to the fact that the game's original ending
    finished very positively; the way most treasure hunts did at that time.
    But the ending was changed between the initial beta-tests and the game's
    final release because of an outcry from testers who disliked the
    protagonist, and thought he deserved far worse than the ending had
    provided. Faced with such an overwhelming sentiment, Mike and his team
    got to work to fix the ending and thus was born Infocom's first tragedy.

    Looking at the credits for Savoir-Faire, I noticed 4 beta testers to its
    credit -- a normal amount for a piece of modern IF. Let me start by
    saying that these four testers did a great job. As I've already
    mentioned in this review, Savoir-Faire is a technical marvel, and so
    much more playable than any Infocom game I can think of that it's
    laughable. But I would hypothesize that one advantage of having tens of
    testers look at a game (which was the case with the Infocom games) is
    that it's easier for an author to notice trends and sentiments with
    respect to storyline and mood. So if an author notices, lets say, 6 out
    of 20 people not feeling at ease with a story's direction it's a lot
    easier to detect a plot concern than if 1 out of 4 people notice a
    similar issue. I'd also hypothesize that having a smaller number of
    testers might mean that those same sentiments may be overlooked and that
    ultimately having a greater number of beta-testers will improve a
    storyline regardless of who writes it. Having said that though, it's
    tough to find dedicated beta-testers in the first place these days, let
    alone tens of them, and again this is not a criticism of Ms. Short's
    work in any way, just a comment on how the IF scene is different today
    as compared to the Infocom heyday. Hmmm... I guess the old Infocom games
    may have actually had an advantage or two in some areas over today's
    games after all. Go figure.

    Anyway, my brief quibble with the ending notwithstanding, Savoir-Faire
    is an excellent game penned and programmed from one of today's IF
    masters and well worth playing. Download it today!

    Zcode .z8 file

    Scapeghost
    From: J. J. Farmer <J.J.Farmer-CSSE94 SP@G computer-science.birmingham.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

     NAME: Scapeghost                                PARSER: Very Good
     AUTHORS: Level 9 Computing                      PLOT: Linear
     EMAIL: ???                                      ATMOSPHERE: Excellent
     AVAILABILITY: Commercial                        WRITING: Good
     PUZZLES: Poor (part 1), Very Good (parts 2 & 3)
     SUPPORTS: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, PCW, Apple II, Atari ST, XE, 800XL, BBC Master,
               Enhanced (sideways or shadow RAM) BBC Micro, Commodore 64 or 128,
               IBM PC, Apple Mac, Spectrum +2 or +3, MSX 64k, Spectrum 48k or 128k
     CHARACTERS: Excellent                           DIFFICULTY: Moderate-Low

    Let's start at the beginning: Alan Chance was a cop.  Alan Chance was
    infiltrating a drug gang.  Someone (or something) tipped off the gang.  Alan
    Chance got killed, his partner Sarah was taken hostage and his ex-colleagues
    think it's all because of his own stupidity.

    But all is not lost.  Alan Chance has returned as a ghost and, with the aid
    of an adventure game-player intrepid enough to actually locate and purchase
    a copy of this game, has three nights to rescue Sarah and bring the criminals
    to justice.

    Scapeghost was the last game Level 9 wrote before they withdrew from the
    adventure market, and evidence of their previous experience is obvious.  The
    parser understands pretty much anything you type in; you can use the command
    "FIND" or "GO TO" to take you to any object in the game, and you can order
    around characters in the standard fashion (e.g. "JOE, RUN TO MY GRAVE, WAIT
    FOR ANDY, FIND THE WATCH, GET IT, FIND ME"), although whether they actually
    do it is another thing.

    Like most of the later Level 9 games, Scapeghost is split into three
    parts; in this case, the three nights on which the game takes place.  However,
    unlike many of the previous games, they can be played in any order.  I'm
    not really all that keen on this; the parts follow each other in a logical
    and chronological manner, and later parts do all but give you the solutions
    to puzzles in previous parts.  I exercised restraint and played through the
    parts in order.

    The first part, November Graveyard, is probably the weakest.  You start the
    game by waking up at your funeral just before dusk.  There are four characters
    in the graveyard at this point (a workman, a supervisor, a detective and a
    crowd of mourners), and valuable information can be gained from following
    them around.

    Then night falls and you are introduced to the first of your fellow
    sufferers - Joe Danby used to be a publican, but he's stuck in the graveyard
    now because his place "doesn't serve spirits" groans all round.  He'll
    take you on a guided tour of the graveyard and introduce you to most of the
    residents.  It doesn't take you long to deduce that each one of them has
    a problem, and if you solve it for them they'll help you.

    It's all rather routine and there are some awful puns along the way.  The
    climax of this part involves coordinating your small army of ghosts in
    a final effort to delay the drug gang while you wait for part two.

    As I said, this part has a good atmosphere but it's pretty much all been
    done before.  There is only really one innovative puzzle, which I won't
    go into detail about because I don't want to spoil it for anyone.  It
    took me about a day to complete this part.

    The location descriptions are very terse; some versions include graphics,
    and these help to get the true feel of the locations.  I had the BBC Master
    version, and whilst the graphics were in an ultra low-res mode, with
    the BBC's normal complement of 8 colours not really helping, they were
    of surprisingly good quality and quite atmospheric.  The back of the box
    shows some screen shots from the Atari ST version, and these are of
    near-photographic quality.  On the other hand, they would put the best
    pictures on the box...

    Although the quality of the location descriptions is rather poor, all of
    the other text is truly excellent.  It more than makes up for the other
    shortcomings.

    Part Two, Haunted House, sees you with enhanced abilities, and you can now
    leave the graveyard.  Your previous squad of helpers has melted into the
    darkness, with only Joe Danby remaining to aid you in your quest to
    investigate the gang's old hideout.

    The puzzles in this part are really excellent.  You must use your ghostly
    abilities to piece together your final moments, and to assemble a body
    of evidence.  All of this can be solved by pure logical thought.  There's
    still nothing too testing, but it's all good fun.

    In part three you can finally get to grips with the criminals - but they're
    trying to get to grips with you too, and force a priest to attempt an
    exorcism.  After your exploits in part two, the police are making their
    way to the gang's new hideout - with lights flashing and sirens
    blaring.  A surprise assault it won't be.

    Although it initially seems that you are left to develop your own strategy
    to bring them to justice, the instructions actually tell you what to do,
    which is a mite disappointing.

    The atmospheric touches in this part are excellent.  It's worth playing the
    part through once just to sit and watch the gang's poker game.  The puzzles
    are once again very original, and in some parts hilarious.  Yet again,
    though, there's nothing overly difficult.

    Scapeghost is a truly classic game let down by a poor first part and some
    very brief location descriptions.  Another review (in the magazine "The Micro
    User") said that it contained "real brain-teasers", and left the impression
    that it was rather difficult.  I personally found it very easy - I finished
    it in three days, which is the quickest I've completed any game, but maybe
    I was lucky.

    Availability is probably rather low - it was released in 1989, and
    when I purchased my copy three years ago Level 9's supplies of all their
    BBC games were running very low (sold out of all but three), and it's a
    fair bet that a similar situation exists for the other formats.  However,
    if you do see a copy anywhere, snap it up at once.  You won't be
    disappointed.

    Solution (Text)

    Scavenger
    From: Virginia Gretton <VGretton SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: Scavenger
    AUTHOR: Quintin Stone
    EMAIL: stone SP@G rps.net
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads2/scavenger
    VERSION: Version 1.0 (competition release)

    This game was well-coded and extensively tested. I was given choices at
    the beginning, which worried me in case no-win states lay just beyond
    the horizon. Happily, that was not the case.

    The setting did not excite me for a long time. And being forced to
    abandon a child in a hostile world went against the grain. Still, it is
    a means to an end -- a workman-like way of coding progression.

    Inside the main location, I was frustrated by clear solutions combined
    with inability to get the required response. That said, the tension
    built nicely and crept up on me unawares.

    The conclusion was satisfying and mollified my buried worries about
    child abuse. Multiple endings were sufficiently interesting to make me
    want to try them. In some ways this game achieved more than my favourite
    entry -- it drew me in and held my attention in a very subtle way. If
    Scavenger were a book, I would find myself pre-ordering the author's
    next title from Amazon.

    From: Cirk Bejnar <eluchil404 SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    My favorite game of the Comp, this old-school gem combines well-done
    puzzles with evocative prose to create an intriguing world. You are cast
    as a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, seeking some secret
    technology of the ancients. This provides a nice explanation for why you
    go off exploring behind every desk and pick up anything not nailed down.
    One feature of note is the many alternate solutions that are coded.
    There is a store in the opening portion of the game where you have a
    choice of several items. Most of them are optional and they provide the
    game with a fair amount of replayability.

    From a technical standpoint, Scavenger is superb. Most actions are
    anticipated and generate interesting customized responses. In addition,
    alternate syntax is generously provided. Only once did I have to
    rephrase a command. There are a few minor bugs in the end game where it
    fails to properly check state, but nothing that adversely effects
    gameplay.

    Personally, I found the gameplay experience of Scavenger to be very
    rewarding. You are given a goal at the beginning that drives the action
    throughout. The primary task breaks down nicely into subgoals, how to
    enter the base for instance, but there are also puzzles which are more
    of less optional, depending on the supplies you have and whether or not
    you want a full score. The balance between player freedom and keeping
    the plot moving was well handled in my opinion. I would also like to
    mention the writing. It is generally quite good at sketching places or
    people with a few simple strokes. Details are included with just the
    right frequency to give you a vivid picture of the world and its
    inhabitants.

    The difficulty is not particularly high nor is the game very cruel. And
    if you do get stuck it features a nicely done hint system to give you a
    nudge (or a shove if you need it) in the right direction. Highly
    recommended to all except perhaps very young children. The language and
    violence would probably garner a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.

    Directory with TADS2 .gam file, license, readme, and walkthrough

    Screen
    From: Tony Baechler <baechler SP@G myrealbox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Screen
    AUTHOR: Edward Floren
    EMAIL: edwardfloren SP@G netscape.net
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/screen/screen.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    I really enjoyed this game, but it had small faults. Before I mention
    them, I would first like to mention that it was very well-written. I
    found no obvious grammar errors. Almost everything I examined had
    descriptions. I found no obvious bugs. I liked the overall premise. The
    best way to describe it without spoilers is "short and sweet." However,
    it is just the right size for what it is trying to do.

    It had small faults. Probably the biggest was that it could not make up
    its mind about whether we are in first or third person. At the beginning
    it was obviously first person. It moved into standard IF, which I think
    is second person. Finally, it was third person in the cut scenes. This
    was a little jarring since I had already figured out my name but it kept
    referring to me by name as if I was reading a book about a stranger. I
    felt myself becoming distanced from the PC, as if I am looking at him
    through an outside window or some such. Overall, this was minor but
    detracted from the game.

    Secondly, I felt it could have transitioned into the three parts more
    smoothly. In other words, suddenly I am in a different part and am
    trying to figure out who I am and what I am doing. I guess it did a good
    job though because the first thing I thought to do was examine myself.
    It did a fair job of describing me, but I thought that part 3 was better
    done with more described characters. The NPCs were cutouts but that was
    perfectly fine for a game like this. They both gave clues as to what
    they wanted, so by poking around it was obvious what I was supposed to
    do in part 2.

    Finally, it lost some points for originality. Sorry, but similar devices
    have been used before. Besides, I am a little confused how the screen
    got there in the first place. Again, though, I emphasize that these
    faults were very minor. The game was slightly above average. The faults
    might have been less noticeable if the game was larger, but I think the
    reason why I liked the game as much as I did was because of its small
    size. It is enough to capture my attention but is not too long and drawn
    out. I was never this PC but can relate to his nostalgia, even with the
    narrative style changing as it did.

    If the transitions were slightly smoother, this would be a good game to
    polish and release after the competition is over. It is a pleasant way
    to spend 10-20 minutes. Congratulations and good job. I would like to
    see more from this author, since I like his writing style.

    My comp rating: 6

    Directory with zcode .z5 file

    Seastalker
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Seastalker:  [Your Name] and the Ultramarine Bioceptor
                                           GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
      AUTHORS:  Stu Galley & Jim Lawrence  PLOT:  Routine
      EMAIL:  ?                            ATMOSPHERE:  Good
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 2                WRITING:  Passable
      PUZZLES:  Good                       SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Good                    DIFFICULTY:  Very Short and Easy

            In Seastalker, Infocom's only adventure designed for children, you
    play the part of...yourself, a brilliant young scientist who has designed a
    two-man submarine.  Before it is completely ready, your aquadome is attacked
    by a mysterious sea creature, forcing you to rush to the rescue, encountering
    danger without and treachery within.
            Obviously, ratings for such a children's game reviewed by an adult
    will be somewhat skewed, though I tried to compensate for this in Wildcard
    Points.
            One of the authors has ghostwritten books for the Hardy Boys, Nancy
    Drew, and Tom Swift series, and the writing style carries over very well.
    The game has the same oh-my-gosh-golly sense of adventure that those books
    have.  This is not a criticism, I read and enjoyed the Hardy Boys as a child,
    but it has a mixed effect on the ratings, causing the atmosphere rating to go
    up a bit, but the plot rating to go correspondingly down, as I had read so
    many of these books that the plot seemed rather routine and predictable.
            The game scored well in the wildcard category, because I thought that
    it was very innovative in three ways.
            First, it allowed you to give the main character your own name, or
    any other name that you chose (this was later used in Moonmist, also by the
    same authors, but in no other Infocom games).
            Secondly, unlike other text games, items in a room are not
    necessarily visible when you walk in the room, even if they are out in the
    open.  In one room, there is a pile of miscellaneous equipment that contains
    something you need.  You are not told that the item is there, and searching
    the pile will not help unless you tell the game exactly what it is that
    you're looking for (If you have your documentation, you should be able to
    figure this out).
            Third, the system used for piloting your submarine, gives you an
    ASCII readout of your radar screen, similar to the sector maps in those old
    Star Trek games (periods for empty sectors, a special character for your
    ship, and so on).
            There was however, one feature that I didn't like.  Seastalker's
    documentation comes with maps of both building complexes, and the
    neighbouring harbour (not the box-and-line graph paper maps that the players
    would make, but floor plans).  This is fine in itself, but many times, the
    description of a room in the game would not tell you where the exits are.
    If you have the documentation you can figure it out of course, and perhaps
    this was meant as a form of copy protection, but it was still rather
    annoying, as it meant that you had to keep the docs right by your side at all
    times.
            I did come up with a little joke to counterbalance this.  Remembering
    the stereotype of the child genius who can design moon rockets, but can't
    pronounce his S's correctly, and noting that the title of the game, and the
    name of your submarine had three "S" sounds between them (Seastalker,
    Scimitar), I decided to play with a main character named Thuthie Thmith.
            All children's software today seems to be designed for the preschool
    through kindergarten age group.  The rest is for adults.  Seastalker, like
    The Hardy Boys, is for ages 8-14, and even 10 years later it remains about
    the only game specially geared towards them.  Since the purpose of children's
    software is always to educate as well as entertain, an all-text adventure
    seems especially appropriate.  It's only a pity that there aren't more.

    Solution (Text)

    Shade
    From: Tina Sikorski <tina SP@G eniac.stanford.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000

    TITLE: Shade
    AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
    E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G eblong.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/shade.z5
    VERSION: Release 2

    Walkthrough? No (hints)
    Genre: Surreal

             +------------------------------------------+
             |Overall Rating        A |Submitted Vote  9|
             |Writing               A |Plot           B+|
             |Puzzles               C+|NPCs          n/a|
             |Technical             C+|Tilt           A+|
             +------------------------+-----------------+

    *** Initial Thoughts

    Mmm. Games that aren't what they seem at first. Except that this one, I
    already had a feeling wasn't going to be what it was presented at first,
    simply from the quality.

    I have to say, with all due respect to Zarf, that I was a bit surprised
    to discover he was the author; I generally don't enjoy his games this
    much simply because his puzzles are usually beyond me. That is just not
    a problem in this game.

    It will be very difficult for me to discuss this game without revealing
    spoilers, I'm afraid; I'll try to keep it to a minimum.

    *** Writing (A)

    First-rate, and from the opening paragraphs I was nearly certain that
    the pseudonymous author was someone with prior experience. I never
    formed a solid opinion about the potential author -- I'm actually not
    very good at such things in any event -- but I was sure it would turn
    out to be someone whose name I recognized.

    Consider, if you will, this bit of description:

       "Odd, how the light just makes your apartment gloomier. Pre-dawn
       darkness pools in the corners and around the tops of walls. Your desk
       lamp glares yellow, but the shadows only draw your eyes and deepen."

    This is something well-crafted. Without getting terribly verbose, it
    reveals information, sets mood, and (though you don't yet know it) also
    firmly sets the plot in motion. Light and darkness are important in this
    game (or at least certainly in my view of the game), and they definitely
    are properly introduced in the first paragraph.

    Beyond that, I could continue to quote, but why ruin your chance to see
    the writing develop? The writing is excellent, details abound even where
    strictly speaking unnecessary, and responses to your actions are superb.

    *** Plot (B+)

    This is the thing that is so hard to discuss without giving anything
    away, because it is on the one hand so terribly simple, but on the
    other, there are some twists. Perhaps one of the most interesting parts
    is that there comes a time when you know precisely what will happen (at
    least for a while) and yet... there is still this sort of frantic "what
    happens next" reaction. It's eerie, it's creepy, it's just plain fun.

    *** Puzzles (C+)

    This would be the one area the game is a little weak in. Oh, sure, the
    puzzles are fairly straight-forward and oftentimes even sensical. There
    is an in-game hint of sorts. But... it would be fair to say that the
    puzzles pretty much exist to give you something to do while you're
    waiting for the next, er, cascade of story, and unfortunately, because
    of a few timing problems, it -feels- that way.

    *** NPCs (n/a)

    Except for possibly once, there are no NPC encounters.

    *** Technical (C+)

    The way the apartment was implemented was interesting. There wasn't much
    else in the way of neat trickage (fairly surprising in retrospect).
    There were a couple disambiguation problems, and maybe one bug (but it
    may have been on purpose) with the in-game hint provision, but overall
    it was fairly bug-free.

    *** Tilt (A+) and Final Thoughts

    I cannot, without revealing entirely too much about this game, explain
    to you just what it was that had me raving about this game for two days
    afterwards, including randomly piping up with a particular rant that
    would, again, spoil things. Let me just assure you that this is the
    case: for two days, I was so haunted by this game that it was constantly
    in my head, teasing me... waiting for me in the darkness. In the
    shadows.

    In the Shade.

    Inform .z5 file (updated version)

    Mac .hqx archive (updated version)

    Inform .z5 file (competition version)

    Shades of Grey
    From: Molley the Mage <mollems SP@G WKUVX1.WKU.EDU>
    Review appeared in SPAG #2 -- September 26, 1994

    NAME: Shades of Grey                    PARSER: AGT
    AUTHOR: See Review                      PLOT: Serious, and quite different
    ATMOSPHERE: Excellent                   AVAILABILITY: F_IF Archive
    WRITING: Often evocative                PUZZLES: Not the real focus
    SUPPORTS: AGT ports (IBM/Mac/Atari ST)  CHARACTERS: Atmospheric
    DIFFICULTY: Fairly Standard (5/10)
    EMAIL: ???

    This is an excellent piece of IF and certainly the best game I've ever seen
    written using AGT.  One of the most interesting factoids about this game
    is that the authors have never actually met face-to-face; the entire game
    was designed and written on Compuserve gamers' forums and via E-mail.
    Despite the geographic disparity, the product is a wonderful game, once you
    get past the very first single stupid non-intuitive puzzle, which is all
    that keeps this game from being an 8.0 (and thus in my ultra-elite).

    Basically, you have amnesia.  You are wandering the streets of an unknown
    city during an unknown year wondering who you are and how you got here.
    Eventually you will discover a clairvoyante who will help you to discover
    your true self and your past through the power of Tarot.  What you learn is
    that this is a somewhat political, occasionally difficult, *extremely*
    well-written game which deals with the past, present, and future of Haiti.
    Beyond that I can say no more without spoiling the excellent plot, but take
    my word for it -- Shades of Grey is a game not to be missed.  You might
    find occasional frustration with the parser, but overall this is only a
    minor annoyance and is quickly forgotten in the stream of evocative images
    which will begin pouring forth from your computer as soon as you play...

    From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforma SP@G rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

            The AGT programming language was designed to be easy to use, to give
    non-programmers the power to create their own games.  Yet in games I've seen,
    its parser has been almost consistently flawed, leading me to believe that
    users didn't find this aspect of the programming as user-friendly as AGT's
    developers had intended.
            But "Shades of Gray" is different.  The annoying quirks that plague
    every other AGT game simply are not present.  The parser generally accepts
    multiple methods of phrasing, a move in a wrong direction does NOT repeat
    the entire room description, and trying to examine something that isn't
    there gives a better message than the annoying "You see nothing special",
    which always seems to imply that something is there when it really isn't.
    Add to this the fact that the writing approaches the very best in _any_
    text adventure, and you've got something well worth downloading.
            What fascinates me about "Shades of Gray" is the fact that it wasn't
    written by a single author, or even a creative pair.  This game is the
    combined efforts of _seven_ authors, from both the U.S. and the U.K.  Not
    only that, but the authors' only means of communication has been through a
    private CompuServe Gamers' Forum!  Having collaborated with a co-author
    myself, I can appreciate the difficulty in trying to merge the products of
    two creative minds into a single streamlined work of art, but SEVEN...!  One
    would think that conflicting ideas and plot details would crop up incessantly,
    reducing the end product to a cluttered, incomprehensible mess.  But,
    astoundingly, it doesn't.
            In fact, "Shades of Grey" has the most fascinating plot I've ever
    seen in a work of I-F.  You begin with no clue about who you are or what
    you're supposed to be doing, shifting back and forth between hallucinations
    and reality.  Eventually you gain the help of the clairvoyant Lady Magdalena,
    whose Tarot cards seek to provide insight into your existence.  (I often
    wonder if this game was Graham Nelson's inspiration for the Tarot puzzles in
    "Curses.")  As you learn more about yourself, and your past and future, you
    act out the roles of yourself as a young child, a soldier, and Robin of
    Locksley and the Sheriff of Nottingham, all culminating in a complex
    political thriller surrounding Haiti.  To say more would certainly spoil the
    entire game, but rest assured that everything fits together beautifully in
    the end, after you've faced every facet of yourself and put the events
    together.
            The use of seven authors leads to a rather segmented design, but
    linearity serves the story well.  The individual episodes vary in style and
    quality (both in the writing and the overall design), yet somehow this
    creates the effect of many pieces coming together.  And the whole of "Shades
    of Grey" is far, far more than the sum of the parts.
            Still, it's not perfect.  The parser still isn't up to TADS level,
    but it's the closest I've seen from AGT.  And there are some small mazes and
    a few puzzles that involve trying to guess the author's frame of thinking.
    But the rest of the game is so breathtaking that these flaws are easy to
    ignore.
            Give this one a play.  Even if you normally hate the AGT system,
    you'll enjoy it.

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip) (updated version)

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip) (older version)

    IBM Pophints (.zip)

    Shadowgate
    From: Adam Myrow <amyrow SP@G midsouth.rr.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #36 -- March 16, 2004

    TITLE: Shadowgate
    AUTHOR: David Griffith (originally published by Icom for the Nintendo
            Entertainment System as well as many other platforms)
    EMAIL: dgriffi SP@G cs.csubak.edu
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware IF-archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/sgate.z5
         Source code is also available at:
         ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/inform/sgate.tar.gz

    Sometimes, a game grows larger in the mind when it is not played for
    many years. This was the case for a game called Shadowgate which was
    released by Icom for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. I have
    been totally blind since birth. Thus, I was never able to play the
    original game by myself. However, I was able to play it a few times by
    having a friend read the text and I would tell him what I wanted to try.
    The game was a mixed graphical/text game with a menu of verbs which
    could be applied to objects in your inventory. Anyway, I never got very
    far, and eventually, lost access to the game.

    Fast forward to late 2003. I was casually browsing rec.games.int-fiction
    when I noticed a post announcing that David Griffith had just released
    an Inform adaptation of Shadowgate based on the Nintendo version. I was
    thrilled. After over a decade, I could now finally play this game by
    myself and get past the puzzles which had previously stumped me. I
    grabbed it immediately.

    What I discovered was that this game had become much more exciting in my
    mind than it was in reality. First off, as the original was based on a
    menu of verbs rather than a parser, the puzzles were rather simple. With
    one or two exceptions, one object is used to solve one puzzle. Once the
    puzzle is solved, the object is either removed from play or will never
    be needed again. There are no alternate solutions, and few hints. Either
    you get past the obstacle, or you die. In fact, dying is extremely
    common in this game. There are numerous death traps besides the instant
    death puzzles. Take an object, go through a door, or attack a monster
    with the wrong weapon, and it's curtains for you. As if that weren't bad
    enough, there is the light source problem. When you start the game, you
    have a torch. You will quickly notice lots of torches lying around for
    the taking. Be sure and grab them! Your torches don't last very long, so
    you will find yourself constantly lighting new torches and dropping dead
    torches. The good news is that there is no inventory limit. This was
    fairly minor, as there are more than enough torches to let you finish
    the game. I think I ended up with 10 extra torches at the end of my play
    session. It's just a nuisance to constantly be told that your torch is
    about to go out and having to light one. There are no mazes, and no
    hunger or sleep puzzles, so most of the really annoying puzzles of older
    games are absent. It's just that learning by death is not much fun.
    Here's a typical example of what I mean.

       Tower Prison
       You are in a bare, round room. A beautiful woman is chained to the
       wall. Moonlight streams in from a window.

       You can see a golden blade and a beautiful woman here.

       >x blade
       It's some sort of spike that is made of precious metals. The tips are
       as sharp as needles.

       >get it
       As you reach for the golden blade the beautiful lady suddenly
       transforms into a wolf! With a load [SIC] roar, the wolf pounces on
       you, taking your life! The wolf's powerful jaws rip your throat out!

           *** You have died ***

       It's a sad thing that your adventures have ended here.

    Examining the girl gives no hint that she is anything other than what
    she seems. So, the only thing you can do is learn by dying, undo, and
    try to figure out how to get rid of the wolf. Another even worse example
    of this.

       Stone Tunnel
       This hallway is made of large granite slabs. There are exits up,
       west, and north.

       You can see four unlit torches here.

       >w
       Without thinking, you jump through the opening and immediately hear a
       loud click. Suddenly, the granite slab above you gives way and
       crushes you beneath it. It breaks every bone in your body.

    As for plot, it is the standard save-the-world type of plot. You must
    overthrow the evil Warlock Lord before he releases the Behemoth to
    destroy everything. Of course, this involves collecting various items
    and assembling them into a weapon of great power. In other words,
    nothing that hasn't been done before. There are a few spells as well. I
    don't know how spells worked in the original graphical game since I
    didn't get that far, but in this version, the good old Enchanter system
    of using gnusto to copy them into a spell book from a scroll was adopted
    probably because it is readily available. This really isn't a big deal
    as far as I'm concerned since like everything else, the spells each are
    used exactly once.

    So, overall, I was a bit let down by the game mainly because it had
    grown into an epic in my mind. What it is, in reality, is a very short
    little fantasy game with loads of death traps and one-use objects. There
    are also plenty of red herrings. However, while the plot is minimal, the
    writing is fairly decent aside from a few spelling errors. I think most
    of the writing comes from the original game, but according to the
    "about" text, many descriptions were made longer to account for the lack
    of graphics. So, it's not all bad. As for coding, I found a few minor
    bugs, but for the most part, things work pretty well. The torches, while
    annoying, have had a lot of work done on them to make dealing with them
    as painless as possible. I would suggest that any game developers have a
    look at this game's source code even if you don't plan on using Inform.
    Bundled with the source code are some transcripts of very early beta
    versions of the game with embedded remarks from the beta testers. These
    serve to illustrate the sorts of bugs to watch out for and the crazy
    things players might try when they get stuck. So, for me, I actually
    found the source code and transcripts very informative despite finding
    the game to be a little annoying. If you treat it like a game from the
    late 1980's rather than a modern piece of IF, I think it will sit much
    better with you than it did with me.

    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G mts.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #37 -- July 10, 2004

    This game is a reimplementation of Shadowgate Classic as it appeared on
    the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) presented by ICOM in 1989. It's
    an interesting experiment and follows somewhat in the recent IF Arcade
    tradition that converts graphical games to text. I played Shadowgate in
    '89 and always felt it would transfer well to a text adventure setting,
    so I was pleasantly surprised to see this game released in late '03.

    In its exactness, the Inform version stays very true to the NES version
    (from what I can remember of the NES version). Even the little bits of
    background noise and red herrings from the original were completely
    implemented, and I have a lot of respect for the painstaking amount of
    replaying of the original version that must have happened to get this
    done correctly. All of the NES version's written responses were intact
    although thankfully the IF version cleans up some grammatical and
    spelling errors. For nostalgia's sake then, this was a great walk down
    memory lane. Unfortunately, once you look past that, it also highlighted
    many of the design errors inherent in many of the early NES games.

    There are unfortunately many things to gripe about here so let's start
    with one of my least favorite foibles: author telepathy. Specifically,
    there was major death without warning. Seemingly innocuous actions like
    picking up items freely available in the scenery, or entering apparently
    non-threatening directions often lead to death with no discernible
    justification. It was also fairly easy to break certain structures which
    always left me wondering whether or not I had permanently made the game
    unwinnable or not. I think the game can't actually be made unwinnable,
    unless you don't budget your light resources properly (which is another
    issue, but I'll get to that later), however death-without-warning
    abounds and waits in every corner, which is something we just don't
    accept in IF games anymore.

    Another issue is a concern that always crops up in my reviews, and
    that's the combinatorial explosion of having too many items in your
    inventory. Throughout the game, you collect well over 80 items and when
    you begin the endgame, it's difficult to remember what each piece does
    or the exact details of each item. This leads to a lot of put X in Y,
    hit X with Y experimentation, which gets pretty tedious the third or
    fourth time around. It also makes the game more difficult than it
    probably should be, as your light resources dwindle very quickly -- the
    net effect of all this is that every time I somehow made the plot
    progress I would have to save, explore, make the plot progress again,
    restore to a previous saved game armed with my new knowledge, and
    proceed forward. Ultimately, that type of forced gaming experience is a
    recipe for disaster.

    It's unfortunate, too, because many of the game's structure problems
    could have been easily alleviated by loosening its light restrictions a
    little. The light issue I keep referencing actually has to do with the
    limited life cycle of the torches you find lying around. As I played
    through the game a second time with walkthrough in hand, I completed it
    with a reserve of only 5 usable torches (having picked up every
    available torch I could find). Essentially, I won without wasting a
    move. Unfortunately, the game is so cavernous and the amount of author
    telepathy need to win the game so great, that winning without wasting a
    move is next to impossible, as is completing the game with any usable
    torches. There is a spell of sorts that you can find that might help you
    with this issue, but it has to be invoked in every new room you enter,
    which leads to further tedium. And, considering the tight restrictions
    on your time, I'm not entirely sure you'll find the spell before you run
    out of torches, so the benefit might be moot regardless.

    Still, the torch issue remained faithful to the NES original, as did a
    number of other conventions, which have to be commended. For example,
    the original Shadowgate loved to bury clues in the scenery --
    specifically, the game's walls. The regular Inform parser has a wall
    object parsed for each of the cardinal directions, and the author here
    did a great job of subtly clueing the player into examining a wall
    without blatantly telling us which one. I believe this involved a nice
    hack in the Inform source code's wall objects. That is to say: a general
    query of X WALL, would still generate a disambiguation request, listing
    all the cardinal directions, but if you examine the right wall there
    wasn't a simple default response [I am impressed here because I believe
    I attempted to parse something similar a while back and made a mess of
    it]. Before I started playing the game, I was curious to see how the
    author was going to implement the puzzles buried in the room's
    constructs and for the most part, I was really happy with the way he did
    it. There was only one glaring omission, where a clue of vital
    importance was buried in the scenery with no hint as to where or even
    why a player should look. I knew it was there from the NES version, but
    were I a first-time player, there is absolutely no way I would have
    found it.

    So, overall the game is effectively parsed, diligently researched and
    implemented (the attention to the original game's detail is impressive
    and the consistent representation in the face of the original's poor
    design choices -- i.e., torch issue -- was commendable), but ultimately,
    due principally to the original's shortcomings, it doesn't live up to
    the standards we expect in IF nowadays. Despite this, however, I was
    surprised by how much I really enjoyed the nostalgia. As a result, you
    may want to check this out if you've actually played the NES version,
    but probably skip it otherwise.

    Zcode .z5 file

    Inform source code

    Shadows On The Mirror
    From: Jessica Knoch <jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: Shadows On The Mirror
    AUTHOR: Chrysoula Tzavelas
    EMAIL: exstarsis SP@G msn.com
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: TADS3
    SUPPORTS: TADS3 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads3/shadows
    VERSION: IFComp ver 1.0

    A major part of this game is figuring out who you are, why you're stuck
    in this car, who the driver of the car is, why you don't want to see
    your grandfather, and so on. It's tricky; there's a lot to it, and it
    can't all be explained, even when you play through it several times. But
    what I have seen of the story and background is pretty intense. There's
    some supernatural stuff going on, and the PC is in the thick of it, and
    you get to be cool, and the driver of the car is cool, and there's just
    a lot of cool parts. But... there is a problem.

    It's kind of like the third quarter of a really close (American)
    football game. Sure, the score is tied at 24, but that's what it was at
    the half, and you're not down to the wire yet, because it's still the
    third quarter. Or maybe it's like the second to last chapter in a short
    novel -- all the really good stuff has already happened, and all of the
    explanations are saved for the last chapter, so even though you're in a
    great story, it isn't happening now. It's already happened, or it's
    going to, but everything that happens in Shadows is subtle and under the
    surface.

    That said, what you get of the story is definitely worth playing the
    game to see. I was initially put off by having to repeat actions to get
    the whole effect, but it's mentioned in one of the "hint" or "about"
    menus, so I guess I should have known. There are some pretty good liner
    notes, which is always nice. Hints and a walkthrough are included, so I
    can't complain too much about the puzzles, such as they are. In this
    game, "puzzles" are either an action you have to take, or a milestone
    you can reach in the conversation. In this sort of situation, getting to
    a "losing" ending and having to replay loses a piece of the game's
    appeal, but there's nothing to do for it but restart and try again.
    Shadows makes it worth the trouble.

    TADS3 .t3 file

    She's Got A Thing For a Spring
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: She's Got a Thing for a Spring
    AUTHOR: Brent van Fossen
    E-MAIL: vanfossen SP@G compuserve.com
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/spring/spring.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    PLOT: Reasonably interesting (1.4)   ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.6)
    WRITING: Strong (1.6)             GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.4)
    CHARACTERS: Excellent (1.8)    PUZZLES: Not especially notable (1.3)
    MISC: Attention to nature is a nice touch (1.6)
    OVERALL: 7.6

    Though it's arguable whether She's Got a Thing for a Spring has the
    best or most memorable setting in this year's competition, Brent van
    Fossen has clearly given the backdrop a wealth of detail: there are
    ample descriptions of flora and fauna that play no part in the game
    other than scenery, and the player gets a feeling that Mr. van Fossen
    lives among and enjoys observing the sights that he describes. The
    rest of the game doesn't quite live up to the setting, unfortunately,
    but She's Got a Thing... is a solid entry in this year's competition
    nonetheless.

    The story: you've received a note from your husband asking you to meet
    him at a hot spring, and you have to get over there, first, and then
    assemble all the little things needed to enhance the
    experience. Getting there is fairly straightforward, and gathering
    most of the accoutrements isn't difficult, but one puzzle at the end
    requires considerable intuition and, even when the gap is bridged,
    doesn't make much sense. (It feels like the author is either trying to
    make the game harder or trying to come up with an excuse for the
    puzzle -- which is, to be fair, a reasonably clever one, though the
    game doesn't give you much of a nudge.) Still, the idea is compelling,
    and the sensual delights associated with the various features of your
    dip in the hot spring are so vividly described that it seemed a safe
    bet to me that this is among the author's favorite real-life
    experiences.

    Among the more intriguing parts of the game is only tangentially
    related to the plot: you encounter a fellow named Bob, who resides in
    a cabin in the woods and can offer his knowledge on virtually
    everything in the game.  Bob seems to serve as a stand-in for the
    author in providing useful information about the various forms of
    wildlife you encounter -- he has a paragraph for all of them, as far
    as I can tell -- and he'll go on about the various aspects of his
    little cabin and garden. (In fact, he so fits the image of the
    benevolent kindly old fellow that his one off-color comment, when you
    ask him about the spring, seems slightly out of place; dirty old man,
    perhaps, but it doesn't seem to fit his persona.) One gets the feeling
    that Bob is so happy to have someone to talk to that interaction isn't
    much of a problem for him; he'll often babble on whether or not you
    respond.

    If there is a side of Bob that is lacking, it is Bob himself -- we get
    something about his wife Sally, dead of breast cancer, but virtually
    nothing else. (Moreover, you are told repeatedly that you remind Bob
    of Sally, certainly effective in painting Bob as a slightly forgetful
    old coot, if that was the intention, but it breaks the spell more than
    anything else. (Even a forgetful old coot doesn't word it the same way
    every time.) If you stay by Bob's side, you can watch him picking
    strawberries, fixing a rocking chair, fixing the porch, making lunch,
    making a strawberry shortcake, painting the forest (no, silly, on
    canvas) -- and though all this takes hundreds of moves, the passage of
    time is slowed while you're with Bob (a comment on the stimulating
    nature of his company?) so that you don't forfeit the main story by
    hanging out around the cabin. The main problem with all this is that,
    apart from a few things right at the beginning, you're largely
    confined to typing Z endlessly -- there are undoubtedly a wide variety
    of things to ask Bob about, but they slow down his various chores, and
    even those run out after a while. There doesn't, sadly, seem to be any
    way to participate in Bob's actions, and watching Bob put together the
    batter for the shortcake, ingredient by ingredient, loses its
    fascination after a bit. And if you're an IF player conditioned to
    expect that something elaborately coded will be relevant, well, you'll
    be wrong, because you only need about five moves' worth of interaction
    with Bob to finish the game.

    Bob is worth noting because he's the rare example of an NPC who is
    much more developed than he needs to be; in fact, he's a relatively
    ordinary character with an ordinary life which you can even witness in
    all its glory. The failure to really fill out Bob's background is a
    weakness, yes, but even so, he does such a remarkable amount of things
    and reacts to such a remarkable amount of stimuli that one can only
    wonder at the amount of code that went into him. It isn't, of course,
    unprecedented to have an NPC who plays encyclopedia for the game, but
    to have one who does that but also carries on complicated
    time-sensitive tasks of his own (which speed up dramatically when you
    walk away from him). And I don't recall ever encountering an NPC who
    did such a variety of, well, mundane tasks, described in such detail;
    it reinforces the idea that living in the wild and carrying out these
    chores is something that Mr. van Fossen enjoys, or at least thinks
    more people should know about. Bob is noteworthy, in short, because
    he's one of very few NPCs that can't be reduced to an obstacle; more
    often than not, characters represent puzzles, locked doors upon which
    you need to use the right key to get the needed object or bit of
    information. There is much more to this one -- the mundanity of it all
    makes him feel more real -- and if for nothing else, She's Got a Thing
    deserves recognition for the inclusion of Bob. (He's a close second to
    Maurice of Zero Sum Game as best NPC of the competition, I think.)

    There are several puzzles, as mentioned, one slightly unfair but most
    reasonably straightforward. One requires observation, as it happens,
    to figure out a pattern, irritating to the impatient IF player but
    consistent with the feel of the game (as in, nature is there to be
    observed, not simply co-opted to the player's ends). The gameplay is
    likewise strong; most verbs and nouns have several synonyms, and there
    are multiple substitute syntaxes for most important actions. One
    puzzle is a mite peculiar -- you dodge an adversary simply by moving
    away, and the adversary disappears and doesn't return (though the
    behavior in question is not atypical in real life) -- and the solution
    to another is not obvious to those of us who aren't familiar with hot
    springs -- but most of the puzzles are passable. As suggested, though,
    the appeal of this one lies less in the puzzles than in the scene as a
    whole, and though a few elements of it do break the spell -- two elk
    lock antlers and stay that way for the _entire game_, several birds
    are largely untroubled by your presence -- the game is well-written
    enough to make those minor flaws. The descriptions are effective...

           The canyon rim trail descends, clinging tightly to the stone
           wall, then disappears entirely as the rocks converge.  You have
           no choice but to wade, the current swift and
           powerful. Overhead, a small slice of the sky is visible between
           the two cliff faces, covered with ferns that thrive in the dark
           moist environment here. The crevice runs northwest to south.

    ...and restrained; Mr. van Fossen has the sense not to go on about how
    beautiful the setting is, certainly a welcome touch. Moreover, the
    vocabulary employed is considerable and scenery objects get far more
    detailed description than standard IF would give; it is virtually
    impossible to find a "That's not something you need to refer to in the
    course of this game" in She's Got a Thing... (And there's even some
    humor: a book that you find includes short stories about "a bored
    diplomat who uses underground means to accomplish his goals", with
    other references to the 1996 competition.) And even though things get
    resolved oddly at the end -- you learn about a few things involving
    your own thoughts and motivations for the first time -- the nature of
    it fits the game quite well.

    On the whole, then, though She's Got a Thing... might not be the entry
    whose playing experience stays with you the longest, it's a polished
    work that's consistently enjoyable to play. Though sticking with Bob
    is only for the extra-patient, there is much to do in the game
    environment, and I gave it an 8 in the competition.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough

    Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
                                            PARSER:  Infocom
      AUTHOR:  Bob Bates                    PLOT:  Very Good
      EMAIL:  ?                             ATMOSPHERE:  Excellent
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI-2                 WRITING:  Excellent
      PUZZLES:  Very good.                  SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Quite good.              DIFFICULTY:  Standard

            In Sherlock:  The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, you play the part of
    Dr. Watson.  Moriarty has stolen Victoria's regalia, leaving a trail of clues
    to follow, and Holmes must recover them before the weekend is out.  Fearing
    that Moriarty would anticipate his own moves and trap him, Holmes puts the
    case in your hands to throw Moriarty off the trail.
            Having read all the Conan Doyle Holmes stories, I found Sherlock a
    positive delight to play.  Both Doyle's writing style, and the atmosphere of
    19th century London are approximated extremely well.  Unlike Infocom's
    earlier mysteries which took place in one house, Sherlock's action takes you
    all over London.  Numerous little bits of Holmesian minutiae flesh out the
    game.  The humour is appropriately wry without resorting to the usual
    Infocom style of silliness that would not work nearly as well here as in
    other games.
            Sherlock is remarkably free of save/restore puzzles (i.e. ones that
    require death or failure to acquire information that can be used after you
    restore the game.  You are usually given multiple opportunities to solve ones
    that you probably wouldn't get the first time around.
            The only place where Sherlock suffers is in its "intangibles". The
    concept of the villain laying down a trail to follow is more reminiscent of
    Batman's Riddler than Professor Moriarty.  Also, the idea of Holmes turning
    such a vital case over to a tyro, stretches the imagination a bit, despite
    the fact that he personally oversees your activities.  The game also suffers
    a bit from the "Zork Syndrome", where you as the adventurer go wherever you
    want and take whatever isn't nailed down.  In the course of the game you must
    take or deface items from Scotland yard, Madame Tussaud's, and the Tower of
    London, with little consequence or resistance.  In e-mail correspondence, Bob
    Bates told me that he was aware of this problem when writing the game, and
    sought to minimize it as much as possible.  To a large extent he succeeded,
    but there is a little residual weakness.  Finally, it must be remembered that
    Moriarty died in the same story that he was introduced (The Adventure of the
    Final Problem), and that at that point Watson had never heard of him.
            Therefore there is a difficulty in going back and doing a story where
    he and Watson meet.  To be fair though, Conan Doyle himself made the same
    cheat in The Valley of Fear, as did almost all of the movies.
            Despite these nits, the game's strong points almost completely
    overwhelm them, and Sherlock, Infocom's final all-text game, ranks as one of
    their very best.

    Solution (Text)

    Shogun
    From: Preston Landers <planders SP@G sierra.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME: Shogun                                    PARSER: Infocom Graphic
      AUTHOR: Infocom                                 PLOT: Linear
      EMAIL: ???                                      ATMOSPHERE: Very Well Done
      AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2 CD version only.           WRITING: Very Good
      PUZZLES: Fair                                   SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS: Very Good                           DIFFICULTY: Hard

    I forgot that I had a copy of one of Infocom's last releases, Shogun, laying
    around over Christmas break.  So when I found it, I decided to tackle it
    because the novel it was based on, James Clavell's SHOGUN, is one of my
    favorites.  The parser is Infocom's last, the Graphic style similar to Zork
    Zero.  There is one graphic puzzle (that can be solved "non-graphically" if
    you must.)  There are many beautiful illustrations in the style of Japanese
    17th century paintings.

    The game itself is extremely linear.  If this really turns you off, you
    won't like the game.  You go through a number of "episodes" or scenes, very
    closely based on the book.  Honestly, I don't think I could have won the
    game if I had not read the original novel (or used the built-in hints
    extensively.)  For instance, you must know where to go and what do to almost
    by magic.  If you haven't read the book, or you don't plan on using the
    hints, then you might not enjoy this game.  Those caveats aside, it WAS a
    very enjoyable game.  It was done by Dave Lebling (I believe.)

    The story, in case you haven't seen the mini-series or read the book, casts
    you as John Blackthorne, a 17th century English pilot, sailing a Dutch ship
    towards the fabled Japans.  The game goes quite a bit into the political
    intrigue between the various feuding Daiymos (Japanese kings.)  Ultimately,
    you must become a samurai and help your Daiymo become Shogun, or Supreme
    Ruler.  There are a few sub-plots, such as your love interest with the
    beautiful courtier Mariko (how many games do you get to type 'MAKE LOVE TO
    MARIKO' to score 5 points?) but overall, the game flies from one episode to
    the next in a very fast-paced, and overall, enjoyable game.

    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

         In SHOGUN, you play the role John Blackthorne, an English seaman in
    1600, working for the Dutch to open up a trade route to Japan.  Based
    upon the book of the same name, the story involves your attempts to
    learn Japanese native customs while caught in the middle of the power
    struggles between Toranaga, and Ishido, two local warlords.
         The writing is much grittier than in any other Infocom game; from
    the cockroaches swarming over your cabin floor to the frequent violent
    killings to the occasional nude bathing scene.  Shogun was the only
    Infocom game ever to carry a warning label on the box.  If it were a
    movie, it would probably be a PG-13.
         Shogun is also the first of Infocom's three Graphic Interactive
    Fiction games.  Unlike the other two however, there is no interaction
    between text and graphics (except the automap in the maze in Chapter
    10), and graphics simply pop up at certain times.  Ordinarily in a game
    like this, the cartoon-like graphics would positively destroy the
    atmosphere, but in a historical novel they resemble what you might see
    in an ancient manuscript, and thus add to the atmosphere.
         One weakness of the game is in compartmentalization.  Rather than
    one large game, it is divided into 18 separate chapters.  It is rather
    like Nord and Bert, except that there are more chapters, and they must
    be played in a specific order.  This does not work as well here as it
    does in Nord and Bert.
            Your point total is the only thing that carries over to the next
    chapter; the items in your inventory are pre-determined.  Admittedly,
    this is probably the only way to adapt such a novel to game form, but
    the effect is still not entirely satisfactory.  Many text games end up
    being all puzzles and no story.  Shogun is exactly the opposite.  Too
    often the story just seems to go on around you while you get
    meaningless points for smiling, nodding, or bowing at the right times.
    The result is rather too many "guess what the author is thinking"  type
    puzzles, rather than puzzles that can be reasoned out.
         Two exceptions to this are Chapter 1 (The Erasmus), and Chapter 16
    (The Ninja).  Both are outstanding blendings of story and puzzle
    solving, and rank with Infocom's best moments.
         One nice feature is that the game asks if you want to save at the
    end of each chapter.  I keep a save file for each chapter on a scratch
    disk, so that I can enter the story at any point if I ever feel like
    pulling the game off the shelf.  Shogun is a very good game to read,
    though a bit less satisfying to play.  Overall though, a fine effort.

    Solution (Text)

    Shrapnel
    From: Christian Baker <lankro SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

    TITLE: Shrapnel
    AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
    E-MAIL: ac SP@G adamcadre.ac
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/shrapnel.z5

    Shrapnel is weird. Really weird. I just want to get that out in the
    open. Shrapnel seems less like a game, more like an idea that Adam Cadre
    had been mulling around. The question on r-g-i-f is, is Adam Cadre a
    genius or a madman. I’m settling for genius, but as Andrew Plotkin said
    "If he snaps and starts barbecuing the neighbors, of course, we'll have
    to pencil in some corrections."

    Shrapnel starts off outside the classic Zork White house, but it’s soon
    obvious that this is no Zork clone. Or any clone of anything ever made.
    You go north, you get eaten by vicious attack dogs. I try to quit,
    seeing that this is just another "One room death" game. I start typing
    QUIT, and find to my surprise that the game is forcing me to type
    RESTART. I go north from the original location, and find that another
    location has opened up. And so on. And so forth. I felt like the game
    was leading me round the (extremely strange) plot, and it seemed like it
    was just a matter of time before I completed it.

    But on the brighter side, the writing and room descriptions were
    excellent. A good example is:

       In the pines
       As you proceed along the path, the light trickling in through the
       treetops seems to grow brighter, as if it had been sunrise and not
       sunset when you began. And the trees... this isn't North Carolina
       anymore. This is, what? Maryland? Pennsylvania? You'd think a man
       would notice walking two hundred miles, but apparently not.

       You hear voices in the distance.

       "Hey, Green," says the first one. Even this is enough for you to
       pinpoint the accent: Carolina. So you're not caught behind enemy
       lines. Good to know.

       "Yeah?" says someone, presumably Green. There was a Green in your
       regiment, you recall. Common enough name to be coincidence, though.
       "Have you been helped?"

    The characters are a bit underdeveloped, but what do you expect from a
    game you can complete in under 10 minutes? What this game does best is
    unsettle you. The whole game has an extremely eerie atmosphere, and half
    of that is due to the strange plot (or lack of a plot, I’m not sure
    which.) The other half is due to some Adam Cadre writing, and the
    strange ignoring of player input. It really adds something to the game,
    and gives the feeling of a total lack of control. All in all, the game
    is short and pointless, but darn enjoyable for a short while.

    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

    It's science fiction! It's a split-identity story! It's a war story!
    It's a parody of Zork! It's a satire! It's Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, the
    weirdest bit of IF to come down the pike in quite some time, and there
    are enough things going on here to drive several full-length games (this
    one takes about 15-20 minutes, though). The ideas are interesting, but
    there's not much polish here--mostly, we only get the ideas. Still,
    Adam's ideas are better than most, and the game does has its intriguing
    moments.

    To try to describe the plot of Shrapnel would be a thoroughly futile
    endeavor, because the point is that the story doesn't travel in any
    discernible path: rather, you come across fragments of story here and
    there, and what exactly is going on isn't apparent until the end, when a
    character appears and infodumps all over you. Even then, it may not be
    fully clear how everything fits together--there are still plenty of hows
    and whys left unresolved for those who care about such things. Moreover,
    there are quite a few memorable images and surprising moments, meaning
    that you might remember and be affected by certain bits of Shrapnel even
    if you never tried to put the various story pieces together.

    Shrapnel might in fact be remembered more for its meta-IF elements than
    its actual story. For one thing, this is the first work of IF to
    actually ignore keystrokes--not disregard a command, but actually ignore
    that the player is typing something and show something else as the
    input. What's shown is 'restart,' no matter what the player types, at
    the restore/restart/quit prompt, though restart generally continues the
    story from where it left off rather than starting from scratch.
    Moreover, pauses are an essential part of the presentation of the text,
    again a meta-IF function that may catch the IF veteran off guard.
    Similarly innovative is "talk" as a conversation system: you direct your
    conversation toward whoever you're paying attention to, usually the
    person you last interacted with, and you're given a choice between
    accepting or rejecting a proposed rhetorical sally; if you refuse, your
    character says something else, something you have no way of predicting.
    The fragmentary aspect, the variety of apparently unrelated plotlines,
    is reflected in the text itself, which now and again spits out
    disjointed words and phrases that have already appeared elsewhere.

    All these are intriguing, even subversive takes on IF as we've known it
    up to now, but--I know, I know, this is a hangup of mine--they also
    reduce the interactivity aspect down to just about zero. In something as
    short and disjointed as Shrapnel, the immersion factor is minimal
    anyway--by the time the player has figured out what's going on in the
    story, the story's over--and when the game commandeers the keyboard, the
    player is justified in thinking, well, why do you need me here, tapping
    on the keyboard? Why don't you just let everything scroll by me at once?
    Certainly, there's interaction of a sort here, even if it's forced:
    being powerless to stop the course of the story is an integral part of
    the experience, of course (though it's still possible to quit at prompts
    other than restart/restore/quit), but, again if you can't figure out
    what story is being told, it's hard to get all worked up about not being
    able to stop it. The limited control over the conversation system is
    similar: if the player's only control over what's said is a veto on one
    conversational option, the character may as well just start talking.
    (Admittedly, there are several people the player can talk to, but the
    choices aren't exclusive--were this rewritten as static fiction and the
    conversations simply written out, one character after another, the
    effect wouldn't be dramatically different. There are a few effects that
    couldn't be reproduced in static fiction: notably, you die repeatedly
    over the course of the story, and the place is littered with your own
    corpses by the end--but it's questionable how much impact that has on
    the story when the player's likely reaction to the deaths is something
    on the order of "huh?" It's not that there are no choices to be made in
    Shrapnel, but the choices there are affect the outcome so minimally that
    the result is closer to F than IF.

    Still, in its own way, this is pretty good F; the effect may be that of
    an early draft of a novel, with ideas, themes, and character development
    all fighting for space, but it looks like it would be a fascinating
    novel. Notably, the protagonist is split between two separate
    identities, and piecing together the way those identities is an
    intriguing challenge. (Of course, given the rampant confusion, the
    player isn't likely to make much headway in separating out those
    identities by the end of the story, but there's definite replay
    potential.) On the figurative level, the numerous violent deaths you
    experience are a precursor to the pain that your character inflicts, and
    you could even say that you're desensitized to the violence sufficiently
    that it doesn't have much effect on you, the player, after a while. (A
    similar process seems to have gone on with the character himself.) The
    Zork parody element--Shrapnel is set in and around a white house, and
    the living room has a rug with a trap door under it--brings out the
    ho-hum-more-violent-deaths aspect, since one hallmark of traditional
    fantasy IF is dying violently so many times that *You have died* has
    zero emotional impact. The core of the story, involving a dysfunctional
    family and abuse, is vividly and disturbingly rendered: the abuse is
    sufficiently distanced from you (you hear accounts of it rather than
    actually seeing it--that your sense of culpability is minimized, which
    is exactly the effect that the character himself has achieved. The way
    you seem to find horrific violence around every corner is a direct
    reflection of the nature of the story: the events that have already
    transpired have left unsightly secrets everywhere. The science-fiction
    aspect that appears at the end of the story, in an apparent attempt to
    make a bit of sense of the demented structure of the story, feels a bit
    tacked on, but it doesn't diminish the impact of what's come before.

    In its own way, then, Shrapnel is quite a story, and that it's less
    interactive fiction than a forced march isn't a major drawback, in the
    end. It's certainly not easy to make sense of what goes on, nor is it
    particularly pleasant, but it's still an impres precursor to the
    paindown to just about zerooff guardfragmentary aspectdemented
    structureseems to have gone onho-humrhetorical sallytacked onrampantbits
    of Shrapneldisregard a commandscratchdiscernible pathculpability*you
    have died* [Hit any key to exit.]

    Inform .z5 file

    Brief notes on the game, by the author

    PC Executable

    A Simple Theft
    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

    TITLE: A Simple Theft
    AUTHOR: Mark Musante
    E-MAIL: olorin SP@G world.std.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/quick.zip
    VERSION: Release 1

    Mark Musante's A Simple Theft is indeed simple: you're apprenticed to a
    fellow who wants to retrieve a jewel from a castle, and you're sent in
    to do the deed--but it's a nice small game nonetheless, with just a few
    puzzles and a fairly thoroughly done backstory. The setting is fantasy,
    but magic at this point is not under control--your master is hoping to
    find something that would help in control it--and the incursion of magic
    at an entirely unexpected point in the story, and your discovery that a
    certain object has magical properties, therefore fit the plot nicely:
    you have no special insight into or control over magic, so you're not
    expecting it when it appears.

    The technical aspect, while mostly good, isn't flawless: one puzzle is
    marred by what I consider a major design flaw (it turns on using an
    object that you're told you can't pick up), and a key object is rather
    confusingly described. Still, in a game this small, there's only so much
    that can go radically wrong, and on the whole the coding is fairly
    solid. Likewise, the writing is more than good enough to tell the story,
    and it's pretty funny in spots as well.

    A Simple Theft feels like an introduction to a longer game--in
    particular, your boss, who's barely a character in this one, is an
    intriguing character who deserves more development in a longer, more
    in-depth game. Indeed, the ending text suggests that there's more to
    come: the story doesn't feel at all complete. For one thing, most of the
    names dropped in the introduction remain dropped--they're not explained
    anywhere--suggesting that the author intends to make something more of
    the world introduced here. The PC is worth fleshing out as well--it's
    intimated that you're a thief, but you don't learn anything about how
    you learned your trade or how you came to be apprenticed to your boss.

    In short, A Simple Theft is a nice preview of what could be an
    intriguing full-length game. Should there be a followup, it'll certainly
    be worth a look.

    TADS .gam file

    Sins Against Mimesis
    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: Sins Against Mimesis
    AUTHOR: Adam Thornton
    E-MAIL: adam SP@G princeton.edu
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/mimesis/mimesis.z5
    VERSION: Release 1 (1997 competition release)

    Few things are more unfunny than an in-joke that you're not in on. On
    the other hand, an in-joke that you *are* in on can be hysterical, as
    it provides not just the pleasure of humor but also the feeling of
    community that comes from shared experience. Sins Against Mimesis is
    definitely a very in-jokey game, and consequently not for
    everyone. However, having been a longtime (since 1994) lurker and
    sometime participant in the rec.*.int-fiction newsgroups, I was part
    of the audience at which the game was aimed, and I have to admit that
    I found a lot of the in-jokes really funny. In fact, one of the most
    fun parts of the game was to play name-that-reference -- kind of the
    IF equivalent of listening to a World Party album or a Dennis Miller
    routine. Of course, the nature of the game (and the fact that it was
    written pseudonymously) also invited us to play guess-the-author. My
    guess was for Russ Bryan, but as it turns out the game was written by
    Adam Thornton, a relatively new author.

    If you haven't played much IF, and in fact even if you haven't spent
    much time on the IF newsgroups, most of this game is going to mean
    very little to you. Even its title is an allusion: to "Crimes Against
    Mimesis," a well-crafted series of articles posted to the newsgroups
    by Roger Giner-Sorolla (whatever happened to him, anyway?) a year or
    so ago. The rest of the game continues in that vein. The opening
    paragraph alludes to Jigsaw. The score of the initial part of the game
    is kept in IF disks which magically pop into the player's inventory
    every time a correct move is made. In some ways, this familiar, almost
    conspiratorial approach is a weakness. Certainly in the context of the
    competition it won't endear Sins to any judge who stands on the
    outside of the privileged circle at which the game aims itself. Even
    for an insider, the constant barrage of "if you're one of us, you'll
    know what I mean" references can start to feel a little
    cloying. However, the game is cleanly coded and competently written,
    and on the first time through I found it quite entertaining.

    There aren't many games which I would highly recommend to one group of
    people and discourage others from playing, but Sins is one of them. If
    you're an raif and rgif regular, I think you'll find Sins quite funny
    and entertaining. If not, forget it. It's bound to be more baffling
    and irritating than anything else.

    Prose: The prose is generally somewhere between functionally good and
    rather well done, with occasional moments of brilliant hilarity.

    Plot: The plot is based around several clever tricks which are quite
    funny at the time, but aren't worth repeating. If you've already
    played, you know what they are, and if you haven't played yet I won't
    give away the jokes. Like the rest of Sins, the plot is funny the
    first time through but won't wear well.

    Puzzles: Actually, this was the weakest part of the game. Many of the
    puzzles can be solved by performing extremely basic actions, which of
    course hardly makes them puzzles at all. Others, however, depend
    either on extremely specific (and not well-clued) actions or on
    deducing something about the surroundings which is not included in
    object or room descriptions. For a game so adamantly self-aware, it's
    ironic that Sins falls into some of the most basic blunders of puzzle
    design.

    Technical:
    writing -- I found no mechanical errors in Sins' writing.
    coding -- I found no bugs either.

    Inform file (.z5) (updated version)

    Inform file (.z5) (competition version)

    Inform source code and makefile (.zip) (updated version)

    GUEmap format map (.gmp)

    Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla
    From: Donna Mccreary Rodriguez <donnar SP@G ix.netcom.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

     NAME:   Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla
                                                     PARSER:  AGT
     AUTHOR: Gil Williamson                          PLOT:  Slightly linear
     EMAIL: ???                                      ATMOSPHERE:  Whimisical
     AVAILABILITY:  IF Archive (hobbs.zip),  F              WRITING:  Good
     PUZZLES:  Clever; logical                       SUPPORTS:  AGT ports
     CHARACTERS:   Whimsical; "punny"  names         DIFFICULTY:  Easy

    You, the main character, are Sir Ramic Hobbs, Knight Errant.  You have
    made a pledge to rescue Princess Anne de Pea from the clutches of the
    High Level Gorilla, who resides in the Pleasure Dome of the kingdom of
    Trassch Khan.   Corny, yes......but really a light, fun little game with no
    pretenses except to entertain the player and present some interesting
    puzzles.  Gil Williamson, the author, says that---having spent days lost in
    the caverns of Zork--he wants to make no unfair demands on the player, and he
    is true to his word.  In case you get stuck, there is a solution file zipped
    in.

    Try this one.  In my download from GMD there was no information about
    registering the game and no contact info on the author, so I suppose
    it's a gift.

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)

    AGT Source code(.zip)

    Sir Ramic Hobbs and the Oriental Walk
    From: "John Wood" <john SP@G elvw.demon.co.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    NAME: Sir Ramic Hobbs and the Oriental Walk
    AUTHOR: Gil Williamson
    EMAIL: Gil.Williamson SP@G syntegra.bt.co.uk
    DATE: October, 1996
    PARSER: AGT
    SUPPORTS: MS-DOS (runtime included), AGiliTy
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/wok

    Not a popular choice, this was my second-favourite game of the
    competition and my favourite AGT game to date by far.  You play a
    drunken knight the "morning after" who has to get the castle deeds back
    from an evil wizard - not the most original of plots.  However, the
    amusing responses from the game's narrator and the situations you find
    yourself in more than make up for this.

    I only used one hint during the two hours, and this was the second game
    I went on to finish before the end of the competition.  The ending is
    unfortunately weaker than the rest of the game, which would have lowered
    the score I gave it slightly, but it still remains great fun.

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

    First off, will someone please tell me whether the last word of this
    game's title is "walk" or "wok"?  The game says "walk," the filenames
    say "wok."  Also, is it "Sir Ramic Hobbs" or "Sir Ramric Hobbs"?  The
    other game starring this character says "Sir Ramric."  I'm bumfuzzled.

    Having never played the other Sir Ramic (Ramric?) Hobbs game, "Sir Ramic
    Hobbs and the High-Level Gorilla," I can't comment on how this game
    stacks up to its predecessor.  I can say, however, that it explores both
    extremes of enjoyability.  The ability to shapeshift into different
    animals was a lot of fun, and brought back fond memories of Infocom's
    "Arthur."  It's funny, with clever object descriptions and commentary by
    the game's parser, which assumes the persona of a wizard who follows you
    about.  His comments are frequently witty taunting, but it's done good-
    naturedly, unlike "Stalker."  This is much more entertaining than the
    nameless, faceless entity that most adventure game parsers never rise
    above (though "Lost New York" does come close).  The method of travel
    (via armchair) is amusing.  Also, it's impossible to make the game
    unsolvable.

    My score was dragged down, however, by a great deal of typical AGT fare:
    Incongruities, a lack of apparent plot until the very end, obscure
    puzzles, a maze where one wasn't necessary, odd results when the author
    didn't anticipate something (entering the library when invisible, for
    instance, still gets you stopped by the librarian), and of course the
    almanac puzzle.  Ohhhh, do not even get me STARTED on the almanac
    puzzle.  After nearly an hour of wandering about, squinting in vain at
    the teeny tiny letters on my screen, trying to deduce a compass
    direction from them, then finding I'd made a wrong turn when I followed
    the directions I DID find... blur-r-r-r-gh!

    Half good, half bad, which means...

    From: "Magnus Olsson" <zebulon SP@G pobox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    [ Note: There appears to be some confusion about the title of this
    game: is it the "Oriental Walk," as the title screen says, or the
    "Oriental Wok," as it's called in some of the docs? "Walk" probably,
    since there _is_ an "Oriental Walk" in the game, but no wok even in
    the kitchen :-). I suppose the "wok" is intended as a pun... ]

    One topic that has been the subject of much heated discussion on
    rec.arts.int-fiction is that of player characterization. How can you
    cast the player as a set character, perhaps totally unlike the
    player's ordinary character, and make him or her feel and act like
    this character? The prevalent view seems to be that most players hate
    when the game tells them what they feel and think, and that few things
    are as irritating as being told that your, perfectly reasonable,
    action is out of character.

    It is interesting to see that one of the less sophisticated games of
    the competition not only tries to do this, but succeeds at it. And,
    perhaps surprisingly, it does so by casting you in a far from
    flattering role: that of Sir Ramic Hobbs, an antihero in every sense
    of the word - or, to be frank, a bumbling, drunken buffoon.

    Or perhaps this is just why it manages to pull it off. For "Wok" is a
    farce, and you are the butt of the jokes. Not just you, Sir Ramic,
    but you, the player. Much of the humour lies in the player being
    misled, and the game pretending to misunderstand the player's
    confusion as Sir Ramic's stupidity. In some cases (such as the sudden
    darkness), the game leads the player completely up the garden path,
    thereby forcing him to act in character.

    As the reader may have guessed, "Wok" is a game that talks back to
    you. It even makes an attempt to explain who is doing the talking by
    giving a name to the "narrator": Prang, a disembodied wizard who takes
    orders from the player and guides him along. As a moderately
    experienced IF player, I found this slightly annoying at first, and
    then I forgot all about it. However, the documentation says that the
    game is aimed at beginners, who maybe will find this a help.

    Despite the fact that the game talks back to you, commenting on your
    every action, and making fun of many of the mistakes you're making, it
    is all very good natured (as opposed to a certain other competition
    game, that apparently made some people feel quite insulted). I never
    had the feeling that the author was making fun of me, but rather that
    we were sharing a joke. And Sir Ramic may be a buffoon, but he's quite
    a lovable buffoon.

    This is all very skillfully done. Apart from the writing, however, the
    game is quite unsophisticated. To start with, it has a rather
    primitive look-and-feel. To avoid fanning the ongoning religious wars,
    I won't speculate whether this is due to the game being written in
    AGT; it does have, however, the feel of a "typical, mid 80's, AGT
    game" - garish colours, rather minimalistic room descriptions, a
    simple parser, rather underdeveloped atmosphere, NPC's that are just
    animated obstacles.

    To be fair, however, these aren't very serious flaws. The parser, for
    example, is quite adequate (there is one glaring "guess the word"
    problem, but a better parser couldn't have remedied a lack of
    synonyms), one of the NPC's (the dog) is at least a bit more
    developed, and this is not the kind of game one plays for the joy of
    exploring a detailed fantasy world.

    The puzzles are fairly standard, but there are some interesting twists
    (and the series of transformations at the end is quite clever and
    entertaining). The obligatory maze adds nothing to the game and could
    have been advantageously removed. The eponymous puzzle, the "oriental
    walk," is clever, but far too tedious - and this is aggravated by the
    fact that saving is disallowed while solving the puzzle. Disabling
    saving is probably a way to prevent solutions by trial-and-error, but
    an unfortunate consequence of this is that a single mistake means
    having to start the puzzle all over again, with all the directions
    randomized.

    The online hints can be somewhat infuriating, since there is only one
    hint per room, but fortunately a walkthrough is provided.
    Unfortunately, the walkthrough is of no help in the "walk" - you'll
    just have to sweat it through (the endgame is worth it!).

    In conclusion, "Wok" is a game that lives by its wit and humour, which
    are more than enough to outweigh its shortcomings in other areas. In
    fact, I found it one of the funniest games I've played.

    Directory With AGT Files

    Six Stories
    From: Suzanne Britton <tril SP@G host.ott.igs.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    TITLE: Six Stories
    AUTHOR: Neil K. Guy
    E-MAIL: tela SP@G tela.bc.ca
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/tads/six/six.gam
    VERSION: 1.0

    "Six Stories" is the first full-blown use of HTML TADS I've seen,
    complete with high-quality graphics (well, "illustrations" feels like a
    better term), sound effects, and speech. However, these multimedia
    aspects are used differently than they are in most commercial games. A
    combination of effects, including subtle background textures that look
    like aged paper, are used to give you the impression of being inside a
    storybook. There is your own story, which you are playing out, and five
    others nestled inside that, each recounted with pictures and a quiet
    voice like a parent reading at a child's bedside. All come together to
    contribute to the one puzzle of note (which, though it is arguably an
    "old chestnut", I quite enjoyed solving).

    I found the experience, though all too brief, to be thoroughly charming.
    Puzzlewise, the pieces all fit together with a satisfying little snap.
    Storywise, there are many insinuations and ambiguities and loose
    ends--enough that I plan on a second play-through to get a clearer
    picture of the whole. The author doesn't go out of his way to explain
    what any of this means and why it's happening. This is obscurity done
    right--unlike some other entries this year which shall remain nameless.

    While "Six Stories" has a number of cosmetic bugs, as well as a
    gameworld which is arguably over-detailed for a game of this size
    (leading to some unwieldly disambiguations), I found no serious
    problems. It is one of several games this year that disables compass
    directions, which normally irritates me, but in this case, there was
    good reason for doing so.

    The main reason I'm only giving "Six Stories" an 8 is because it ended
    just as I was getting warmed up!

    Directory with TADS .gam file and resource files

    Skyranch
    From: Robb Sherwin <Robb.Sherwin SP@G ia.nsc.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000

    NAME: Skyranch
    AUTHOR: Jack Driscoll
    E-MAIL: slackerbox SP@G snet.net
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: DOS, custom
    SUPPORTS:
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/msdos/skyranch/skyranch.exe
    VERSION: 1

    Professionalism.

    With over a hundred new text adventures being written every year and
    excellent libraries, documentation, and newsgroup help available, it's
    perfectly reasonable to have expectations of the games we choose to
    play. The thing is, it doesn't always work out that way. Skyranch is
    completely lacking in professionalism. Many have stated that it did not
    appear as if the author was a native speaker of English. Valid, perhaps,
    but there has always been a percentage of the population that simply
    does not come across as fast, competent and skilled when it comes to the
    electronic word. We have all seen "the first e-mail" from our otherwise
    intelligent computer-newbie friends that looks like it was typed by a
    mentally handicapped, three-fingered snow ape. This is the type of voice
    Skyranch speaks with. We're actually somewhat lucky that the game is not
    written all in caps.

    The game definitely has potential. It's about an experiment in the sky.
    As a survivalist type, you have signed yourself up to take part in the
    skyranch project. The real challenge isn't dealing with the lack of
    oxygen and air pressure as so much as being unable to concentrate on
    anything other than the dreadful sounds of heavy machinery.

    One verb will usually do it for Skyranch. If Driscoll was made aware of
    the concept of synonym he no doubt thought, "bah! Who needs 'em?"
    Unfortunately, this does not bode well for the player. You absolutely
    have to go into the game with the understanding that the game's
    vocabulary is slightly better than Mystery House, second-level verbs
    are not going to be referenced and guessing the verb won't help you as
    much as getting a thesaurus and typing in alternate ways to express
    "exit" one by one.

    The thing is, it's often extremely amusing to place yourself in a
    literary world where the author is not a superb writer of English. (The
    Walter Miller Home Page, or Fat Chicks In Party Hats website, for
    instance.) Driscoll's game offers this style of appeal. His description
    for the robot that follows you around ("Lloyd 2.0") ends with the robot
    telling you, "I will love you always." This apparently sincere
    expression of emotion in a sea of poor spelling and incorrectly used
    homonyms is *funny*. No one, short of the author of Annoyotron, really
    goes out and attempts to make a bad game. The unexpectedness of Lloyd
    2.0 can at least produce a chuckle. Realizing that the author does care
    about the game can shock you into seeing it differently. More, the
    game's concept, at least, is not completely without merit. Sure, it's no
    Trinity -- hell, it's not even Punkirita Quest, but Skyranch contains a
    small bit of style to keep it from otherwise being a *complete* waste of
    time.

    Unfortunately, the lack of a decent parser really does damn the game.
    Exiting the ferry is not accomplished by "exit" or "out" or "get out of
    ferry" -- it is done by typing "leave." Although making those sort of
    breakthroughs allow you to continue to play the game, you can't
    effectively experience it in one sitting unless you are blessed with the
    gift of telepathy (and, er, have Mr. Driscoll sitting next to you within
    your effective mental range). Skyranch would be most effective -- and
    most entertaining -- if Driscoll collaborated with an experienced TADS
    or Inform programmer. Any sort of spell checking would absolutely ruin
    the game's charm, but being able to navigate the game's world is a must.
    Until that time, Skyranch's appeal is limited to the sort of player that
    enjoyed Space Aliens Laughed At My Cardigan, Symetry, and Human
    Resources Stories.

    Directory with PC executable and accompanying text file

    Slouching Towards Bedlam
    From: Jessica Knoch <jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003

    TITLE: Slouching Towards Bedlam
    AUTHOR: Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto
    EMAIL: bedlam SP@G peccable.com
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/zcode/slouch
    VERSION: Release 1 (competition version)

    The title recalls the W.B. Yeats poem, "The Second Coming," in which the
    question is posed: "What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" It is, possibly, the most
    suggestive and fitting title of any game in this Comp. You play... well,
    the game starts in some sort of office, where you are listening to a
    voice on a phonograph talk about chaos, and a secret, and moments of
    madness. Almost immediately, the game has an eerie tinge to it,
    resulting from two things: first, if you've seen enough movies, you
    suspect that it is your voice on the phonograph -- moments of madness,
    indeed. Second, the text studiously avoids saying "you." You're
    examining objects, exploring the contents of the office, but the
    descriptions of things and even descriptions of actions are ghostly,
    passive: the desk you want to look in is not "your desk," the response
    to "open drawer" begins with "The large central drawer opens..." Even
    default responses have been changed, so that trying to take an object
    you already hold gives "One cannot take what one already has." It all
    evokes a mystery, and the discovery that the office is in an insane
    asylum in 1855 only adds to the creepy, disturbing atmosphere.

    But this is not a scary game: there are no monsters chasing you, no
    weapons to wield in self-defense. The act of exploration is so natural,
    after the first scene, that you don't realize for some time that the
    *PC* is also exploring. There is a subtle lack of familiar references,
    which you might expect after identifying yourself as Dr. Xavier, who is
    superintendent of the asylum. Instead, the PC is just as new to all this
    as you are, which aligns your purposes seamlessly, making the player and
    the PC one.

    You are given a powerful tool to aid in comprehension, described in the
    phonographic diary: the Triage unit. It is a mechanical information
    assimilator, and it follows you around on wheels. It can identify
    objects and give you an idea of how things are used. It's also useful
    for other problems you encounter during the course of the discoveries,
    and is just about the ideal thing to have along in a text adventure.

    In the course of exploring the asylum and the town, some odd things
    start to happen. We start to get into spoiler region here, but you can
    find a pattern to the odd things, and between that and the odd things
    you find as you explore, the mystery slowly begins to take a clearer
    shape. Eventually, gradually, it coalesces until the situation is clear.
    However, what you will do about it is not clear. There are several
    options, with five different outcomes, none of which could rightly be
    called winning or losing. If ever there was a game where not having a
    score was justified, this is it.

    As for the other aspects of a game people generally talk about:
    wonderful. I didn't see a single confirmable error in the text. The
    actions needed to "solve the puzzles" were logical and intuitive, and
    figuring out how one of the various machines worked in the game was very
    satisfying. There are hints: good, extensive, thorough and gentle hints.
    The pacing is superb: the pieces of the story come at just the right
    moments, the understanding comes gradually and not too slowly. The size
    of the game is next to perfect for the Comp, exactly filling up two
    hours in reaching one or two endings and reading the appendices. There
    are moments that made me completely forget about the real world, and
    focus entirely on what was happening in the game.

    In short: you must play this game.

    Zcode .z5 file

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

    NAME: Small World
    UTHOR: Andrew D. Pontious
    EMAIL: byzantium SP@G tuna.net
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: TADS, above average
    SUPPORTS: TADS ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/smallwld
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    Idly examining a globe, you find yourself at the north pole of a tiny
    world which has stopped spinning.  You need to start it spinning again.

    This was one of two games I couldn't help playing to its conclusion
    before the end of the competition period.  The puzzles were gauged about
    right for my talents, and the atmosphere sucked me in.  Apart from the
    poles, the locations around the planet are named for the time of day
    (Gloaming, Morning, Noon, etc) which provide a means of moving from the
    poles.  Indeed, a lot of normal adventuring activities are affected by
    the small world - dropping things becomes a minor puzzle because of the
    low gravity.

    What really makes this game is the way that everything is so neatly tied
    together.  It all makes a bizarre sort of sense, and responses are
    almost always appropriate.  My favourite game of the competition.

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

    I'm not sure how fit I am to comment on this one, as I didn't finish it
    completely.  Treat my opinion as worthless if you think it appropriate.

    "Small World" is a nicely-programmed little work (at the outset anyway),
    with an imaginative map layout and some nice features like the "sack
    object" (its first appearance in a TADS game, if I'm not mistaken), a
    "warning mode" like PTF's, and the direct elimination of a great many
    useless verbs, which ends up saving a great deal of wasted typing
    (programmers take note).

    It also has a cute scoring system (earning percentages of a single
    coveted point), one of the most amusing NPCs of the entire competition
    (the devil), and some theological issues that got me thinking.

    Now for the bad part.  After my getting about 18% of the point, plot
    advancement abruptly ground to a screeching halt, reducing the
    remainder of my playing experience to the following:

    "Okay, the hint system tells me that I'm making progress simply by
    moving around.  Wandering around... yep, wandering around... no visible
    progress...
            >HINT
    Still says that moving around makes progress... Hoooooo-KAYyyyyy...
    wandering around some more... la de da de dee... still no visible
    progress... doot de doot, hmm hmm hmm... nope, not yet... maybe if I
    wander around in a slightly different manner?... huh-uh, no change...
    noon, afternoon, twilight, evening, midnight, gloaming, dawn...
    aaaaaaand back again... dawn, gloaming, midnight, evening, twilight,
    afternoon, noon... still wandering around... I must be making a LOT of
    progress now... Damn, time's up."

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

    Small World, another largely forgotten gem from the 1996 competition, is
    a nice effort on several levels--the puzzles are creative and reasonably
    forgiving, there's a funny and thoroughly implemented NPC, and the game
    takes whimsical pokes at a variety of targets that should keep even the
    non-puzzle-solver entertained.

    You've been transported magically to a tiny world (eight feet in
    diameter) which has stopped spinning, so your brief is to get things
    moving again. Along the way you encounter a miniature Adam and Eve,
    nuclear war, interplanetary conflicts of various sorts, and other
    problems of various seriousness. The most memorable aspect of the world
    is the devil that tags along behind you on a pogo stick making snarky
    comments about most events in the game; as a parody of Satan (in
    reference to heaven, "Is that powderpuff really where you want to go
    when you die?") or as general comic relief ("A miserably whistled
    rendition of 'Can't Get No Satisfaction' assures you the devil is right
    behind"), the devil is one of the game's main assets.

    The game itself has become somewhat more user-friendly in recent
    releases--the competition release made inventory management somewhat
    excessively cumbersome for the sake of realism. (The cleanup makes
    sense--insisting on realism in the story of an eight-foot-in-diameter
    world was probably overkill.) Still, owing to the nature of the beast,
    it's not an easy game; when so much of what goes on is dependent on
    whimsy, it can be difficult to tune into the author's brand of whimsy in
    order to get the puzzles solved. Some of the non-user-friendly aspects
    are still there, in fact--the game can close off without warning early
    on if you do certain things out of order. Nor is there an overarching
    logic to the game that the player needs to acclimate to, really--there's
    no theme or motif that explains the puzzles. They're not bad puzzles,
    but they're not particularly accessible, either--and the last one, which
    effectively plays games with the syntax and is rather difficult to
    visualize, is even more challenging. There's a hint system; it doesn't
    adapt perfectly to your situation, but it works well enough.

    What's interesting about Small World is that it doesn't appear to take
    itself seriously, and yet the conflicts on the world you inhabit are
    rendered as actual conflicts rather than as humor. That is, even though
    the devil appears to be mostly there for fun, you do have to get rid of
    him, and at a key moment you get the devil rooting against you (and
    various heavenly choirs rooting for you). When you finally succeed, the
    devil gives "a great despairing wail, taken up by all his followers,
    combining the sounds of howling wolves, screeching canaries, hissing
    snakes, yammering jackhammers," which eventually "trails off to a
    hollow, echoing moan, then silence." A little heavy for a comedy game,
    as are the various nuclear warheads hurled at you (you're given a
    thousand-turn countdown until the inhabitants run out of missiles). In
    its own way, though, the comic/serious duality works--after all, your
    role is, in a sense, to play God/savior for the miniature world, and you
    get a sense of both the comic absurdity and the tragedy of such a role.
    That is, your perspective permits you to laugh at the world you're
    charged with saving, but the inhabitants can be forgiven for not seeing
    the humor in it all. The quality of the writing helps here: generally,
    when the game's being funny, it does so through understatement, without
    appearing to try too hard, so shifting into a less whimsical mode
    doesn't feel like a jolt.

    Small World is uneven in a few respects, but it's none the less
    enjoyable for that, and the most recent releases have improved its
    production values.

    TADS file (.gam) (updated version)

    Macintosh (.sit) (updated version)

    Directory With TADS .gam File and hints (competition version)

    Commented Solution (Text)

    Snatches
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    NAME: Snatches: An Interactive Horror Story
    AUTHOR: Gregory Weir
    EMAIL: Gregory.Weir SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/
    snatches/snatches.z5

    In a number of respects, this game is so unusual I haven't been sure how to
    start reviewing it. Finally, I've come up with drawing an analogy with a
    theatre play.

    So, imagine a dark stage, on which, in a circle of light, a fight is going on --
    a fight between the main hero and a strange, evil creature. Searchlights start
    to flare up in a seemingly random fashion, illuminating various spots on the
    stage for short periods of time. Finally, putting the single pieces of this
    mosaic together, the spectators get an integral picture of what's going on.

    And that's how Snatches is set up. It consists of several episodes from the
    perspective of different characters in the game (so that there're many player
    characters, but only one main hero), following in a random order. The narration
    is threaded by the aforementioned fight, cut-scenes of which occur after each
    episode like a refrain. This technique works very well -- to a no small extent
    thanks to the catchy writing (I've even considered to imitate it in my review,
    but finally let it be, realizing I'm not up to the task). There have been minor
    implementation issues regarding overlapping of, uh, let's call it "character
    experiences" (in the single episodes, different actors often are able to visit
    the same places and interact with the same objects, which sometimes can have
    effects unforeseen by the game author), but they are completely forgiveable.

    The main problem the work has is (I'm returning to our theatre parallel),
    after the searchlights have finished scanning the stage, and the battle has
    ended, the director doesn't quite have an idea what to do next, and
    effectively just rings down the curtain. Sure, Snatches featured several
    endings, but none of them seemed worthy. In my opinion, a "the evil can't be
    defeated" type of epilogue (in the style of the X-Files movies) suggests
    itself here -- but it's just what I think. Anyway, in my eyes, this is the
    only snag that prevented Snatches from being a major challenger for the
    podium.

    SNATS:

    PLOT: An appropriate ending would help it a lot (1.2)
    ATMOSPHERE: Satisfyingly sinister (1.5)
    WRITING: One of the best in this IF-Comp (1.8)
    GAMEPLAY: Ragged but integral (1.6)
    BONUSES: The unusual story-telling approach (1.3)
    TOTAL: 7.4
    CHARACTERS: Mostly adequate (1.4)
    PUZZLES: Modestly stick to their last (0.6)
    DIFFICULTY: Trivial -- except for a couple somewhat tricky points
                (4 out of 10)

    COMP SCORE: 8

    COMMENTS: The correlation between the SNATS and the Comp score is pretty
              good. The slight difference is caused by the fact that, when I
              replayed Snatches for the review, I fished out the technical issues
              mentioned there (somehow, they eluded me during my first
              play-through).

    From: DJ Hastings <djhastings SP@G centurytel.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #46 -- October 17, 2006

    Snatches is a horror story about a creature that is stalking and attacking
    people in and around an old house. During the game you switch perspectives
    frequently, although you play each character only once. This is because the
    perspective switch usually occurs when the "shadow" bumps off your current
    character. Because of this, most of the game is pretty linear.

    In fact, Snatches could probably be better described as an "interactive story"
    until the very end, when there are multiple endings available based on your
    actions. There are clues here and there in the main story that may help with
    the endgame, but no real puzzles until the end.

    I actually think that this is a problem with the game. By the time I got to the
    endgame, I was used to doing fairly obvious things and watching the story
    unfold. So when I hit the puzzley bit, it felt like an interruption. I didn't
    *want* to do anything clever at that point; I just wanted to finish the story!
    I found a couple of the less optimal (but more easily accessible) endings and
    then quit. If the final segment had been similar to the rest of the game, I
    would have enjoyed Snatches far more.

    That's not to imply that I didn't enjoy it. On the contrary, I really liked
    viewing various events through multiple sets of eyes, and piecing the story
    together as I gained more information. I particularly enjoyed playing as the
    family dog and seeing his perspective on things. Even though I knew that each
    of my characters would get killed eventually, the author managed to keep me
    interested in them and their story.

    I thought that the story itself was reasonably interesting and creative,
    although I haven't really read any horror fiction, so it could be completely
    hackneyed and I wouldn't know it.  :)  In my opinion, it was well told using
    the character switching.

    The game had a number of bugs, mostly small inconsistencies in the text of the
    game. These appeared to be caused by making assumptions about what the player
    would do. For example, one cutscene describes a character's gun going off when
    she drops it. When I played the character, I had fired the gun until it was
    empty, but the cutscene still described it going off when it was dropped. This
    sort of thing could have been ironed out with a little more testing (and
    probably should have been).

    There were also a few typos and at least one programming error. But none of the
    errors I saw had any real effect on gameplay, and they were infrequent enough
    not to spoil the story. On the whole, I had fun with this game in spite of its
    problems, and look forward to seeing what else Mr. Weir will come up with.

    Zcode executable (.z5)
    Walkthrough

    The Snowman Sextet
    From: Dan Shiovitz <dans SP@G drizzle.com>
    Review Appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: The Snowman Sextet (Parts 1, 2, 4, and 5)
    AUTHOR: Roger Carbol, Jessica Knoch, Josh Giesbrecht, and Tommy Herbert
    EMAIL: david.cornelson SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: May 26, 2005
    PARSER: TADS2 and Inform
    SUPPORTS: TADS and Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/segment

    I am totally interested in continuity in IF. I like it intra-game, like in time
    travel games where you get to visit a place at different times and see how it's
    changed; and I like it inter-game, like how in Unnkulian Unventure II you play
    the famous hero of Unnkulian Underworld, or how Paul O'Brian's Earth And Sky
    series develops a storyline over three games. The obvious next level of
    complexity is to try for continuity involving multiple authors. I've heard
    several proposals for doing this -- some kind of shared-world deal, or
    different authors working on a single game -- but the most complicated multi-
    author setup I've seen is the Snowman Sextet that David Cornelson organized
    earlier this year.

    Perhaps a little too complicated -- although the name suggests it was to be a
    six-part story, parts 3 and 6 never got completed. Nevertheless, there's a
    pretty decent story that can be pieced together from the existing four parts,
    so I thought I'd take a look at what's there, and see how the different games
    compare.

    The overall setup seems to be some sort of story about a family travelling up a
    mountain to make a snowman and coming back again. The individual games are
    pretty small -- usually only four or five rooms each -- with one or two puzzles.
    Each game advances the plot a bit and the next one picks up more or less where
    the previous game left off. None of the games are particularly hard; you should
    be able to play all four in an evening.

    The first part of the story, But For A Single Flake by Roger Carbol, is set in
    your family cabin in the mountains. It seems like Carbol may have expected the
    players to know the overall premise coming in, since the game never explicitly
    tells it (or even tells the player what their immediate goal is). On the other
    hand, the game is small enough that this isn't really an issue -- there're just
    four rooms and one puzzle -- so you can pretty much bumble through without
    knowing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. In fact, it's small enough
    room-wise that I'm surprised that the implementation isn't any deeper: your
    wife is in bed asleep in the first room, but you can't wake, kiss, or talk to
    her. On the other hand, there are a number of bits of writing that are quite
    snappy, and I was evilly pleased to see a response for >PUSH GRANNY.

    The second segment, by Jess Knoch, is set on a boat in the middle of the lake.
    Just starting this shows a few bumps in the segment-game idea -- the story-so-
    far at the beginning of the game disagrees with the previous game over whether
    your wife came along, and the boat's suddenly gotten a lot bigger than it was
    last game. This segment has the best puzzles of the four, I think: they're not
    too hard, but they fit the environment and I had to think about them a bit
    (although there's one thing that seems like a puzzle but as far as I can tell
    is just a red herring -- sort of a weird choice to make time  for in this short
    a game). The writing is fairly straightforward, but Knoch definitely gives the
    impression of having done her homework about boats. Unfortunately, there's no
    game three in the series so I was  unable to find out what happened next, but
    it wasn't too hard to pick up the plot with game four.

    Game four, Josh Giesbrecht's Kaboot's Story, was my favorite of the four games,
    and not just because the PC is a hamster. Well, ok, it's *mostly* because of
    that, but it's also funny and cute on its own merits. My notes for this game
    say "storing things in cheekpouches = awesome", and I don't think I can put it
    any more clearly than that. The family seems to have weird priorities if they'
    re more worried about building a snowman than freezing to death, but luckily
    the heroic hamster is here to save the day. Save the day multiple times, in
    fact -- I played through this game in just 22 turns and still had to shepherd
    the family through three crises. The puzzles themselves aren't particularly
    challenging but they don't slow the game down either, so there's nothing wrong
    with them being the way they are. I guess that's really the secret to the
    appeal of this game for me: it was about the same length as the other three
    games, but had like three times the number of events, and that made it feel
    extremely fast-paced and fun, especially with the cheerful writing to back it
    up (the thing with gangster chipmunks was totally ridiculous but also pretty
    funny).

    Game five, the fourth and final game written for this project, is Tommy
    Herbert's Fran and Bart Want a Snowman!. Despite the previous game being about
    a hamster who fights off a puma, I found this game the least plausible of the
    four. Possibly this was inevitable given the premise -- you have to bring the
    snowman back down off the mountain, and there's no real way to do that without
    pretending snowmen are much less likely to fall apart than they actually are.
    The game also feels a little overwritten most of the time, but there are a few
    very funny bits -- especially the ending text -- that are noteworthy. The
    coding, on the other hand, was uniformly solid: this felt to me like the best-
    implemented of the four, despite requiring the most complex commands.
    Unfortunately, there was no game six written, so the cliffhanger that game five
    ends on won't be resolved, but I'm sure it all worked out happily in the end.

    Overall, the Snowman Sextet is a useful look at the benefits and drawbacks of
    doing a multi-author series like this. The most obvious issue is, of course,
    that if not everyone gets their parts done you're left with holes in the story.
    And really, even if they do, you're still likely to have more issues keeping
    strict continuity from game to game -- Susan's re-/dis-appearance between games
    one and two, but also more subtle stuff like how the characterization of the
    NPCs (sulky or cheerful? quiet or loud?) changes from game to game here.
    Playing these also pointed out the usefulness of having a story-so-far summary
    at the start of each game -- I only got it in game two, but it was really nice
    there to re-establish the backstory as the current author understood it.

    On the plus side, though, I really think it's cool to have a bunch of games in
    the same story. The viewpoint switch on one of the games was especially nice to
    provide a different perspective on the story while advancing the overall plot,
    but even when authors didn't switch viewpoints, they still provided a unique
    style for their games that made the series as a whole better than any part.

    The premise behind the games
    Part 1 -- TADS2 executable
    Part 2 -- Zcode executable (.z5)
    Part 4 -- Zcode executable (.z5)
    Part 5 -- Zcode executable (.z5)
    Part 5 -- Walkthrough

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

    NAME: So Far
    AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    EMAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
    DATE: December 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: .z8 compliant Inform interpreters
    URL: Story File: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/sofar.z8
         Invisiclues: http://www.bioc.rice.educ/~lpsmith/IF/sofar.html

    So Far has been around for a while now, having been released in late
    96, but for some reason it's never been reviewed in SPAG News. Magnus
    reckons we're all too daunted by it. Given that it won the awards for
    Best Game, Best Writing and Best Puzzle in the 1996 interactive
    fiction awards, organised by XYZZY News, I thought it was about time
    it was written up here. It's a noteworthy title, for a whole slew of
    reasons. IF's traditional features have been handled extremely well,
    in that the writing, the puzzles and the coding are as near flawless
    as they come. There are further aspects however, concerning the
    game-world and the player's place within it, that add new and
    thought-provoking elements. I'll go through all of these.

    In reviewing any adventure, there's a balance to be struck, between
    describing the game and giving the game away... In this case
    especially, where so much is so inventive, I really don't want to reel
    off the places and events that make up the story. I'll try and
    describe the style and the approach, and I'll quote a little, and
    hopefully you'll get some idea of what's different about So Far.

    On beginning, the first thing to strike you is the quality of the
    writing.  Most of the text is in traditional fantasy style,
    i.e. plenty of adjectives, plenty of drama, plenty of verbal
    swoosh. From a writer of limited ability, this can be fairly
    cringe-inducing, but the author here brings it off extremely
    well. There are dramatic moments, exotic settings, and strange,
    half-understood events throughout this game, and the prose never
    flags. I would say this is the best writing, in this style, that I've
    seen in IF.

            West Portico

            More people are relaxing here, perhaps because of the kegman
            who sells his beer under the theater portico. The main street
            bakes in sunlight to the south; the front of the theater
            continues to the north, adorned by some decorative potted
            shrubs.

            A couple of people nearby are discussing the moons. That's
            right; tonight is the night that the astronomers have been
            going on about. You'll have to be sure to watch. Snuggled in a
            blanket, ideally... if you ever find Aessa.

            You feel the faintest cool breath of air.

            Wait. Wait. What's ever cool in this suffocating summer heat?
            It comes again, slight, smoky, deep with autumn. Impossible.

            >x sky

            You lean out of the shade and look up. The sun scorches you
            from one side of a metal-blue sky. The moons are also
            visible. Warel is already high; Amwal is just rising, but she
            will soon be catching up, approaching tonight's lunar event.

    Early in the game, the settings are pretty much fantasy staples, but
    they're varied and well realised. The player has no particular idea of
    their role, or even their identity, but without giving too much away,
    the game is a journey, an exploration of worlds weird and
    wonderful. While some of the places to be found are standard
    adventure-fare, frozen wastes, castle moats and the like, others are
    fresh and fascinating. These tend to be the inhabited stretches. The
    author creates the impression of some rich and living cultures, by
    virtue of things happening in the background, with virtually nothing
    in the way of Ask XXX About YYY. Coming across these people, observing
    their strange activities, it's eerily reminiscent of the early Star
    Treks, when Kirk was always beaming down to strange new civilisations,
    picking his way cautiously amongst the 'aliens'.

    These people are a good example, in fact, of the style the author has
    adopted throughout the game. The world is not there for the player's
    benefit. It does not revolve around him. On seeing a building, a
    street, a door, an object, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to
    do anything useful with it. It may well be there for some reason which
    doesn't concern you. This is not to say these things can't be referred
    to, or looked at or under or manipulated, just that they won't
    progress the story, or at least, not the story of the
    player. Conversely, as you find yourself in strange places, with
    strange items to be had, some of these things most definitely are
    useful, if only you can work out how to do whatever it is they do.

            >x box

            The box is strange, even stranger for being so simple. Just
            polished wooden sides, trapezoidal, no two faces parallel. But
            the joinings are precise; no seams show. The craftwork is
            exact. No mark shows on the rich reddish wood, except for the
            natural grain; and also a row of paler circles on each
            side. These seem to be inlaid discs of a blond wood, flush
            with the surface, each incised with a deep star-shaped mark.

            >x discs

            The discs are each about as long as the last joint of your
            thumb. They are arranged in precise rows of three discs each,
            one row on each face of the box. Each disc is incised with a
            mark in the shape of a three-pointed star.

    Often you'll have no idea why or how things do what they do, you just
    have to figure out how to make them do it

    Moving through things and places, that you know nothing about, but
    that you have to make some sense of to move on, gives the story an
    eerie, other-worldly feel. In the early stages this feeling, of things
    going on that no-one is telling you about, is evoked by impassable
    locked doors, streets the locals won't let you enter, arcane power
    sources for derelict machinery.

    You're reminded of Europe, in the later 19th century, where one of the
    influences that produced the Impressionists was the new availability
    of prints from Japan. These, shockingly, included pictures of objects
    half-in/half-out of the frame, cutting people or scenery in half, with
    seeming disregard for the careful composition of scenes characteristic
    of Western art until that time. In the real world, whatever you choose
    to look at, you catch unconnected things in shot. The author has
    achieved that effect here. It's a subtle, quite brave thing to do,
    pretty much new in IF.

    Later on, things become less conventional yet, and the familiar
    traipse round the map, looking for objects, becomes a fond memory.

    Read this example. In this dark place, seeing nothing, you're battered
    by sound, different sounds as you move around, some so loud that they
    block your progress, some deadly. The solutions to these problems
    depend on sound as well, but you never know just why or how they work,
    or exactly what you've done, or why this place is like this.

            Darkness

            It is too dark to see.

            You are nearly deafened by unseen clangor. A thousand bells
            might be roiling a foot above your head. The noise is dampened
            to the east, where you can hear an occasional sharp rap, and
            to the north, where an echoing plipping noise gives the
            impression of dripping water.

            >listen to the bells

            The noise is a thousand incessant bells, from an ice-sweet
            chime to a fierce, deep gongen. Not one of them pauses, for
            one moment.

            Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
            chanting: "Hear the tolling of the bells... iron bells..."

            >listen to the bells

            Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
            chanting: "What a world of solemn thought their monody
            compels..."

            >listen to the bells

            Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
            chanting: "To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells..."

            >listen to the bells

            Somewhere behind the noise, there is an indistinct voice,
            chanting: "From the jingling and the tingling of the bells."

    Metaphysical moments come thick and fast towards the end. You find
    yourself drifting among clouds, with vague feelings of attraction and
    resistance interfering with your progress. You see shapes acting out
    scenes you don't understand; you don't know where you have to be. When
    they ask you questions, you don't know what they mean. In most games,
    this would mean you'd missed out the bit where you found out the
    answers. In So Far, the author has pushed the idea that in a strange
    world, the player might well face strange incomprehensible things, and
    to pass through that world, he might well have to figure out what they
    can do for him. He is not the focus of this world; it has its own
    history, its own concerns. The player will not get his hand held here.

    The idea that things need not be explained, as long as they exhibit an
    internal logic, is probably the defining characteristic of So Far.
    Metaphysical choices, vital and incomprehensible objects, whole worlds
    which aren't north-south-east-west-strolls: these really require a new
    view of the player's place in his world. It asks what IF does, what it
    can do, and so what it should do. And this, is Modernism. In IF. If
    this carry-on doesn't stop, we'll be a proper grown-up medium before
    you know it. Lordy.

    But moving quickly on now, um... puzzles.

    The puzzles are generally very good. There are only a few problems
    which come down to find & use, and even these tend to be unusual
    objects and uses. There are also some excellent, more complex
    problems, which are imaginative and very satisfying to solve. (XYZZY
    News voted the immense gate the best problem of 1996, although I
    preferred the bizarre animals. I had to consult the invisiclues for
    the light source...) These problems (and there are a few) involve
    several stages, and are thankfully well coded, with the possibilities
    arising from each step dealt with intelligently.  There's very seldom
    a single action which the player has to find. More likely, a range of
    choices will be apparent, most of which will end with the player
    feeling rather sheepish, with the actual solution requiring quite some
    thought. Indeed, the range of things the player can do at each stage
    of one of these problems is part of what makes them difficult.

    And this is a difficult title. The puzzles are not re-hashes of things
    we've seen before, and the stranger ones will definitely have you
    scratching your head. The significant freedom the player has can let
    him screw things up completely. There is apparently a walkthrough
    available, although I haven't seen it, and in fact Lucian Smith has
    gone to the effort of producing some online invisiclues, which I had
    to use for the later sections, and would recommend above a
    walkthrough. Screwing up is generally worth doing a few times however,
    just to read what's gone wrong this time.  Black humour, metaphysical
    angst... you'll be on the end of it all.

    On the technical side, coding is robust enough to deal with even the
    complex, multi-stage problems encountered. Basics like spelling and
    grammar are just about perfect, and guess the word problems are almost
    non-existent, although in some weird situations, you may find yourself
    producing weirder suggestions than the parser is expecting.

    In conclusion, I'd recommend So Far to anyone. Some of its new ideas
    won't be to everyone's taste, but they're certainly worth looking
    at. The more traditional parts are imaginative and involving and make
    a cracking game in their own right. Go get it.

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

    It's well known that latter-day IF has moved away from the
    puzzle-centrism that marked earlier games (to the point where many
    authors resist the term "game," though no one has come up with a
    substitute, to my knowledge). Some recent, um, works of IF have shown
    their defiance of puzzles by eschewing them altogether, but many authors
    have managed to both incorporate puzzles into the IF they produce and to
    convey that the puzzles aren't the raison d' etre. Andrew Plotkin's So
    Far was one of the first games to make that break, and it did so in an
    interesting way: there isn't a plot as such, but the game conveys themes
    and impressions in a way that manages to tell a story nonetheless.

    Trouble is, it's not easy to convey to the uninitiated what that story
    is. A relationship that may or may not be broken is at the center of
    it--as the game begins, you appear to have been stood up by Aessa, the
    object of your affections, and everything that follows picks up the
    thread in one way or another. You repeatedly encounter machines and
    devices that don't work properly, usually because of neglect; you
    repeatedly find yourself in situations where verbal communication seems
    to be impossible; you repeatedly navigate through hostile and
    uncomfortable settings. Does all that reflect the relationship in
    question and the problems with it? Presumably, but nothing is ever
    spelled out as such; in a sense, you learn about the relationship that
    drives the game by observing the game and guessing at what pieces are
    supposed to be allegorical or metaphorical, and in what way.

    What's interesting about the thematic elements, though, is that they're
    not just window dressing: at several points, puzzle solutions are
    solutions because they reflect the themes. In other words, there's no
    particular reason that could be expressed through any deductive process
    why something should work, but an attentive player who recognizes the
    parallel should try the correct solution because it seems to fit into
    the story. So described, it sounds fairly crude--"gee, I think I'll have
    everything in my game in threes, and then require the player to knock on
    a door three times"--but it's done much more effectively than that; the
    theme in question isn't just an arbitrary motif. To say that you have to
    think on the game's terms overstates the case a bit; it's more that you
    have to recognize where the game's sending you. Still, it's an unusual
    twist.

    The genre, to the extent there is one, has been called magic realism:
    the settings aren't taken from fantasy as such, but the rules of the
    game's world are surreal in some respects. It's a limited surrealism,
    though: the "magical" aspects are few and limited, and many of the
    reactions you set off, or problems you solve, are firmly rooted in the
    ordinary and explicable. Moreover, for the most part, the game keeps the
    fantastic and mundane elements distinct: with a few exceptions (and
    those exceptions form an obvious pattern) you won't be wandering along
    through a conventional setting and come upon something wild and weird.
    Magic realism, like straight fantasy, can sometimes lead a player to
    suspect laziness--"rather than trying to make sense of all this, I'll
    just call it magic"--but So Far mostly resists that characterization:
    the departures from realism eventually (though not right away) are
    revealed to be part of a larger pattern and follow rules of a sort.

    And the writing--ah, the writing. I'm reminded of a saying to the effect
    that an master or expert is someone who knows when and how to break the
    rules, because the writing in So Far breaks a lot of rules and gets away
    with it every time. The prologue, for example:

       Hot, foul, and dark. How did indoor theater become so fashionable?
       Well enough in spring rain or winter, but not in the thick, dead
       afternoon of high summer. And though Rito and Imita looks very fine,
       shining with electric moonslight in the enclosed gloom, you're much
       more aware of being crammed in neck-by-neck with your sweaty fellow
       citizens.

       Damn the crowd, in truth: your mood was hot, foul, and dark when you
       sat down. Aessa was supposed to meet you here. She's made excuses
       before, and you don't think about what it might mean. Try not to
       think, rather. Just watch the story. One of your favorites. But it's
       miserably hot, and you just aren't caught up in the play...

    A lesser writer would not be able to get away with that "in truth" or
    "well enough," which should sound terribly stilted; a lesser writer
    would not be able to get away with a neologism like "moonslight" in the
    first paragraph; a lesser writer would not be able to get away with
    calling the fellow playgoers "citizens." Here, though, it all works--the
    seemingly stilted language not only anticipates the poetry of the play,
    but doesn't even sound awkward here. ("Damn the crowd, in truth" has a
    certain unlikely ring to it.) Even the shift back to more conventionally
    colloquial language ("you just aren't caught up in the play") fits--the
    earlier mood reflected in the unusual sentence patterns is broken, just
    as the character's concentration breaks. "Moonslight" works because the
    writing has already established that it's ever so slightly
    off-kilter--and because the light in question is "electric," off-kilter
    in its own right. And "citizens" suggests that the theatergoers are
    there under some sort of duty or compulsion, as if the play is something
    to be endured rather than enjoyed.

    Another example:

       Grassy Hilltop
       Not a flat tame greensward, mind you; you are surrounded by wild,
       waist-high, reed-yellow growth that hisses and rattles in the dry
       breeze. The grasses roll to every cloudless horizon. Above you towers
       an immense tree -- the only one visible anywhere in this prairie
       world -- and its shadow slices blackness past your feet. A path of
       flat, trampled grass cuts south down the hill.

    The direct address to the player ("mind you") could be distracting, but
    it's terse enough here (and rare enough elsewhere in the game) that it
    slides by without yanking the player out of the scene. There are also a
    lot of adjectives here--"flat" twice, "tame," "wild," "cloudless,
    "immense," "trampled"--but the active verbs ("hisses and rattles,"
    "roll," "towers," "slices," "cuts") do most of the descriptive work; the
    adjectives are mostly in a supporting role. "Greensward" feels a little
    like a thesaurus word, but since it's impossible to miss the meaning of
    it here (because of the contrast with the "wild, waist-high, reed-yellow
    growth"), the use of the word doesn't feel willfully obscure.

    In the gameplay department, So Far breaks some rules as well. For
    instance, the game begins with a lengthy noninteractive sequence--you
    can look around and examine things, but that's about it--which is hardly
    a surefire hook. (And there's no hint at anything more interesting until
    the noninteractive sequence is over.) Even after the game gets going, it
    takes quite a while for the player to get a handle on where it's
    going--and given the nature of the story, or lack thereof, most players
    are likely to feel directionless for a while. It's rare that you
    encounter IF with no clear goal, and a new author might not be able to
    get away with such a move. Arguably, though, that aimlessness is
    unavoidable, given what the game is trying to do; the alternative is to
    give the player an ostensible plot that gives way to the introspection
    that happens here, but there are problems with that as well.

    There are also various unfairnesses--plenty of learning by screwing up,
    and in one respect it's easy to send the game into an unwinnable state
    simply by progressing too far in a certain direction without progressing
    enough in another. (On the other hand, the point-of-no-return moment is
    about as obvious as such a moment can be, and it's also fairly obvious
    that more lies down the other path.) The game bills itself as "cruel,"
    and while it isn't as cruel as Change in the Weather, it's far from
    forgiving-it's easy to waste essential resources, and at one point it
    takes only a few moves of waiting to game the game unwinnable.

    So Far is not a particularly long game, and the overall puzzle-count is
    relatively low, but the world you're exploring feels larger than it is.
    Part of the way the game achieves this effect is by scattering locked
    doors and inaccessible (for one reason or another) exits through the
    game, which constantly reinforces the sense that you haven't seen
    everything of interest in the game's world. It's been said that the
    effect is also to remind you that you're not the center of attention --
    the game's universe doesn't revolve around you -- and that effect is
    particularly well achieved in one setting with a wide variety of
    characters who can't be bothered to acknowledge your presence (unless
    you break the rules somehow). Red herrings have always been with us, but
    obstacles that aren't meant to be overcome are an unusual breed of red
    herring; Infocom's Planetfall is the only game I can think of that used
    unsolvable puzzles to set the scene in a similar way. It should also be
    said, though, that puzzles that aren't meant to be solved at all and
    puzzles that can only be solved by figuring out the logic of the game's
    world make for a highly difficult game, and most players will probably
    end up using hints at some point.

    It's obvious enough to be hardly worth saying that when Andrew Plotkin's
    So Far was released, in 1996, it was unlike any IF that had preceded it.
    Part of what made it unique (then) was the emotional content--the
    emotional impact of the game is, in many ways, the point. (For the PC,
    anyway, and arguably for you too.) The prevailing theme of the game is
    tension and separation: if you don't choose to feel that tension, you're
    unlikely to find the game involving. It wasn't unknown then (though it
    was far from common) to impute some sort of emotions to the PC, but
    generally those emotions weren't particularly complex--now and again the
    PC might be afraid of something, say--and usually things would be nicely
    spelled out. Here, by and large, you figure out what the PC feels by
    analogizing from the impact on you, the player. (The game also tracks
    your mental state to some extent--the status line, while not recording
    your emotional temperature as such, does note your general impression of
    each setting. Examples are "hot, sticky," "mild spring, quiet," and
    "cramped, crawling.") That reading points to the significance of the
    PC's emotional state.)

    It might be argued that that's true for every game that has any kind of
    emotional content, and it simply doesn't matter what the PC feels--but
    here, I think, it does matter. You're given a choice at the end of the
    game, with two very different endings depending on which choice you
    make--and the choice that most consider "better" (though there's debate
    about that too) reflects a certain understanding of the emotional
    significance of the terrain you've traversed. That is, to the extent
    that the game can be understood as an introspective journey, the
    "better" resolution of that journey reflects a specific emotional
    reaction to the self-understanding you've achieved. Other games since
    So Far have given emotions their place in various ways--Sunset Over
    Savannah, for one, reproduced So Far's status line but made it describe
    the PC's mental state more precisely than So Far does (and had the
    status line reflect events that are likely to affect the PC's thoughts).
    Other games have aimed at affecting the player's emotional state rather
    than the PC's; Photopia and Exhibition come to mind. But it's the
    subtlety of the emotional effects that So Far conveys that make it
    notable: the feelings at issue are unfulfilled yearnings here, a sense
    of alienation there, a sensation of conflict between duty and sympathy
    at another point, and there are no full-orchestra emotional turning
    points. In this respect, as in others, it's a game that rewards careful
    reading.

    It's difficult, in the end, to explain what it is that makes So Far so
    memorable. The settings are vivid, but not spectacularly so, and the
    strongest theme in the descriptions is decay and abandonment--compelling
    on an emotional level but not necessarily captivating as IF. A few of
    the puzzles are memorable, but there aren't enough puzzles here to make
    the game work on that basis alone. My own sense of why I found the game
    fascinating was that it demanded attention and analysis; indeed, without
    analysis, it's not even vaguely memorable, because very little of what's
    most interesting about So Far is there on the surface. More than any
    other IF I can think of--Losing Your Grip is the only game that comes
    close--So Far is best appreciated through poring over the transcript and
    drawing connections between events that aren't necessarily juxtaposed in
    space or time. (An example: dawn is a recurring theme throughout the
    game. There are several references to "dawn-tales," and at a key point
    you're told that "dawn is distant yet." As it happens, the woman you're
    seeking is named Aessa, and the Latin for "dawn" is "aes.") (Another
    example: a certain substance links two disparate scenes by protecting a
    road from erosion in one setting and sustaining a trapped character in
    another.) There's been plenty of IF that's been thought-provoking, but
    very little that calls for textual analysis.

    Is that good, or bad? Shouldn't IF be capable of appreciation without
    transcript dissection? I dunno; I certainly wouldn't say that So Far is
    to everyone's tastes, and I do enjoy IF where the relevant happenings
    are closer to the surface. But much of the best contemporary fiction
    works in a way that's closer to the way So Far works, and it's exciting
    to see a work of IF that aspires in that direction. That the product is
    less than ideal as a game, in the final analysis, seems almost beside
    the point.

    Inform File (.z8)

    Stepwise walkthrough (Text)

    Alternate stepwise walkthrough (Text)

    THL format hints (.zip)

    UHS format hints (.uhs)

    Solitary
    From: Emily Short <emshort SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #37 -- July 10, 2004

    TITLE: Solitary
    AUTHOR: Kahlan
    EMAIL: kahlan SP@G kahlan.org
    DATE: April 18, 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Code Interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/solitary.z5
    VERSION: Version 1

    "Solitary" is a short, puzzleless game set in the player-character's
    dorm room. The basic point of this piece, as with a number of other
    plot-driven/puzzleless games I can think of ("Photograph", "Shade", and
    even to some extent "Photopia") is to put together the background that
    led to the current situation.

    As far as I can tell, this is the author's first game, and it shows in
    certain ways. There are some odd glitches in the world model: as, for
    instance, when you put on a piece of clothing, but can't afterwards
    remove it, and are told that you're not wearing it. Apparently the
    author circumvented the normal operation of "wear". Similarly, some
    default responses have been replaced with answers that don't really make
    sense in all contexts. For instance:

       >DIE
       You jump on the spot, fruitlessly.

       >KILL ME
       You can't snap that in two.

    For the most part, though, the implementation is fine: there aren't a
    lot of glaring omissions, or scenery that seems important that you can't
    examine. Moreover, I had the sense that the author cared about the game
    and about doing a good job -- and that's always a good sign.

    Most of the problems I had with "Solitary" had to do with storytelling
    technique rather than with implementation. One major challenge of
    writing a learn-backstory-through-exploration game is to keep the player
    from discovering information out of order -- especially when, as here,
    everything is in a single room and almost every object is accessible
    more or less at the same time. In this case, there are all sorts of
    items in the room that *should* let you discover a critical background
    fact, but the player character refuses to acknowledge them until you hit
    on exactly the right trigger. It's annoying and manipulative (in my
    opinion) to prevent the player from reading some useful document with a
    line like "You can't bear to read that.". I certainly *can* bear to read
    it, and telling me otherwise does not heighten my feeling of
    identification with the player character.

    What's more, finding out what has happened is the only goal I-the-player
    have in the game. There are no other goals provided. The only way for me
    to move forward is to investigate things, so it is irritating to come
    across what seems like a juicy piece of evidence only to have the game
    refuse to let me look at/read/think about it.

    Even so, by the time the Horrible Truth was revealed, I had pretty much
    already guessed it. Foreshadowing is a useful technique, but only if it
    doesn't completely give away what's coming. Best of all if it leads you
    to expect something close to the truth, but wrong, so that the real
    revelation still takes you by surprise even though you thought you were
    prepared.

    The handling of PC emotion also needs some work. At a number of points
    in the game, I'm handed emotions that I have no reason to feel. Being
    told that I'm weeping intensely is weird when I-the-player have so
    little cause to do so. In that respect, this would work (a little)
    better as a story in the first or third person, I suppose -- but I think
    it would still seem a bit maudlin and self-indulgent.

    My other fundamental problem with "Solitary" is that the background
    story is not very interesting. I'm sure the events would be horrible to
    live through. But there aren't enough particulars here to make me feel
    much of anything about the protagonist or about any of the implicit
    NPCs. The player is told that the PC is hurting, that things are bad,
    that her love used to be strong, etc., but so what? I need more than
    that before I can generate much empathy. Instead of the vaguely-worded
    memories, I need specific flashbacks that make me actually feel
    something about the PC and the people she interacts with. I need more
    examples of what was so great about her relationship with her love. I
    need to feel as though they're people I know and would actually care
    about, rather than place-holders. This is not easy, but without it, a
    story like this falls flat.

    Finally, the last line of the game reads as funny in a way that
    undercuts what good effects the game has achieved elsewhere.

    I should mention a few positives, though. "Solitary" is set in a dorm
    room, which is something of a cliché, but I've certainly seen duller
    dorm-room implementations. The items here did help to paint an image of
    the player character. (She came off as somewhat immature, but I suppose
    that's not out of place.) Some of the descriptions showed a nice
    attention to senses other than sight: tangibles such as how well a
    drawer slides open, for instance. This is a good sign.

    "Solitary" also comes with a hint system, which got me through a few
    points where I was stuck. That was useful as well. It's not a long game
    to play, but there are a few moments where you may need guidance. I
    would have liked this system even better if it had adapted itself to
    what I'd already tried and suggested only new directions, but it worked
    well enough as it was.

    I'd encourage the author to write more IF, but also to look into
    improving traditional story-telling techniques, particularly
    characterization and plot structure. There's promise in the care that
    went into "Solitary", but it would be better put in service of a richer
    story and more accomplished writing.

    Zcode .z5 file

    Author's notes

    Son of a...
    From: DJ Hastings <djhastings SP@G centurytel.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #46 -- October 17, 2006

    TITLE: Son of a...
    AUTHOR: C.S. Woodrow
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/soa/SOA.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    SOA is a puzzle game without much plot to speak of. You're stranded on a
    deserted highway and have to find a way to get back to civilization. All of the
    puzzles are well integrated with the story; none of them felt artificial to me.
    The solutions, too, were for the most part things that I might reasonably try
    in the same situation. None of the puzzles made me say "cool!" when I solved
    them, but none of them seemed tedious or boring either.

    I mentioned that the solutions to the puzzles were things I might reasonably
    try, and that leads me to the game's main problem: I *did* think up the correct
    answer to all but one of the puzzles on my own, but I often couldn't manage to
    get the game to understand what I meant. In some cases the game failed to
    understand reasonable phrasings of a command (and the phrase it *did*
    understand didn't quite make sense). In others, the game recognized the
    alternate phrasings that I tried but gave a generic failure message, with no
    indication that the correct action was slightly different, leading me to
    believe that my solution was wrong. I ended up going to the walkthrough on
    about half of the puzzles only to find that I had already tried the correct
    solution, but with the wrong words.

    The writing is clear and very funny in several places, although there were
    quite a few grammar errors sprinkled throughout. The game would also be fairly
    easy without the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph. I'm generally not
    good at solving puzzles, but I thought up the answers to nearly all the puzzles
    on my own. If the author releases an updated version with some of the problems
    fixed, it could make an excellent game to help introduce new players to IF.

    On the whole, SOA just needs a few good rounds of testing to become a solid
    little game.

    Zcode .z5 file

    Plain text solution

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

    NAME: Sorcerer
    AUTHOR: Steve Meretzky
    E-MAIL: Good question
    DATE: 1984
    PARSER: Infocom standard
    SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    AVAILABILITY: Commerical
    URL: N/A
    VERSION: Release 15

    RATING:
    ATMOSPHERE: A bit inconsistent (1.2)    GAMEPLAY: Very strong (1.7)
    WRITING: At times too jokey (1.5)       PLOT: Save-the-world (1.3)
    CHARACTERS: Few, not central (1.1)      PUZZLES: Good, two excellent (1.8)
    MISC: Style doesn't work as well as it might, but entertaining and
    satisfying, with lots of very funny Easter eggs (1.3)
    OVERALL: 7.0

    Sorcerer, the second entry in the Enchanter trilogy, begins
    arrestingly enough...

        You are in a strange logation, but you cannot remember how you got
        here.  Everything is hazy, as though viewed through a gauze...

        Twisted Forest

        You are on a path through a blighted forest. The trees are sickly,
        and there is no undergrowth at all. . One tree here looks
        climbable. The path, which ends here, continues to the northeast.

        A hellhound is racing straight toward you, its open jaws
        displaying rows of razor-sharp teeth.

    That may be the best hook of any of Infocom's games--no desultory
    "west of a white house" here. Escaping from the hellhound leads to a
    attack of locusts, a crumbling riverbank, a pit of snakes, a rotted
    drawbridge...the danger comes thick and fast. Unfortunately, it soon
    turns out that the landscape in question is a dream--a dream that
    exactly predicts the middle of the game, true, but still just a dream
    and unrelated to one's performance in the game. I spent quite a while
    trying to figure out what exactly I was supposed to be doing in that
    dream, and only grudgingly concluded that it was a long, elaborate red
    herring.

    Steve Meretzky is among Sorcerer's authors, and his influence is
    clear: his earlier Planetfall was crammed with red herrings, and the
    jokey approach to NPCs (distinctly different from the other two
    entries in the series) also echoes the earlier game. The role of red
    herrings in a game is a matter of taste--though this reviewer doesn't
    care for it, he can't unequivocally declare that a large percentage of
    irrelevant objects and locations makes for a bad game. He can,
    however, warn the potential Sorcerer player to set aside the "anything
    this complex must be useful somehow" assumption and not to spend too
    long on any given problem or object, since chances are good that
    Meretzky is up to his old tricks.  (Lord knows, I spent hours in some
    of those areas that proved irrelevant, trying to figure out why they
    were in the game.)

    Also notable in Sorcerer is the introduction of magic potions, absent
    in Enchanter and Spellbreaker--though, typically, only some of the
    potions that you find are relevant. Some of the potions have effects
    that are limited in duration, and one is permanent (it still seems to
    be in effect in Spellbreaker, in fact)...and Meretzky's goofball side
    is evident in the responses when you drink one potion while the
    effects of another are still ongoing--e.g., "Uh oh. Your left ear
    turned into a poisonous toad and ate your brain." Still, even if not
    especially innovative, the addition of magic potions give the magic
    another dimension.

    Meretzky's forte as a writer is humor, and Sorcerer's genre is
    wizardry/fantasy, not humor--and though the writing is far from
    disappointing, the atmosphere hardly approaches that of Dave Lebling's
    or Brian Moriarty's games. Too often, Meretzky is content to tell
    rather than show the player what to think--for example, in reading
    Belboz's journal at the beginning of the game:

    "The last three entries are strange and frightening, written in a hand
    quite different from that of Belboz, and in a language totally
    unfamiliar to you."

    Yes, fine, we can understand what has happened--but how more
    skillfully might the sense of unease have been heightened by dropping
    the "unfamiliar" part and actually reading bits from the journal, bits
    that imply something sinister! Compare the discovery of the
    alterations to your paper at the beginning of Lurking Horror; Lebling
    gives us all sorts of suggestive little tidbits ("there is something
    about a 'summoning,' or a 'visitor'...") in order to let our
    imagination roam. On the whole, there is little mood to Sorcerer; the
    dangers are so often vaguely ludicrous that it is hard to generate
    much in the way of tension. (Killer vines? A slot machine that crushes
    you with coins?) There are many, many locations like this:

        Highway

        This is a wide road winding away to the east and west, perhaps a
        relic of the Great Underground Empire you read about in history
        class. A passage leads up to the north.

    This could be in any game; the "history class" reference is typical of
    Meretzky in the way it shatters the description. That approach works
    brilliantly in Leather Goddesses and in other humorous games, but
    Sorcerer is not as free for humor in that respect, and contrasted with
    the skillful atmosphere in the rest of the series, the writing in
    Sorcerer feels a bit flat. (The lack of atmosphere is illustrated by
    the inclusion of the amusement park--how strange and inappropriate
    would that have felt in Enchanter or Spellbreaker?) Though the
    abandoned equipment and empty rooms in Planetfall became wearying,
    they did create a world of sorts; the world of Sorcerer feels
    thoroughly incoherent.

    All that said, though, there is much in Sorcerer to enjoy, including
    two of the better puzzles in the Infocom library. I enjoyed the glass
    maze immensely, even if it required considerable trial and error (and
    I never thought to take the easier solution); the idea felt so
    innovative that I was willing to put up with the aggravation. And the
    coal mine/time paradox puzzle is justly famous, and well worth the
    effort required to reach it; though I've knocked Meretzky's writing, I
    must admit that the tension I felt when trying to get through the mine
    in time was considerable. I don't particularly approve of the
    inclusion of the maze in the coal mine--it felt like an artificial way
    to make the puzzle more difficult--but the nature of the puzzle itself
    was so absorbing that I could forgive that.  (And there's something
    vastly entertaining about being told "You cease to exist!...If you had
    continued to exist, your score would have been..."  when you violate
    the confines of the loop.) As a mind-bender, the coal mine puzzle is
    one of the best--consider sometime where the knowledge of the
    combination originated--and the feel of ultimately getting through is
    indeed rewarding. (I always felt like the character's need for sleep
    once that puzzle is completed is intended to mirror one's own relief
    at being out of danger at last.) Minor annoyances--the maze,
    Meretzky's insistence on "Wheeeee!" in the coal chute--aside, this
    puzzle is clearly the highlight of the game (it makes the final few
    puzzles--fairly "duh"-worthy puzzles--feel wildly anticlimactic,
    though). Sorcerer is not especially hard--it was rated "advanced"
    under the rating system at the time, but there are few if any
    genuinely difficult puzzles (though figuring out what to solve takes a
    good deal of energy, of course).

    For fans of Enchanter, Sorcerer is worth playing; it continues the
    inventive use of magic to solve puzzles, and there is a genuine sense
    of accomplishment at the end. Though, particularly in the writing, it
    doesn't quite equal the standard set by Enchanter, it is well worth
    the time of any fantasy-game enthusiast.

    Solution (Text)

    The Sound of One Hand Clapping
    From: Magnus Olsson <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

    NAME: The Sound of One Hand Clapping    PARSER: Advsys (not quite sufficient)
    AUTHOR: Erica Sadun                     PLOT: Many linear sub-plots
    EMAIL: erica SP@G cc.gatech.edu              AVAILABILITY: IF Archive, S10
    PUZZLES: Simple                         WRITING: Beautiful, poetic
    ATMOSPHERE: Beautiful                   DIFFICULTY: Quite easy
    SUPPORTS: DOS (portable source for Advsys run-time included)
    CHARACTERS: Non-interactive but interesting

    It's a sad fact that the world of interactive fiction seems to be an
    almost exclusively male one; although many women enjoy IF, there are
    very few female IF authors. In fact, the present game is probably the
    only one by a female author that I've played. Had this been the only
    unusual thing about this game, it would have been noteworthy as a
    curiosity, perhaps; fortunately, it has other qualities that make it
    a very unusual experience.

    To start with, the setting and general idea of the game are quite
    different from the logical, puzzle-oriented world of most adventure
    games, which tend to have a rather mechanistic view of the world
    (pardoxically, this seems to be especially true of magic-based games;
    indeed, the magic systems of games like Enchanter are more logical
    and mechanistic than most scientific gadgetry in SF games). As one
    might infer from the full title of the game, "The Sound of One Hand
    Clapping - a Riddle in Subtlety", the focus of the game is different,
    emphasizing emotion, empathy and analogy, rather than deduction. This
    is not to say that the puzzles aren't logical (they are - see below),
    just that the emphasis is on a different kind of thinking; for
    example, several puzzles can only be solved through meditation (in the
    game, that is - you don't have to be a Zen master in real life to solve
    them).

    What makes this game truly outstanding, however, is the atmosphere and
    the quality of the writing. I can't put it in any other way than
    saying that this is by far the most beautiful piece of IF I've ever
    come across. My experience is that most good IF reads like either
    "hard-boiled" novels, gothic horror stories or slightly absurdist
    comedy - all of these pretty "male" genres (if I'm allowed to continue
    flogging the rather moribound horse of gender differences in writing).
    "One Hand Clapping," on the other hand, at its best reads like a prose
    poem: the imagery vivid, the prose gently flowing.

    This kind of writing makes very high demands on the author, and she is
    in general up to the challenge. There are, as might be expected of an
    amateur author, some beauty spots. Occasionally, the rhythm of the
    prose falters (rhythm being especially important in this kind of
    poetic writing), turning it into a drab march of short descriptive
    sentences, which renders the imagery peculiarly ineffective;
    occasionaly, the metaphors seem a bit overdone, dangerously close to
    empty rhetoric; but these are mere blemishes that hardly detract from
    the overall impression. More serious is, perhaps, a certain tendency
    to bathos; for example, the long build-up towards the encounter with
    Crystal Dragon results not in the expected profundity, but in a
    rather trivial conversation, and the final confrontation with Black
    Dragon (the villain of the piece) culminates in a disappointingly
    trite plot device. Still, I'm willing to forgive these shortcomings of
    the writing; the game is a pearl, albeit flawed, and flawless pearls
    are few and far between.

    As for the atmosphere, it is as beautiful as the writing: in typical
    fairy-tale fashion, you are transported to the World Beyond to find
    six dragons and obtain six keys in order to confront Black Dragon, and
    restore balance to this world as well as the one Beyond.  The fairy
    tale atmosphere is not the usual, Western, one, but Chinese, or rather
    generally "Oriental" -- in the author's own words, it's not
    realistically Chinese, but "Chinoiserie", the reflection of the
    Oriental world in the mirror of Western folklore and prejudice, and
    some aspects of the game, such as the Zen allusion of the title and a
    puzzle involving a bonsai tree, are decidedly Japanese rather than
    Chinese. The dragons are not the fire-breathing monsters of Western
    folklore that you generally find in adventure games, but Chinese
    dragons: supernatural beings of great subtlety, not to be confronted
    by violence but to be won over by empathy, provoked into action, or
    perhaps simply outsmarted. The World Beyond is as perfect as a Chinese
    painting; serene, meditative, with just enough detail for your imagination
    to fill in the rest.

    So much for writing and atmosphere. Had these been the only aspects of
    the game, it would have been close to a masterpiece. However, the
    game-play aspects are, unfortunately, on a totally different level of
    perfection.

    The puzzles are not bad. Most of them are quite simple, but I don't
    mind simple puzzles; in fact, having too difficult puzzles in a game
    like this would perhaps only distract the player from the beauty of the
    World Beyond. A few of the puzzles are quite subtle, one perhaps
    overly so, since it hinges on the player's interpreting a clue quite
    literally. Without being too explicit, let me say that at one point,
    when obeying certain instructions, you should carry them out to the
    letter, without thinking or rephrasing them into the verb you'd
    normally use. You could claim that this is an example of the different
    way of thinking needed to solve these puzzles; to me, however, it is
    dangerously close to "guess the verb".

    Despite what I've written above, many of the puzzles are not very
    unusual or even imaginative, but just standard fantasy game puzzles.
    On the other hand, they are not trivial, and a few of them offer new
    twists on old ideas. Perhaps there are a few too many puzzles of the
    type "find hidden object X, give it to dragon Y" with nothing more to
    it; this, however, may be a plus for the inexperienced player.
    Meditation plays an important role, as several of the puzzles can only
    be solved through insights gained that way; the player is advised to
    meditate frequently, since only a fraction of meditations lead to
    enlightenment (there is a random factor involved).

    A plus regarding the puzzles is that the plot is multi-linear; if
    you're stuck on, say, how to extract a coin from a bonsai tree, you
    could always try to climb a glass mountain or explore a mysterious
    cave instead. The map branches out with six-fold symmetry from the
    central point, Rainbow Fountain; similarly, the Fountain is the
    central point of the sub-plots, which with six-fold symmetry branch
    out from it.

    The NPCs, most notably the dragons, are unfortunately not very
    interactive; they don't care very much about human affairs and generally
    only pay you any attention when you perform the right action to
    rouse their interest - and you can generally only do this once. This,
    however, is the nature of dragons, so maybe one shouldn't complain.
    Like in most IF, you feel distinctly alone; the dragons aren't very
    sociable. Your most memorable companion is a "fire iguana", a curious
    lizard with a tendency for quasi-profound Taoist utterances. Though
    the iguana doesn't make a very good conversationalist, he's really
    quite charming. There are also some more NPCs that aren't very interactive.

    The area where I feel I must be the most critical of the game is its
    interactivity and general playability. To begin with, the parser isn't
    very good and has some annoying quirks (the game was written with
    Advsys, to which I'd like to return in another article);
    fortunately, no sophisticated commands are needed, but there's still
    an element of "hunt-the-right-word", especially since the game's
    vocabulary is pretty limited. However, you can live with a bad parser.
    What's worse in my opinion is that you can't do very much. Most
    objects are in the game for one specific purpose only; you can't do
    anything with it until you find out that purpose, and then it's rather
    evident.

    It may seem that interactivity is not very important; after all, we
    can never hope for an accurate simulation of reality in a text
    adventure, and, unlike the "simulationist" school of IF theorists, I
    don't think authors should even aim for such realism. However, if the
    game introduces a highly complex and usable object, like (to use a
    real example from the game) a box of rubber bands, the player will
    want to play around with it, or at least get some sensible message
    when trying to do so; in this game, the player has far too little
    freedom to interact with the simulated world; there are far too many
    possible actions that are just not possible to perform, and there are
    far too many interesting objects described in the text that either
    aren't recognized by the parser or produce a message about "that's
    just scenery". At least to me, this produces a feeling of being led by
    the hand through a beautiful diorama with a few useful artifacts
    strewn about; your hands itch with eagerness to touch and manipulate
    things, but you are constantly reminded that you're not supposed to do
    that, just to watch and admire.

    By contrast, the really great games of IF (such as Infocom's best) may
    have a less perfect atmosphere, and far coarser writing, but they
    actually let you experience their world, not just observe it. _This_
    is the great potential of IF, as opposed to books, plays or films: not
    only do you experience the world "as if you were there", but you can
    actually interact with it. Alas, "One Hand Clapping" to a large extent
    misses exploiting that potential.

    Had this game had a better parser and a larger vocabulary, and had the
    author put more effort into the interactive aspects, this would have
    been a great work of IF. Had she polished her prose just a little more
    (avoiding, for example, the occasional anticlimax), and added perhaps
    just a little bit more dramatic tension (let's face it, the plot is
    rather thin). While I don't hesitate to give this game near-perfect
    marks for writing and atmosphere, I must unfortunately rank it as
    less-than-average on gameplay, and the plot is only of average
    quality. Still, with my wildcard points for overall impression, this
    adds up to an impressive (for a shareware game) 7.5.

    And: despite all my criticism, let's not forget that "One Hand
    Clapping" is an unforgettable experience. Play it, if only for the
    writing; immerse yourself in the atmosphere, let the gently flowing
    prose entice you away from the usually cold and logical world of
    computers, enjoy for a while the subtle simplicity of this world of
    imagination:

         The peace of summer,
    Fish gliding through still waters,
          Subtle as dragons.

    PC Executable runtime & AdvSys files (.zip)

    AdvSys files & source code of Unix interpreter(.zip)

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

      NAME:  South American Trek         GAMEPLAY:  No synonyms
      AUTHOR:  Conrad Button             PLOT:  Unintentionally funny
      EMAIL:  ?                          ATMOSPHERE:  Almost none
      AVAILABILITY:  MS-DOS              WRITING:  Passable
      PUZZLES:  Uninteresting            SUPPORTS:  MS-DOS
      CHARACTERS:  Unimportant           DIFFICULTY:  Easy

         South American Trek by Conrad Button is an educational text
    adventure designed to teach children about South American geography.
    The plot is a bizarre cross between a wasteful Federal pork program,
    and a college fraternity initiation.
         You are sent by the President to spy on South America.  But rather
    than seeking to learn about troop strengths or drug lord activity, your
    mission is to learn things like Venezuela's leading export, and the
    capital of Peru (a quick look in the atlas could have saved millions of
    taxpayer dollars).
         You start on Devil's Island and must travel to South America by
    raft (here's where the fraternity-like stuff comes in).  Once there,
    you wander around learning about the various countries and solving
    puzzles to try to acquire the item you need to signal the submarine
    waiting for you at Cape Horn.  Once you've reached the sub, the captain
    will ask you six trivia questions about South America.  If you get a
    question wrong, back you go.  You have a maximum of three opportunities
    to get all six questions right.
         The map scale varies tremendously.  Some areas are no bigger than a
    temple or a mine shaft, others are the size of a city, or even an
    entire region.
         But since South American Trek, or S.A.T. (appropriate acronym) is
    an educational game, we should not be asking whether its plot is
    plausible, but rather, whether or not it fulfills its goal of educating
    while making learning fun.  Unfortunately, the answer is that it most
    certainly does not.  The programming may have been good by 1986's
    shareware standards, but now or then, the game is worse than a month of
    detention.
         Like all Buttonware text games, the 2-word parser is rock bottom.
    There are absolutely no synonyms for anything.  If you try to refer to
    the "rowboat" as a "boat", the game will not know what you are talking
    about.  To make it even more confusing, some items are known only by
    their adjective.  If you see "copper ore," you must type "take copper".
    "Take ore"  will not work.
         In addition, the map is especially confusing.  Generally speaking,
    there are two ways that text game authors can make their map
    challenging.  The first way is to change directions in transit.  For
    example, suppose that you leave a room by going south, but must go west
    rather than north to return.
         The second way is by varying the transit length.  For example, look
    at the following map:
                                E D C
                                A   B

         As you can see, the distance between A and B is longer than the
    distance between E and D.  As a result, if you go from A to B first,
    you will probably draw a short line, and only after you have then gone
    to C, D, E, and A will you discover that the first line wasn't long
    enough and have to redraw the whole thing.
         Using this motif once or twice may make a game a little more
    challenging, but South American Trek uses it extensively.  Not only is
    the technique totally unsuitable for the beginning audience that the
    game is aimed at, but it is used to such excess that even the advanced
    gamer will be annoyed more than challenged.  The beginner will never
    want to play another text adventure again.
         The information about South America is presented in the "room"
    descriptions, and in one or two speeches made by Miss Diddlemeyer, an
    American teacher you may pick up along the way, but who is not
    necessary to win the game.  The presentation is hardly more interesting
    than just reading it out of a book, since the game doesn't really make
    you apply the information anywhere, except in the trivia quiz that the
    submarine captain gives you at the end.  The rather dry information
    about major exports, highest mountains, and longest rivers, does
    nothing to bring the area alive, since it is primarily a sidebar to the
    game rather than being integrated into it.
         There are one or two laudable points.  The game's contrived and
    unintentionally humourous plot may give the game a small amount of cult
    value, and the idea of mixing education with play value is a good one,
    despite the poor execution seen here.
         Unfortunately the kids will be too busy trying to redraw their maps
    and play "guess-the-word" to have time to learn anything, much less
    have any fun.  Gaming parents would be much better advised to try
    Carmen Sandiego.

    PC Executable (.zip)

    Space Aliens Laughed at My Cardigan
    From: Molley the Mage <mollems SP@G WKUVX1.WKU.EDU>
    Review appeared in SPAG #3 -- October 26, 1994

    NAME: Space Aliens Laughed At My Cardigan  PARSER: AGT
    AUTHOR: Andre M. Boyle                     PLOT: Minimal
    EMAIL: ???                                 ATMOSPHERE: Demented
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive                          WRITING: Strange
    PUZZLES: Weak                              SUPPORTS: IBM
    CHARACTERS: Not Much                       DIFFICULTY: Incomprehensible

            "Space Aliens Laughed At My Cardigan"  has perhaps the best title of
    any game I've yet seen on the Interactive Fiction Archive.  This alone
    prompted me to download it and give it a play.  I had a moment of fear when I
    discovered that it was written with AGT; I am able to report, however, that
    the game would have been just as bad in TADS, Inform, or any other language
    as far as I can tell. The introduction is promising -- you're sitting in the
    garden when an alien ship lands nearby and two blue beings begin making fun
    of your cardigan.  They then proceed to vaporize it with a ray gun.  You're
    quite dismayed, since your mother gave you that cardigan, and you fear
    physical reprisals if she discovers that it's gone.  Getting a new
    cardigan, therefore, becomes the goal of the game.  Sadly, the game was
    almost totally unplayable, and I was unable to determine if Our Hero
    actually succeeds.  All I can really say about the game is that it had a
    glimmer of potential, but that quickly vanishes under a torrent of
    typographical errors, bad attempts at humor, and bugs.  There are 10,000
    possible points in the game; just by walking around and picking things up, I
    somehow achieved 257 of them without attempting to solve a single puzzle.
            The puzzles themselves are nonsensical; sometimes typing HELP will
    get you a hint, other times not.  The atmosphere of the game is badly
    fragmented; items and locations are thrown together without the slightest
    rhyme or reason.  The parser is unresponsive at best and damnably frustrating
    most other times. There are a few funny bits of text -- the chess grandmaster
    in particular is rather humorous -- but most of the attempts fall on their
    face.  I usually prefer Irish/British humor to American humor, so I can
    safely say that cultural differences do not play a role in my failure to
    find the game funny (although people with no experience whatsoever in
    British humor might not even understand why the jokes are *supposed* to be
    funny). The most interesting thing about this game is that while
    registration is not expected by the author, if you do register (for $60.00
    or 30 pounds) the author offers to write an entirely new game to your
    specifications and place you as a character in one or more of his later
    games.  I am mildly curious to know if anyone has taken advantage of this
    offer, although I must say after playing Space Aliens Laughed At My
    Cardigan, I can't see any reason why a sane person would.

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

    Initially, it was the title that drew my attention to this game.  I
    didn't download it, however, until I saw the review by Sean Molley
    (a.k.a. Molley the Mage) in SPAG3 - I wanted to see for myself if it
    really was possible to have a game as bad as his review indicated.
    What I found exceeded my wildest expectations.

    This game is not just bad, but unspeakably so, and it's uniformly bad;
    the writing, the puzzles, the atmosphere, the plot, the NPCs, the
    room descriptions, the attempts at humour are all miserable. If there
    was an award for the world's worst adventure game, this game would be
    an obvious candidate.  In addition, this game must be the most
    bug-infested piece of software it's ever been my misfortune to try; it
    actually seems as if the author hasn't even tried playing his own game
    once, or he would have found the bugs immediately.

    You may wonder why I bother to write this review if I'm only going to
    tell how bad it is, which Sean did an excellent job of saying in his
    review. Well, I think Sean missed an important feature of this game:
    its cult value.

    In fact, every aspect of this game makes for a truly unique
    experience: the total lack of logic, the weird malapropisms triggered
    by some player actions, the utterly bewildering atmosphere, the
    author's inexplicable hatred for policemen (try examining the
    "policeman standing here like a total and utter prune" sometime), the
    demented dialogue produced by your interaction with some NPCs, the
    attempts at humour (including some utter failures at imitating Douglas
    Adams), just to name a few examples.  A great source of unconscious
    humour is the author's weird, fractured English (it's hard to believe that
    he actually lives in the U.K.), that switches freely between
    tenses, persons, even gender (human NPCs are referred to as "it") and
    spellings.

    Playing (or trying to play) this game is sure to create a lasting
    impression. It is not to be recommended for the weak of heart or those
    incapable of appreciating the beauty of absurdity, but if you'd like
    to experience Infocom on acid, as it were, you should by all means try
    it out.

    AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)

    AGT source code (.zip)

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

    NAME: Space Under the Window
    AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
    E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER: Inform, thoroughly hacked
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/sutwin.z5
    VERSION: 2

    Not sure if it's reviewable, but I'll try. Andrew Plotkin's Space
    Under the Window is a work of "experimental" interactive fiction, as
    part of a project that produced a variety of creative works under that
    title -- and it's hard to imagine how the others could have pushed the
    boundaries as much as this one does. The point of Space... is to let
    the player interact with the environment without conventional IF
    commands -- and what, exactly, is the player doing? It's hard to say,
    but it's certainly worth trying.

    The mechanics are simple: given a block of text, ranging from a
    sentence to several paragraphs, you type a word appearing somewhere
    within the text, which may or may not affect the narrative. If it
    does, the screen clears and you are given a new block of text --
    sometimes changed only by a word or two, sometimes with a new
    paragraph, sometimes entirely different, and you start once again
    trying words. The effect is not quite EXAMINE [object], as the
    following shows:

              The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
              set for two.

              >two

              The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
              set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you were
              expected.

    No one would type "examine two", but the change manages to elaborate
    on the concept, somehow, and suggest that you have learned more about
    the idea. The closest analogue in real life might be a storyteller
    whom you are invited to interrupt constantly to explain something more
    fully, though the storyteller apparently declines sometimes to
    elucidate whatever it is. (Sometimes, a word that led to development
    may not later, even if that word is still on the screen.) The progress
    is thoroughly nonlinear -- most words, if typed a second time, will
    reverse the effect of the first input, though that isn't always
    true. As a result, there is minimal need to restart even if you've
    sent the narrative somewhere you'd rather not, since you can undo the
    effects of any command (either with a well-placed word or "undo"), and
    a few commands can send the story back to the beginning.

    This could be mechanical and fairly dull without some imagination --
    it could become conventional IF with only EXAMINE available -- but
    Plotkin is up to the task. Many words yield unexpected results, and
    trying to manipulate the story to do something in particular is almost
    invariably a failure -- it is more accurate to say that you discover
    the story as you go along. In that sense, this is closer to
    conventional fiction than traditional interactive fiction, since you
    only affect what particular story you see -- you are not, really,
    writing the story yourself. The levels on which you change the story,
    though, are several; there is a wide variety of input by which you can
    affect what you "see". One of the more intriguing involves light, and
    its effect -- this is one transition:

               The window is open, so you climb down into dimness. The
               table is set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you
               were expected. The cold shadow lifts a little. Yes. An
               empty vase, white glass, stands beside a single lit
               candle. A smile touches you; it feels like the first one in
               some time.

               You are arranging your flowers when the door opens.

               >dimness

               The window is open, so you climb down into dimness. The
               table is set. An empty vase glows, white glass catching the
               light of a single candle. The rest of the room shades into
               obscurity.

               You are arranging your flowers when the door opens. (You
               slip back into the shadow of a corner.) A figure climbs
               out, and lowers the door closed.

    Primary among the adjustments for the seasoned IF player is losing the
    "goal" feeling -- the need to type in the right combination of
    commands that will produce a "You have won" or some equivalent. That,
    to say the least, is not the point of Space Under the Window, and
    insisting on it leads to frustration; there are certainly many endings
    to the story, but not many of them resolve much, such as who you are
    and what you're trying to do.  Moreover, many of them are frustrating
    in some respect: they seem to represent failures of one sort or
    another. A lost connection here, an ignominious flight from an
    encounter there, distrustful silence that never gets broken. Those
    that aren't expressly negative are at best neutral, and the player
    learns to appreciate intriguing twists as developments in the story
    rather than goals achieved.

    Space... is superior in that respect to other "experimental" works of
    IF, such as "In the End", that never quite lose the feel of
    "accomplish something." The mechanics are part of it -- though you
    occasionally say things, the player has no control over the words, nor
    when they are said, and the effect is sometimes like a novel centered
    around a main character who is not always sympathetic. Not being able
    to exercise control over the character -- yet playing in the second
    person nonetheless -- is a strange and disconcerting feeling, and the
    haphazard ways that your input affects events reinforce the sense that
    you are witnessing rather than participating in the narrative. The
    result is subversive in its way -- it questions the assumption that
    you are sent to an interactive-fiction environment to do something
    concrete, make an effect, rather than experience what's there. In
    effect, it makes the scene itself, and what happens there, more
    important than you, the player (though you as the player are distinct
    from "you", the character), since your importance is mostly to enter
    commands that allow you to see more. In that the setting is almost
    entirely fixed in one location, Space... also forces the player to
    appreciate the minute details that Plotkin brings out.

    There are a few red herrings that I found somewhat distracting. One of
    the few choices you can make sends some signals suggesting it will
    affect the plot, but in fact it doesn't -- it merely affects a certain
    room description. There are plotlines that simply can't be followed --
    it looks like they might lead to several-paragraph narratives, but
    they simply stop, and all input either reduces the text or sends the
    player down a different line. And it is best not to try to understand
    the cryptic bits of conversation by cross-referencing between
    different storylines, since the comparison yields little insight; it's
    ultimately more rewarding simply to regard the exchanges as cryptic
    and appreciate the way they change with your commands.

    At one point, a certain input will add to a fairly innocuous account
    of a woman's movements the following: "(Always careful, and always
    quiet. It took months before you saw past that.)" You never discover
    what the "months" reference meant, nor enough to say what you "saw",
    which certainly intensifies the air of intrigue; it's difficult to say
    whether Space... would be more or less satisfying with fewer
    unanswered questions. There is certainly intrigue aplenty in the
    movements you observe, all the more because they reflect a history
    unavailable to you. The above addition also provides a moment of
    insight into your own character -- the scorn in the tone of that
    statement reminds the player that he or she is not, despite the second
    person, dealing with a blank slate.

    The writing is skillful: Plotkin makes the scene changes reflect your
    input while limiting your ultimate control over what you see. (The
    experience is sometimes like throwing a rubber ball in the general
    direction of an object -- we know it will change things around, but we
    can't reliably predict how.) Sentences and phrases are added to
    existing text, with considerable effect:

             The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
             set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you were
             expected. Yes. An empty vase, white glass, stands beside a
             single lit candle.

             >surprise

             The window is open, so you climb down inside. The table is
             set for two -- a surprise; you didn't think you were
             expected. The cold shadow lifts a little. Yes. An empty vase,
             white glass, stands beside a single lit candle. A smile
             touches you; it feels like the first one in some time.

    Again, the change is more psychological than perceptual; your
    character begins to perceive something differently, and the change
    affects later interactions. In the hands of a less effective writer,
    this sort of thing could feel clumsy, as if our attention were
    deliberately drawn to whatever it is that's affected -- but, here, an
    inattentive player might miss the significance of the change and how
    it influences later developments. An equally effective example is the
    difference between the following two descriptions, depending on a
    certain input earlier on:

            "I never dreamed it would." She tosses her head back
            suddenly. "It seemed appropriate, that's all. Here. Finally."
            The flame of the candle flickers uncertainly, but her voice is
            still steady. "...Shall we go?"

            "I never dreamed it would." She tosses her head back suddenly,
            her lips falling one more time into that wry smile. "It seemed
            appropriate, that's all. Here. Finally." The flame of the
            candle flickers uncertainly, but her voice is still
            light. "...Shall we go?"

    Not so remarkable when examined side by side, but it takes a good
    writer to know when to make changes minor rather than waving flags at
    the player that might disrupt the feel of the narrative. Plotkin's
    writing almost never intrudes on the structure of the story (the
    sequence with the flowers is one of the few exceptions), and it
    rewards close attention to the various paths. Perhaps the best thing
    about Space... is the spareness of it: the reader is left to infer
    details from the way various pieces of the setting flicker in and out
    with light changes. And there, as well, the writing is well-calculated
    to tell the player just as much as needed to paint the picture.

    It's hard to categorize this one, obviously; some will quickly grow
    bored with it on ground that not much happens, and some will be
    frustrated with how limited the player's control is, as if different
    commands opened pages of a novel at random. And the feeling of not
    having anything as such to do requires some attitude adjustment,
    true. But there is much to appreciate in Space Under the Window,
    notably some of the more satisfying or upbeat endings, and even
    without a "right" way to play it, finding a previously undiscovered
    narrative trail is just as intriguing as any new discovery in
    conventional IF. If you can set aside your assumptions for a little
    while, give this one a shot.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Space War! ...and the PDP-1
    From: Greg Boettcher <greg SP@G gregboettcher.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: Space War!...and the PDP-1
    AUTHOR: Paul Allen Panks
    EMAIL: dunric SP@G yahoo.com
    DATE: June 2005
    PARSER: Simple
    SUPPORTS: DOS/Windows
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/pdp1.zip

    VERSION: 1.03B

    If you played the games in IF Comp 2005, you may have played Paul Allen Panks'
    game Ninja 2, which took last place in the comp. It begins with a dragon who is
    programming a PDP-1 computer and shouting "Spacewar!" If you looked at this and
    thought it was sort of weird and irrelevant, then you may not have realized
    that the "Spacewar!" remark was a reference to this game. Well, okay, it was
    still pointless and irrelevant. Nevertheless, just in case you're interested,
    it was a reference to this game. So what is this game like?

    Some people complain that Panks' games are all full of generic fantasy cliches.
    If you are among these people, then you should know that this game is not in
    some generic castle or dungeon, but is set solidly in the real world --
    specifically, on the M.I.T. campus in the year 1962. The goal of the game is to
    locate a tape of the then-new computer game Spacewar and find a way ot play it
    on M.I.T.'s PDP-1 mainframe computer. Of course, to do that, you have to kill a
    dragon that inhabits M.I.T., and maybe deal with the campus werewolf too. But
    mind you, such combat is only the means to an end. The main purpose here is to
    play Spacewar. In such a way does this game depart from the usual dragon-
    slaying conventions of Paul Allen Panks.

    Oh yes, and I forgot. In this game, you are Master O'Ryoko, a "ninja of peace."
    Also, sometimes another ninja will come from out of nowhere to fight you.
    Therefore, let no one say that this game does nothing to escape from the drab,
    boring atmosphere often to be found in games set on college campuses.

    I wish I could say that this game is better implemented than many of Panks'
    earlier efforts, but I'm afraid I can't. Few verbs are recognized, and none of
    the items mentioned in room descriptions can be interacted with at all, unless
    they are listed individually as something "you see." Basically, if you can't
    take it or kill it, you can't do anything with it, with only two exceptions.
    This is a step down from the likes of The Golden French Fry, which Panks at
    least had beta-testers for.

    Maybe the weirdest thing about this game is the scoring system. Sometimes your
    score goes up or down based on your achievements, but more often it depends on
    verb usage. If you want to boost your score, just take something and drop it
    repeatedly. Each time you do, you get ten points for taking it and four more
    for dropping it. Taking inventory gets you two points every time, and examining
    anything is good for three points (even if you just type "examine asdf" or just
    "examine"). However, be sure not to use a verb the game doesn't know, such as
    "wait" or "listen" or "put," because then your score goes down by ten points.

    In conclusion, if you liked Ninja 2, you'll probably love Space War!... and the
    PDP-1. But, oh wait, based on IF Comp statistics, there is roughly a 0% chance
    that you liked Ninja 2. Well, anyway.

    MS-DOS executable and BASIC source code

    The Spatent Obstruction
    From: Mark J. Musante <olorin SP@G world.std.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #22 -- September 15, 2000

    NAME: The Spatent Obstruction
    AUTHOR: Chris Canavan
    EMAIL: ???
    DATE: November 1992
    PARSER: AGT
    SUPPORTS: AGT ports
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/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.

    AGT files (.zip)

    SpeedIF 8: A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless
    From: Jonathan "Skip" Rosebaugh  <skiprosebaugh SP@G email.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #25 -- June 20, 2001

    [Note: This overview does not include Dan Shiovitz's game "You Are A
    CHEF!", which Skip suggests is so perfect that to review it would be
    wrong. --Paul]

    NAME: SpeedIF 8: A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless
    AUTHORS: Matthew Amster-Burton, David Cornelson, Christopher Huang,
             Admiral Jota, and Dan Shiovitz [not included in review]
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: TADS and Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS and Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/speedif/SpeedIF08.zip
    VERSION: 1

    The Games reviewed:
    * A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless by Christopher "Miseri" Huang
    * I Went to the WTO Ministerial Conference and All I Got Was This
    Souvenir Delegate From Mauritius by Matthew "mamster" Amster-Burton
    * Pantsless in Seattle by David "Jarb" Cornelson
    * A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless III: Endgame by Admiral
    "Jota" Jota

    SpeedIF is a blot on society. As indicated by the name, a SpeedIF entry
    is a work of IF written very fast -- two hours is the usual time limit.
    The parameters for each SpeedIF are usually generated via a mad-libs
    style audience participation thingie on ifMUD. The parameters for
    SpeedIF 8 were:

       SpeedIF8, entitled, 'A Freak Accident leaves Seattle Pantsless[1]',
       outside of a shop (type of which is your choosing) named 'End Of
       Days' serving something on the menu named 'Blitzkreig', 'ViReX', and
       'Macrolicious'. At another location, 23rd and Lincoln, an experiment
       is taking place that you need to help complete. This experiment
       involves corn, an electical kite, and a missing sock. Bonus points
       for ZeroG Sex, and _any_ references to BWP (Blair Witch Project).

    [1] Pants are considered to be inherently funny on ifMUD, particularly
    when they are not being worn.

    As might be expected, the entries were many, various, and totally off
    the wall. Below is a transcribing of the notes left behind by an
    adventurer who failed to protect his sanity.

       A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless

    Entropy fascinates me. I loved, for example, "The Entropy Effect."
    Physics fascinates me. On the first day of physics class, I managed to
    use both words in the same context, and was overjoyed, so it's only
    natural for this game to please me. You have a quest. You must recover a
    sock -- a sock that vanished in a clothes dryer. Along the course of
    your quest you will encounter two out of three of the following items: a
    voodoo doll, a rectal thermometer, and an artifact of Jack the Ripper.
    Why? There's no reason; there doesn't have to be. This is SpeedIF. Once
    you complete your quest, you find that you have socks. You have, in
    fact, all the socks ever lost for the past few decades. However, since
    the law of conservation of mass applies to plane transfer, everybody for
    miles around loses their pants. Provided that the protagonist escapes
    lynching, he will have both a mighty terrorist weapon and an excellent
    source of socks. Also, he will have popcorn. Mmm, popcorn. The virgin
    adventurer might be tempted to look for meaning in this work of SpeedIF.
    After all, we have physics and meta-physics. We have complicated
    experiments designed to reverse the flow of time. We have food. Alas,
    no. The only meaning is that there is not, and can never be a meaning in
    SpeedIF. Unless there can be one. The only possible thing to take away
    from playing this game is a newly-enhanced respect for the limitless
    possibilities for counterfeiting involved in transformation of physical
    matter.

       I Went to the WTO Ministerial Conference and All I Got Was This
       Souvenir Delegate From Mauritius

    Aha! Here we have both entertainment and social commentary in one small
    package with a very long name. Featuring both a famous author and a
    mayor, and also a bonus appearance of the author, this little game
    manages to make us concerned enough about the fate of world trade that
    we too will drop our pants -- erm, I mean, practice civil disobedience.
    Also, this game features hilarious puppets. This is likely the only
    SpeedIF game ever to feature more puppets than NPCs, even though it has
    10,003 NPCs. Also, I was disappointed that Neal Stephenson prefers
    Sherman tanks to his own All-Purpose Plex Armed Strife Mobile Unit. In
    fact, Neal Stephenson isn't even really a part of this game; he just
    stands around playing with advanced weaponry. In fact, why are hydrogen
    bombs even available to World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference
    protesters? Is this the kind of world you want your children to inherit?
    If not, then get out there and protest the protesters. What is in fact a
    part of this game is removing pants as a statement and protest, which
    gets you trucked off to jail in the ending statement. Like small
    countries, this small, short game has a very, very long name, and like
    small countries, it may be worth visiting.

       Pantsless in Seattle

    At last a game that respects the integrity of science enough to include
    a Professor, and a game that respects the integrity of hormones enough
    to include a beautiful woman. Er, that's just one game, in case you were
    counting. Like every other game in the SpeedIF universe, this game is
    short, sweet, and gets worse everytime you play it. (Actually, it
    doesn't, but I felt compelled to work entropy in here somewhere.) This
    game does, however, feature what I think must be a character from
    Spellbreaker, in that this NPC does some magic. Like another game, this
    game features loss of pants. There is a NPC responsible for this
    atrocity, but he is never brought to justice. What is this world coming
    to when a pants thief can, in addition to his previously heinous theft
    of socks, get away scott-free with the theft of all of Seattle's pants?
    Obviously, the problem is scott-free. If Adventureland were not packaged
    with Inform, the knowledge of Scott Adams games would be limited to an
    elite few. Once this happens, there would be a socialist revolution
    within the IF community, and pants would be shared equally.

       A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless III: Endgame

    Once again, we have a criminal. In this case, however, our arch-fiend is
    not a magic-wielding pants-thief, but a deranged sock. Also, despite the
    title, this game takes place in Acapulco. This game is the third in a
    tragically non-existent series and it makes frequent reference to the
    precursing games. Furthermore, since it takes place in Acapulco, all
    dialogue is in Spanish. Fortunately, subtitling is provided for
    non-Spanish-speakers. Those who can speak Spanish, however, will be
    laughing. The Spanish dialogue is the second-funniest thing in the game,
    right after the sock. The game ends with a promise of more to come.

    [Here the scribbled hand ended. I can only presume that he died of
    starvation, while frantically waiting for A Freak Accident Leaves
    Seattle Pantsless IV: Tentative Title.]

    So, there you have it, folks. Once upon a time, only the IF Gods could
    enjoy games made humorous due to time limits, but now these games are
    available even to mere mortals. So play away, and come join the ifMUD so
    you too can help keep the tradition of quickly written Interactive
    Fiction alive.

    Please note: The author is not on crack. The author is on caffeine.

    .zip file containing all games

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

    NAME: Spellbreaker
    AUTHOR: Dave Lebling
    E-MAIL: I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you
    DATE: 1985
    PARSER: Infocom standard
    SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
    AVAILABILITY: Commerical
    URL: N/A
    VERSION: Release 87

    RATING:
    ATMOSPHERE: Rich, surreal (1.8)  GAMEPLAY: Outstanding (1.8)
    WRITING: Excellent (1.9)                PLOT: Absorbing (1.9)
    CHARACTERS: Few, strange (1.6)    PUZZLES: Good, but very hard (1.9)
    MISC: Absorbing in way that belies plot, humorous, diverse settings,
    slightly disappointing ending (1.8)
    OVERALL: 9.2

    The culmination of Infocom's Enchanter trilogy came in 1985 with
    Spellbreaker, and quite a culmination it was; the final installment in
    the trilogy was far harder than the previous two, and far more
    satisfying as a game. Authored by Dave Lebling (who chose to leave his
    personal insignia in a thoroughly unlikely -- and slightly macabre --
    place in the game), Spellbreaker puts the player at the head of the
    Circle of Enchanters at a moment when magic itself appears to be on
    the wane -- a plot borrowed from Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, to
    be sure, but no less compelling for that. Gone is the semi-slapstick
    feel of Sorcerer -- the humor is subtler here -- but the mood here is
    also darker and lonelier; you encounter some humans along the way, but
    many sections of the game feel deserted -- at least, no longer
    populated by humans -- and Lebling's talent for atmosphere is
    evident. One room description begins this way:

        This is a ruined temple to a forgotten god. Black basalt
        pillars reach to the ceiling, but some are broken and lie in
        huge fragments on the ground.  The air is stale and filled
        with the odor of decay. Bats roost in the rafters, the only
        remaining worshippers.

    Though the plot of the game amounts to, as with the first two entries,
    "save the world from an evil force through your use of magic", there
    is far more going on here -- and the plot is much more integrated into
    the game as a whole. The initial development/hook, though very
    different from the device in Sorcerer, has considerable shock value --
    and, incidentally, serves to draw the player into the story rather
    than sounding a false alarm. Learning the "rules" of the game takes
    some time, and there are numerous opportunities to make the game
    unwinnable, many more than in Enchanter or Sorcerer (including one
    juxtaposition early in the game that seems like a "pull-my-finger"
    joke of sorts) -- but the unconventional nature of the story makes
    every new development a new discovery in a way that cannot be said of
    your average collect-the-treasure cave quest.

    Spellbreaker was given an "Expert" difficulty rating under the system
    at the time, a label only somewhat accurate. The bulk of the game's
    puzzles are fairly standard use-the-proper-spell affairs, though some,
    naturally, rely on wits rather than magic -- but up until nearly the
    end, Spellbreaker could just as well be an "Advanced" game. The last
    few puzzles, though -- certainly two of the last three, and a few
    others from near the end as well -- are vastly more difficult; I will
    candidly admit that I needed a substantial push. (In fact, I didn't
    even get the premise of one of them without assistance -- one that
    amounts to a variation on a mathematical problem -- and I suspect I
    was not alone in that respect.) That factor increases the frustration
    level of Spellbreaker considerably; intuitive leaps are needed at the
    end that were simply not necessary earlier, and the unwary player
    might well assume he or she has missed something that would make the
    last few puzzles less baffling.

    It should also be said that, considering the intricacy of the
    puzzle-solving required to get there, the great climactic ending is
    something of a letdown -- one short paragraph, in effect, hardly
    longer or more resounding than any of the many deaths one can die. The
    nature of the ultimate ending does, in a way, explain that -- but it
    still feels like a letdown (I wondered for a while whether there was
    another, "better" ending).Despite frustration, though, there is an
    elegance to many of Spellbreaker's puzzles that the player can only
    admire; Lebling manages to shake the feel of "put the octagonal key in
    the octagonal hole" or "give the food to the animal blocking the door"
    that plagues many games. (The implications of one puzzle in particular
    are either completely absurd or supremely logical -- either way, they
    might give you a headache trying to sort it out.)

    In a sense, the puzzles reflect the plot -- on occasions, magic ceases
    to help the player at all; there are areas and situations where no
    amount of spellcasting will set things right, a subversion of the
    "spell for every occasion" feel of the first two games. In other
    instances, though, the player's magical powers circumvent the rules of
    the game's universe in ways that the first two games (in the temple
    and the coal mine, respectively) had only hinted at. The effect is
    occasionally a bit dizzying -- in that the geography is largely
    non-contiguous, the player jumps between realms and situations, and
    types of dilemmas, rather abruptly -- but the final confrontation ties
    things together, for the most part.

    Spellbreaker's plot has been described, and criticized, as "narrow"
    and "linear," which usually means that the amount of exploration
    possible before the player is confronted with another puzzle is small
    -- and hence that only one or two puzzles are available at a given
    time. Critics of such an approach claim that it makes a game too easy
    -- but Spellbreaker should give the lie to that; even though the
    difficulty increases toward the end, as noted, there are few puzzles
    that could be considered obvious.  Moreover, after the first few
    puzzles are solved, the game opens up considerably, to the extent that
    it is often possible to have five or six unsolved puzzles at
    hand. (And there are also a few dummy puzzles, or what seemed so to
    me, and a few that require specific tools that don't come until well
    after the problems are first encountered.)

    Granted, the freedom of the player is limited; the amount of variation
    in a winning game of Spellbreaker is minimal (as in, there are only a
    few puzzles or tasks whose order of solving or accomplishment can move
    around -- and not very far, at that -- whereas very few of the puzzles
    in Sorcerer, say, were in sequence) -- but that is part of why the
    game was, in fact, rated "Expert"; of the several puzzles available
    for head-scratching over at any given moment in Spellbreaker, it is
    likely that only one will be solvable. The feel of the game lends to
    the sense of narrowness, true -- for the uninitiated, the player
    follows a trail of sorts of mysterious cubes that transport him/her
    between a series of apparently disconnected locations, and the surface
    area that each cube provides to explore is limited to one or two rooms
    in a few cases. But it is possible to have several cubes whose
    possibilities are not fully explored at any given time -- one cube, by
    my count, has six distinct puzzles associated with it. The point is
    that Spellbreaker avoids the usual problems associated with linearity
    (in a way that, say, the recent "Time: all things..." does not), and
    provides one important advantage inherent in narrow games -- the sense
    of a storyline that the player discovers/is drawn into, rather than a
    bunch of problems to solve. (The cubes, suffice it to say, have a
    significance beyond their ability to transport you hither and yon --
    and once you realize that significance, the plot of the game becomes
    much more intriguing.)

    The writing, as in most Lebling games, is controlled and skillful, all
    the more so considering the nature of the game's world -- the sheer
    surreality of your surroundings as the game progresses. (Try to
    picture this scene, for example:

        This place is odd indeed. Nothing that you look at is what it
        seems. If you look at something carefully enough it turns out to
        be something entirely different. The room is cluttered with
        objects and obviously hasn't been cleaned in a long time. The
        floor is overgrown with grass and weeds, and rabbits have chewed
        them. There are bird nests around the ceiling and droppings here
        and there. A very untidy and unsettling place.  Much of the walls,
        ceiling and floor is covered in mirrors. There are empty,
        mirrorless square areas at north and south and a round black
        emptiness to the east.

    If you can visualize that scene at all, your imagination is better
    than mine.) There are, of course, defensible reasons why Lebling chose
    to have that particular room appear that particular way -- but it is
    also true that the atmosphere is sometimes more baffling than
    evocative of anything in particular. But though the nature of your
    travels allows Lebling to give you scenes like this...

        Light Room

        This place is bright and glaring. The very materials of which it
        is made blaze with light so bright that their forms are
        obscured. There are glowing archways to the west and south.

    ...or this...

        No Place

        There is nothing here. You are here, but there is no here where
        you are.  You see nothing. Your senses are vainly trying to find
        something, anything to work on. You can know your body is there,
        but you can't truly sense it to confirm the suspicion. Your mind
        is alternately drawn in three "directions" (or at least what seem
        like directions): east, west and south. There is something
        slightly different about the nothing in those directions.

    ...the sense that the author is Telling You A Big Cosmic Important
    Tale is mostly absent, thankfully, and the game manages to take you
    into realms several degrees removed from the average landscape without
    losing the feel of the adventure-game romp, no small feat. Those who
    have finished the game might do well to consider the nature of what
    Spellbreaker was purporting to describe, and the restraint with which
    Lebling carries it out; that much of the game seems prosaic is, in a
    way, high praise. The humor in the game is essential to its
    enjoyability, in that respect -- in the plain scene, notably, in the
    merchant's patter, and in the very nature of the idol puzzle -- and
    the absurdities (and acknowledgment of same) help keep the game from
    becoming portentous.

    Spellbreaker and Trinity have been mentioned in the same breath, and
    for good reason -- their plots have much in common, and there is a
    deft interaction between puzzles and story in each game that makes
    them just as absorbing for the narrative as for the challenge of the
    puzzles. A resounding conclusion to a somewhat uneven series,
    Spellbreaker deserves to be considered one of Infocom's very best.

    Solution (Text)

    Spider and Web
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #14 -- May 17, 1998

    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 (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5
    VERSION: Release 4

    PLOT: Multilayered, intriguing (1.6)   ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.5)
    WRITING: Strong (1.6)                 GAMEPLAY: Solid (1.5)
    PUZZLES: Logical, some difficult (1.6) CHARACTERS: One, very thorough
    (1.5)
    MISC: Ambitious idea, carried off with skill (1.8)
    OVERALL: 8.0

    Andrew Plotkin posted on rec.arts.int-fiction a few years ago a list
    of implicit assumptions common to most IF, suggesting that
    experimental IF works might set about subverting those
    assumptions. Plotkin's Space Under the Window pushed the limits of IF,
    to be sure, but in a rather straightforward way; there, the author
    forced the player to give up the usual mode of interacting with the
    game environment. Spider and Web, though no less subversive in its
    way, is altogether more subtle--and Plotkin overturns the tropes of
    standard IF to great effect.

    As it would be altogether too hard to discuss otherwise, I'll describe
    the essential structure--the outer layer, as it were--of the game: as
    a spy sent to investigate an enemy laboratory, you have been caught
    and are recounting your actions to your interrogator. But you recount
    them not verbally, but as scenes replayed in your memory and picked up
    by a mind probe--and therefore you play out the recreations as
    conventional IF narrative, or so it seems at first. Moreover, your
    interrogator interrupts you constantly to inform you that you have
    gotten the scene "wrong," or to interject comments when you do get it
    right, and there's therefore a sense that you're discovering what
    you've already done. The confusion of narratives that arises is done
    with remarkable skill: after all, the effect of the scene is that the
    interrogator is asking you, for the most part, to confirm what he
    already knows, and therefore the point of most of the exercise, as far
    as he's concerned, is less to learn anything than to have you submit
    to his coercion, repeat what he's telling you. (The interrogator
    describes it that way: "It comes down to telling stories. You spin me
    a story, and I listen....This verse isn't yet right.") Critical theory
    meets IF, in other words: the controlling ideology enforces its rule
    by forcing the controlled to repeat--and play out, over and over
    again--the narrative. The idea, at least for critical theorists, came
    down from Marx, but it has a life of its own by now. If Foucault wrote
    in this medium, he'd more than likely write something like
    this. ("Discipline and Punish" in IF form? Internalized panopticons?
    could happen.) The experience of playing it is unique and vaguely
    reminiscent of "1984"--it forces the player not only to accept someone
    else's account of a certain truth, in this case his own memories, but
    to replay them in conformity with what he's told--and the feeling is
    often unnerving.

    At any rate, Plotkin uses this premise skillfully, often in ways that
    can't be revealed here lest they spoil the fun. Among the more amusing
    moments is the opening scene in the city streets, which, like
    everything else, you're replaying for the interrogator's benefit--and
    you therefore throw in some ingratiating sentiment laced with sarcasm:
    "And however much of the capital city is crusted with squat brick and
    faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic
    charm." Later, a subtle dig at the police state: "The alley is quite
    empty, bare even of trash. (Your guidebook warned you: the police are
    as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.)"
    Later repetitions of the scene cut out most of the rhapsodizing about
    the city's charms, as if in acknowledgment that the interrogator
    doesn't want to hear it. The temporal confusions abound: this is one
    work of IF where much of the action has already happened at the
    beginning of the game, and the story technique works far better than
    many "flashback" sequences common in film. The slow-developing plot is
    frustrating at times--the player is often reduced to thinking "_why_
    would I have done that?", and not all the questions get resolved. But
    there is method to Plotkin's madness, as always, and the twists are
    calculated for maximum effect.

    Spider and Web owes its setting and plot to Cold War spy movies and
    novels, in a sense. It gradually becomes apparent that you're after a
    mysterious device, a weapon of sorts: they have it, you want it or
    alternately don't want them to have it, it's essential to the balance
    of power, etc. (And a certain less-than-credible scene toward the end
    recalls one of the silliest features of action movies.) There is also
    a certain debt to science fiction, though, in the wealth of gadgetry
    that you carry around--you bring a toolcase with you--and in the
    endgame, which requires that you figure out a whole host of devices at
    high speed in a way reminiscent of lots of SF. Particularly since so
    much of the plot turns on understanding the properties of gadgets,
    it's tempting to make them the real point of the story--and yet good
    science fiction, despite appearances, is often less about neat
    technology than about the human conflicts that it brings about, and
    Spider and Web is no different. At one point, your interrogator--oddly
    candid, but I suppose he has to be for the story to go anywhere--
    acknowledges that the new weapon, rather than enabling a supposed
    "clean war", would actually make the ongoing war even more chaotic and
    enable dangerous abuses of power, but then acknowledges that he still
    participates in building and developing the weapon. (The tension, in
    critical theory terms: the figure who wields the power admits his
    doubts about the validity or appeal of the dominant ideology, thereby
    deconstructing that ideology's claim to exclusive truth and
    legitimating dissent. Well, maybe.) Implicitly, technology becomes an
    end in itself, divorced from its desired ends--or, alternately,
    avoiding a certain technological advance is more risky than pursuing
    it, lest one's side lose the destructive advantage. The latter echoes
    Cold War deterrence theory, while the former is an element in most
    dystopian visions (Fahrenheit 451, for example). At any rate, the
    endgame underscores the importance of the backstory; players should
    probably go back to old save positions once they near the end simply
    to make sense of some of the earlier speeches.

    As a game, Spider and Web works well. The interrogator's comments act
    as a sort of hint system for much of the game, since your various
    mistakes draw out comments that indicate what he's looking for and
    narrow down the scope of your actions through repeated tries. As such,
    the game is fairly short and most of it isn't all that hard; it's only
    toward the end that the Zarfian side comes out and the player needs
    real intuition to keep up. (As with other Zarf works, furthermore, the
    hardest points are the most satisfying to solve--they're rewarded in
    one way or another.) There are a few points where the interrogator's
    responses don't quite seem to match your actions, and it isn't quite
    clear at those points whether he just doesn't care about the
    discrepancies or whether there are bugs afoot. The ultimate ending is
    something of a letdown, at least in terms of spy-novel victory-for-
    your-side expectations, though it certainly fits the Zarf ethos. On
    the whole, the puzzles are unique and well crafted; there is nothing
    arbitrarily thrown in to require puzzle-solving, and the obtacles feel
    logical enough. There's even some humor, unlikely as it sounds: the
    interrogator is equipped with plenty of sarcastic jabs. (At one point,
    if you claim that the guards lied about something: "Ah. They'll be
    hurt to hear so.") The atmosphere is likewise effective: the halls are
    cold but not obtrusively so. As seems to happen in many Plotkin games,
    a key shift in mood is marked by the lights going out and the player's
    having to stumble around in "dimness" (the word, in particular,
    reminded me of Space Under the Window); though the dimming doesn't
    accompany changes in the landscape, as happened in Change in the
    Weather, it does serve to heighten tension and set the final events of
    the game in motion. Technically proficient, with a well-developed
    story, Spider and Web is a solid game.

    But Plotkin is not, precisely, known in the IF community for
    conventional solid games, and Spider and Web doesn't really fit many
    categories. The spy-adventure aspect is subverted by the moral
    ambiguities: it isn't clear that arranging for your side to have the
    weapon would be an altogether good thing, and it becomes obvious that
    the interrogator is driven to develop it more by political necessity--
    the regime demands it--than by personal fascination with the
    possibilities. Indeed, one event toward the end suggests that the
    power game is what really matters, that the technology is expendable;
    the real value of the thing lies in simply having it while the other
    side doesn't. A development parallel to the story of the weapon,
    moreover--call it one of the plot layers--suggests that technology
    still can't keep up with human ingenuity, in that a large part of the
    game turns on outsmarting a device that your captors rely on.  While
    there are science fiction elements, the game turns on the
    interrogation and the conflict it masks rather than the technological/
    speculative bits; the specter of the omniscient questioner who
    manipulates his captives into saying what he wants recalls, among
    other things, Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Most importantly, unlike
    the bulk of IF, the player cannot identify a clear goal for the
    protagonist, or necessarily even assume that he understands what the
    protagonist is thinking at any given time; the feeling of discovering
    rather than creating a story recurs on several levels. Put another
    way, the game sharply limits how much innovation you can give the set
    script, sometimes because you have to match the interrogator's account
    and sometimes because every move is vital, as in Change in the
    Weather. Throughout the story, discovering what you're "meant" to be
    doing means discovering what your own character is up to, sometimes in
    surprising ways, and the effect is occasionally similar to coming
    gradually out of a total loss of memory.

    There is much that's worth pondering over the course of Spider and
    Web: the various competing narratives keep the player guessing (some
    of the techniques reminded me of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger
    Ackroyd, though I'm sure they're not unique), and the game is well-
    crafted on every level. Anyone who has enjoyed Plotkin's previous
    efforts should without a doubt check this one out.

    From: Adam Thornton <adam SP@G adam.remote.princeton.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #14 -- May 17, 1998

    This review necessarily contains spoilers for _Spider And Web_.  If
    you haven't played it, I recommend you stop reading here, go out and
    get a copy (ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5), and
    play it.  It is certainly worth your time.  After you've played it,
    continue.

    It's an excellent game.  If I have to give it a rating, uhhhh, let's
    see.  9.0 out of 10.

    Now go play it.

    _Spider And Web_ is the latest IF effort by Andrew Plotkin.  It
    represents a radical departure from his earlier works in that it is
    neither an impossibly unfair series of timing puzzles (e.g. "A Change
    In the Weather"), nor is it a lyrical allegorical journey (e.g. "So
    Far"), nor is it an arcade favorite reborn (e.g. "Freefall"), nor is
    it an Interactive Unbelievably Painful Breakup (e.g. "The Space Under
    The Window"), nor is it even a Computer Science homework set
    (e.g. "Lists and Lists").

    Instead, it's a Cold War spy story, and a fairly straightforward one
    at that.  When stripped to its essentials, the plot is: break into a
    research center, elude the guards, steal the Secret Plans, and escape.
    Nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before, right?

    Well, no.  This is, after all, a Zarf game.

    For starters, the game begins with the player outside a closed door in
    a grimy alley, with no means of opening the door.  It's only after
    giving up and walking away that we find the real setting of the game:
    the player has been captured and is being interrogated.

    The player, it turns out, was a spy breaking into this facility.  He,
    or possibly she--Zarf doesn't specify, and it's made quite clear that
    at least the captors' forces include both men and women; I'm going to
    refer to the protagonist as "he," since that's how I imagined the
    game--was captured.  His captors have a memory-extraction McGuffin
    that allows them to see the scene through his eyes.  The challenge of
    the first part of the game is to replay each scene in such a way that
    it matches the evidence found by your captors.  It's an awful lot like
    the movie _Groundhog Day_ in that you do everything over and over
    until you get it right.

    Except that, after you're comfortable with that paradigm, about two
    thirds of the way through the game, there's a huge shift.  You escape
    and are suddenly playing for real.  And that's when you find out that
    there were certain things you lied to your interrogator about, and
    figuring out what you told him vs. what you really did becomes the
    major challenge of the game.

    The escaping puzzle has to be one of the best ever seen in IF.  It's
    incredibly subtle, incredibly elegant, and extremely satisfying.  But
    aside from that, finding out that you were an unwitting Unreliable
    Narrator is an amazing rhetorical gimmick, and works beautifully.  It
    completely subverts what you thought you were doing; the first part of
    the game becomes _Groundhog Day_ except that you're repeating
    everything until you get it convincingly and consistently *wrong*.

    The remainder of the game, alas, falls a little short.  Most of it
    concerns figuring out what you really *were* doing in the earlier
    part, and realizing how to use it to get into the Lab.  Once there
    it's pretty obvious what you need to do to get enough time to operate,
    and what to do.  However, at this point, it *is* pretty much a Cold
    War spy story, albeit an exciting one.  The metaphysically neat parts
    of the game are behind you.

    One object, which you have to use twice, is the hardest part of the
    game, because it appears in no room descriptions, and unless you
    examine the walls or listen very carefully, there's no indication that
    such things exist.  This is, in fact, precisely the point.  They're
    ubiquitous and never noticed.  Annoying, but it can hardly be said to
    be unfair.

    The mechanics and prose are, as in every Zarf game, excellent.  The
    one fleshed-out NPC is convincingly drawn, and Zarf's choice to limit
    conversation with him to "yes" or "no" works well both in the context
    of the game and as a tool so that the amount of coding is kept to a
    minimum.  The spy gadgets work intuitively and the interface seems
    very believable.  And they're fun to play with.

    It's interesting and very refreshing to have an exciting spy story as
    the basic premise, and have no one get killed or even seriously hurt
    in the game's main action.  The total body count is seven, plus or
    minus, unconscious guards, most of them simply stun-gunned, one
    poisoned with a temporary neurotoxin, and one interrogator with a bad
    headache.  Plus whatever happens to the player's character.

    There are some nice incidental touches: words like "night-clumps," the
    twin moons seen in the sketch in the interrogator's office, the
    marvellously evocative phrase "dawn-tales."  All of these give a
    feeling of a fleshed-out background world with a charmingly minimalist
    sketch.  They also make the game feel like a sequel of sorts to "So
    Far"; if the world of "So Far" was late Victorian (well, the beginning
    world, where _Rito and Imita_ is playing), then this is near-future,
    maybe a century and a half down the road.

    The "web" of the title also plays a nice recurring role.  "Scan-web"
    is apparently a metal-detecting metallic woven fiber.  Indeed, maybe
    that's all it is: metal passing through it would set up an inductive
    current, which could then trigger an alarm somewhere.  It's also used
    as some sort of conductive field-generating device in the lab, and, of
    course, the whole issue of the game is "Who's the spider, and who's
    the fly?"

    The interrogator is an interesting character.  He's a thinking man
    with a hell of a job.  Zarf says that he tried to create an NPC and
    ended up once again writing himself, but with a dirty job.  That's
    possible.  But I found he rang very true to the one intellectual
    career military man I know, who once described himself to me as "your
    basic liberal arts colonel."  He's someone with an artistic side, and
    his art reveals a great deal about his personality.  So do his
    bookshelves.  I, alas, don't believe Zarf's explanations that I can
    see the contents of his shelves from the door--more on this later.

    The political setting of the game is interesting.  This would have
    been an amazingly affecting game in 1986, the year of Trinity's
    release.  It is set in a nasty Cold War, and the Device in the Lab is,
    as the interrogator points out, at least the equivalent of the Bomb in
    terms of destructive potential.  These days, it's a nice spy thriller.
    Back when Balance of Power and Detente actually *meant* something, it
    would have been much more relevant.

    Half the fun of the game is figuring out what really happened.  The
    basic plot (not the one you tell the interrogator) goes something like
    this:

    { Editor's comment: The final part of Adam's review contains an
    analysis of the game that goes to such detail that I felt I couldn't
    publish it here - it would simply give away too much for people who
    haven't completed the game. This was a difficult decision to make,
    since this analysis is in a way the most important part of the
    review. As a compromise solution (approved by the author, of course),
    I felt that publishing the first part of the review, while making the
    complete text available elsewhere, would still be worthwhile; the
    complete and uncensored review is available from
    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon/if/spider_review.txt. Readers without
    WWW access may email me for a copy. }

    Inform file (.z5)

    Solution (Text)

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

    TITLE: Spiritwrak
    AUTHOR: Daniel Yu
    E-MAIL: dsyu SP@G holonet.net
    DATE: 1996
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/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.

    Inform .z5 file

    Puzzle hint guide

    Step-by-step solution

    Splashdown
    From: Adam Myrow <amyrow SP@G midsouth.rr.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: Splashdown
    AUTHOR: Paul J. Furio
    EMAIL: pjf SP@G staticengine.com
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF-archive freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/splashdown
    directory containing PDF documentation, walk-through, and game.

    This was not only one of many games involving space travel this year, it
    was one of at least 3 games in which you wake up from cryogenic sleep to
    find that a disaster has taken place, and you are the only one who can
    do something about it. Why this particular story line was so popular
    this year is a mystery, but this is the best of the games to explore
    this subject. The game gives credit to Steve Meretzky for inspiring the
    author, and the influence is pretty obvious. For example, you will find
    lots of broken machines which need fixing, there is a robotic companion
    who makes cute remarks and follows you around, and of course, your
    companion is necessary to solve some of the puzzles. Of course, if you
    have played Planetfall, this will sound rather familiar. Continuing in
    the Infocom tradition, this game has several humorous bits. The included
    PDF documentation is a side-splitting parody of a travel brochure and an
    even better spoof of a legal document. When I discovered the exact
    reason for the cause of the disaster, I was left laughing out loud.

    As for the story, you are one of several other colonists who are
    traveling to a distant planet known as Ayria Prime 6. The trip will take
    over 30 years, so, of course, you are all put in cryogenic sleep to
    await your destination. So far, so good. However, when you finally do
    reach the planet, the ship crashes into the ocean. The computer wakes
    you up, and you have to rescue the other colonists. Naturally, you start
    out with a very tight time limit, and some obstacles to overcome. Once
    you have gotten past the first major puzzle and bought yourself some
    time, the game opens up for more relaxed exploration and planning.

    While this game is clearly inspired by Infocom, it thankfully leaves out
    some of the more annoying features. There is no starvation puzzle, and
    no sleep timer. Of course, there is a light with a limited battery, but
    it's unlikely that it will be a problem. If the player should get stuck,
    there are InvisiClue-style hints to help out. They are even sprinkled
    with fake questions, just like Infocom's were. So, for fans of Infocom,
    this game will suit them well. However, I'd suggest that they wait to
    see if a second release comes out. While the first release is perfectly
    playable, there are a few grammar errors, and some parser trouble. It's
    not bad, but just not quite at the high standards that it is trying to
    pay tribute to.

    From: Carolyn Magruder <carolynmagruder SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    Score: 7 out of 10.

    This review includes an extraordinarily mild spoiler. If you want to
    avoid all chances whatsoever that you will see a spoiler, please leave
    this review or make sure that you stop reading at the [SPOILER ALERT]
    mark. [It is quite a mild spoiler, so I've left it in, along with the
    warning. --Paul]

    You awaken in a cryotube only to discover that there is a malfunction
    and your ship is in trouble. You have been selected randomly from the
    passengers on your sleeper ship to try to save the ship. (This is a
    seriously weird backup plan on the part of the ship's designers, but, oh
    well, I'll let it go.)

    Splashdown is a neat game. Its greatest strength is its setting, which
    carries a gritty sense of realism that I appreciate. I can see this
    place, with its puddles, its mist, its broken girders, and all the rest
    of it. The room descriptions show where to go in
    aft/forward/port/starboard notation, but it didn't actually insist on it
    -- it would still accept standard north/south/east/west instructions. I
    appreciated that, too, although I wound up writing out a paper map
    because it helped me with the layout. (I have trouble keeping directions
    to about more than six rooms at a time straight in my head, so this does
    not necessarily say very much. Your mileage will probably vary.)

    As well as having a neat setting, Splashdown had neat puzzles. The
    puzzles varied in difficulty, but every one made me say "Oh, I see, that
    made good sense" afterward, and none of them involved commands that were
    not straightforward and mimetic. Some puzzles required you to twist your
    brain intuitively (which I am less good at) and some required you to
    think logically through a pattern (which I am normally better at, but I
    have a few personal excuses that sum up why I hit the hints so fast,
    although I won't bore you by actually writing them down.) Both kinds
    were pretty good at rewarding you and making the puzzle matter.

    Those who particularly object to resource-rationed games should be aware
    that Splashdown has two rationing systems in play as the game begins.
    One involves the allocation of the power supply, and the other is a time
    limit. Both are logical for the game, and I did not object to either
    one. Between the two, however, I doubt that anyone will finish
    Splashdown on a first attempt without hitting the hints very heavily (or
    the walkthrough.)

    What else is interesting about Splashdown? As I play through a game with
    the purpose of reviewing it, I take short notes in a Notepad file, and I
    refer back to them when I write the review. My first note relates to a
    nice touch of foreboding in the opening sequence, and my second note
    reads, "That PDF file is bigger than the game itself! What on earth did
    he put in there, bricks?" So I opened up the PDF file, and then added to
    the second note, "No, he put in a pretty cool intro and briefing. That's
    a lot of work for a game that won't be longer than 2 hours. I approve."
    And I do approve, and a lot of work was plainly put into the PDF file
    (although the cover page could use some smoother, straighter lines on
    the ship-- the art didn't seem to match the flavor of the game's actual
    setting to me. This is such a minute whine that the author has every
    right to whine about me including that whine.) You can play the game
    just fine without the PDF, though, which is nice.

    In an odd way, Splashdown reminds me of the Fox cartoon Animaniacs.
    Animaniacs mixes a strong dose of kid humor with a whole lot of grown-up
    easter eggs, and the result is something that you can enjoy at quite a
    few levels of knowledge. Similarly, I could enjoy Splashdown without
    understanding the easter eggs and in-jokes that are constantly spewed
    forth by the game's sidekick, Spider the maintenance robot. As it
    happens, I am familiar with most of the in-jokes... and I hated him
    anyway.

    Aside from Spider, Splashdown is a beautifully crafted sci-fi piece with
    an intense, serious tone. Spider's casual lingo and constant in-joke
    commentary is seriously detrimental to this valuable tone. He feels like
    he was written for another game entirely, a comic parody of the genre,
    and then the author adapted him for Splashdown at the last minute. I'm
    sure that isn't what happened, as the author has shown a great deal of
    insight and care in all other aspects of the game, but hearing
    repetitive references to Planetfall every 20 moves or so left me ready
    to scream. In his capacity as an information-producer and puzzle-solving
    system, he is super. In his capacity as comic relief, I wish the game
    hadn't included any comic relief! (Your mileage may vary.)

    There is one more thing I want to touch on, which relates to the subject
    of easter eggs and in-joke humor. I thought about getting out of this
    review without it, but it did affect my enjoyment of the game.

    [SPOILER ALERT]

    I hit the hints bright and early, as I've mentioned above. One hint
    begins, "Is a colonist missing?" When I spotted that heading, all my
    mental bells and whistles went off -- "Ooh! Sabotage! This is going to
    be so neat!" When I got farther and farther and farther without learning
    more about the missing colonist, I finally looked, and seeing that it
    was only an easter egg was pretty disappointing. It was perhaps an
    appropriate punishment for checking the hints so fast, but I felt like
    I'd been promised something by the game that I never received. This
    wasn't fair.

    Almost everything else about the game was, though, so that makes up for
    it. Right? Right.

    Directory with .z5 Zcode file, readme, walkthrough, and PDF feelie

    Map in .gif format

    A Spot of Bother
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #46 -- October 17, 2006

    Title: A Spot Of Bother
    Author: David Whyld
    E-mail: dwhyld SP@G gmail.com
    Date: December 24, 2005
    Parser: ADRIFT
    Supports: ADRIFT interpreters
    Availability: Freeware
    URL: http://www.shadowvault.net/spotofbother.taf
    Version: 4.0

    In the former Soviet Union, a corny phrase was very popular -- "a city of
    contrasts". Journalists loved to use it in their feature articles about various
    towns of Western Europe and the USA, setting off the lustre of the city centres
    and villa districts against the misery of the slummy outskirts, letting the
    readers make their own conclusions about the reasons for such an inequality.

    Since then, this cliche has somewhat fallen into disuse, at least in Russia --
    I suspect to a no small degree because our own towns developed pretty much in
    the same direction. However, as I played A Spot Of Bother, I couldn't help
    myself thinking of it again; if I had to describe the game using a single word,
    I'd choose "uneven".

    The undoubtedly most brilliant part of the game are its characters. The
    exaggeratedly tough PC, Stavros McGrogan aka The Bulldog, the eccentric Mrs.
    Moog he needs to rescue, her no less extravagant, albeit in a different manner,
    husband, and the mean Sergeant Twiddles, Bulldog's immediate superior, who
    isn't even a real character in the game, and only appears in cut-scenes -- all
    of them are depicted with great care and love, and made me smile more than
    once. I'm not getting in much more detail now, but it's not because the
    characters don't deserve it -- I just don't want to spoil the fun for other
    players.

    We fairly often talk about puzzle-oriented IF and plot-oriented IF; in my
    opinion, A Spot Of Bother doesn't fall in any of these categories. I'd rather
    call it a character-driven game, and I think it's quite unique in its way.

    Now, please don't start showering me with insufficient IF-literacy accusations
    (although they probably are condign). I know there are enough games built
    around characters out there (the most widely-known examples probably are Emily
    Short's Galatea, and Best Of Three), but they all (or, at least the ones I have
    encountered) are more or less experimental works
    exploring character interaction, without any real plot or setting. It's
    entirely different with ASoB: in respect to layout, it's a fairly traditional
    text adventure, but all the nominally present game elements seem to serve but
    one purpose -- grotesquely setting off the PC's and NPC's personalities.

    The plot, for instance, is in itself a quite standard save-the-world business:
    the old lady who's the head of the British Nuclear Research Facility, Mrs.
    Moog, has fainted in her cottage, and you have to get her out, because a
    nuclear reactor is going to explode, and she's the only person competent enough
    to shut it down. However, this story is just ideally suited to comically
    emphasize the PC's toughness, and Mrs. Moogs nuttiness. The effect is supported
    by luminous writing; a few "glosses" could send a reader less phlegmathic than
    the author of this review down to the floor cringing with laughter. All this,
    as well as the understanding of the secondary role of the plot, helps not to
    pay any attention to a few stretching points.

    But now we get to the "slummy outskirts" or, to be more precise, the "poor
    relatives" of the game -- the puzzles. They also are here mostly in order to
    accentuate what an oddball Mrs. Moog is (according to the game story, she's
    paranoid about security, and has set up several quite fiendish traps against
    burglars in her house; the puzzles as such consist in overcoming these traps).
    However, making the puzzles weird enough to fit with Mrs. Moog's eccentric
    nature, yet fun to solve for a much less eccentric average player at the same
    time seemed to be a task the author wasn't entirely up to. Thus, the player has
    to do enough reading the author's (or Mrs. Moog's?) mind, be very pedantical
    about examining each and every item in each and every room in order not to miss
    something crucial, and formulate her/his commands very carefully.

    One example illustrating the remark about command wording (not adopted from the
    game): imagine you get to a room whose description goes like this:

      Foothills

      Here, the doleful monotonity of the planes gives way to
      rocky terrain. The latter is doubtlessly much more
      picturesque; unfortunately, it also makes your further
      progress to the south impossible -- at least if you don't
      employ the shaggy, stocky skewbald pony grazing nearby as a
      transport facility.

      > SOUTH

      You can't pass there afoot.

      > GET ON PONY

      You can't get on the pony.

      > CLIMB PONY

      You can't climb the pony.

      > CLIMB ON PONY

      You can't climb the pony.

      > RIDE PONY

      No, I don't understand that. Try something else.

      > EMPLOY PONY

      No, I don't understand that. Try something else.

      > CLAMBER ON PONY

      What a lucky guess!, you think to yourself, as you climb
      onto the pony, and make yourself ready to continue your way
      to the south.

    Of course, A Spot Of Bother features built-in hints, but they aren't completely
    thorough, and don't give away the final solution. Thus, although one can't deny
    they are a great help in overcoming the "read the author's mind" and "examine
    everything" issues, they're still pretty ineffective against the too strict
    phrasing requirements. Whatever, after a long but unsuccessful fight with the
    prototype of my pony example, I resorted to a walkthrough I dug up in the
    Internet for the rest of the game, and never regretted doing so afterwards.

    Finally, there are a few things that anything but adorn a game with such
    ambitions. I mean minor glitches -- room descriptions unaware of state changes
    they should be sensitive to, items mentioned in the descriptions yet
    inaccessible for manipulations, that kind of things. There are a bit too many
    of them, especially considering this is the fourth release of the game. For
    instance, there is an official cheat (!) for one of the puzzles, because the
    appropriate section of the game sometimes doesn't work as it should for
    uncertain reasons. To be fair, I think the problem lies not on the part of the
    game itself but on the part of the interpreter, although it doesn't
    really matter from the player's point of view.

    To put it short, I think you're going to have a great time in the company of
    The Bulldog, Mrs. Moog, and Sergeant Twiddles. Just don't fix on the puzzles
    too much.

    SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Grunt (meaning "ideal for setting off the characters'
          personalities") (1.1)
    ATMOSPHERE: Grunt (one of the game's main attractions) (1.7)
    WRITING: Grunt (cool) (1.7)
    GAMEPLAY: Grunt (well, uneven) (1.0)
    BONUSES: Grunt (the troupe) (1.1)
    TOTAL: 6.6
    CHARACTERS: Grunt (they're what this game exists for) (1.9)
    PUZZLES: Frown (I've seen better) (1.0)
    DIFFICULTY: Grunt (pretty easy -- once you use a walkthrough;)
                (7 out of 10)

    ADRIFT game file

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

    NAME: Spur                           GAMEPLAY: Quirky but not frustrating
    AUTHOR: Kent Tessman                 PLOT: Unfolds nicely
    EMAIL: by723 SP@G torfree.net             ATMOSPHERE: Good
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive          WRITING: Good
    PUZZLES: Logical but not obvious     SUPPORTS: Hugo ports (DOS, Amiga, Linux)
    CHARACTERS: Fairly convincing        DIFFICULTY: Medium

            Considering the potential for atmosphere and adventure puzzles with a
    western theme, it's something of a surprise to me that Infocom never did a
    game in this particular genre, not to mention the fact that there is so
    little I-F in general set in the Old West.  Kudos are due Kent Tessman, who
    has found a relatively unexplored niche in the world of I-F in which to place
    "Spur."  The game is full of atmosphere and serves as a good showcase of the
    Hugo language's capabilities.
            Since no one has yet done a review of a Hugo game (since there are so
    few to begin with), I suppose I should analyze the parser and overall user-
    friendliness of the system before examining the game itself.  Relative to the
    most popular development systems out there, Hugo's parser is far superior to
    AGT's standard, but a number of strange quirks keep it from matching Inform
    and TADS for ease of use.  For instance, a number of common phrases aren't
    understood -- "OPEN DOOR WITH KEY" as opposed to "UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY" is
    one that comes to mind.  To ride a horse, you must first "GET ON THE HORSE"
    and then "RIDE" in the desired direction ("RIDE HORSE" won't get you on the
    horse in the first place).  "KILLing" and "SHOOTing" someone are two
    completely different actions.  Also, I found one that was quite
    (unintentionally) amusing:

                    >steal the axe
                    You'll have to buy the pick-axe first.

    ("STEAL" seems to be a synonym for "TAKE" in this case.)  Much of the scenery
    can't be examined either.  Don't get me wrong, most major objects such as a
    billiards table are present, but tables, chairs, and even Grady's bar aren't
    even recognized.
            I'm not trying to be overly harsh here; I merely want to give players
    a basic feel for how the parser handles, and Hugo handles quite well overall,
    with most of the standard "ease-of-use" features ("UNDO," "OOPS," command
    recall, etc.) implemented.  If a particular syntax doesn't work, it usually
    takes little experimentation to find another common one that does.  Rarely is
    there a need to guess a particular phrase, and if the need seems to arise,
    it's more than likely that you're on the wrong track, so it's not too
    terribly frustrating.  To perhaps put it more tangibly: I usually score the
    AGT parser around 0.7 (with a couple of exceptions), and both the TADS and
    Inform parsers around 1.5 or 1.6 on average.  By this standard, Hugo would
    come in at 1.3 or so.  (This is Hugo 2.0, BTW.  As no games have yet been
    released with 2.1, I can't offer comment.)
            The action begins immediately, with the player thrust into the middle
    of a gunfight, and doesn't let up.  The outset is fast-paced, pushing the
    player along, but it doesn't force the sort of do-or-die time limit where
    you're dead if you don't do everything exactly right (such as the opening to
    "Demon's Tomb" or the endgame of "Christminster").  Some events are timed,
    but sufficient warning is provided.
            "Spur" has a pleasant western atmosphere to it, with appropriate
    situations and puzzles, and some intentional anachronisms tacked on for
    humor.  Those more familiar with the western genre (and I for one am not)
    will no doubt spot some minor cliches but I found nothing so obvious as to
    make me cringe.
            The game is linear overall, and it's sometimes easy to overlook
    things.  Quite a few problems rely on the other characters and can't be
    solved unless you gain the right information from the right person (much like
    "The Path to Fortune").  Reading the sample commands in the online help will
    give you some nudges if you're stuck in the early stages.  What's interesting
    here is the fact that the Hugo engine prevents you from asking characters
    about something if you haven't actually seen it.  This adds a degree of
    realism, but has the side effect of being a pain on subsequent playthroughs.
    It's a trade-off.
            The characters in "Spur" are quite nicely done, many of them with
    reasonable mobility and most of them fairly responsive.  The fact that
    they're observing your behavior as well lends to the realism.  Grady the
    bartender has a superstitious streak, but you can't trick him by giving him a
    fake charm if you create it while he's watching you.  Little Jimmy whines
    incessantly if you steal his taffy.  Old Dan, the town drunk, wanders about
    on his own personal quest for liquor.  Sheriff Argyle is a constant threat
    until you can escape town.
            Your own character is not the typical John Wayne western hero.  The
    story reveals that you're not a very good shot at all, and most other
    characters don't have a very high opinion of you.  It's also necessary to do
    some rather unkind things in order to complete the story.  (The scoring
    system reflects this by summarizing your exploits rather than using a point
    tally, and the effect is pleasing.)
            Although "Spur" is not a long game, it's a detailed one.  You're more
    or less free to do what you choose, with few messages to the effect that
    "violence isn't the answer."  Killing off other characters, though fatal, is
    a perfectly valid move (shooting Sarah's horse was particularly fun -- gawd
    I'm sick!).
            "Spur" is a fairly unique work of I-F, and a fine example of what the
    Hugo language can do.  I'm looking forward to more games from Kent Tessman in
    the future...as well as more Hugo games.

    Hugo File (.hex)

    Hugo Source (.zip)

    Square Circle
    From: Carolyn Magruder <carolynmagruder SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: Square Circle
    AUTHOR: Eric Eve
    EMAIL: eric.eve SP@G hmc.ox.ac.uk
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: TADS3
    SUPPORTS: TADS3 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/tads3/squarecircle/SquareCircle.t3
    VERSION: 1.0 (competition release)

    Score: 8 out of 10.

    "Square Circle" is a detailed, interesting game with a cunningly
    designed plot. Playing it without assistance from the walkthrough would
    be a task of several days due to the length of the plot and the
    difficulty of some of the puzzles (for me, at least; your mileage may
    vary.) The image of the world that it puts forward is both satirical and
    chilling. As the game begins, you awaken in a cell with instructions
    that inform you that you will only be released from prison if you
    successfully create a "square circle." Although "main character has
    amnesia" premises are becoming quite time-worn, this game handled it
    with elegant flair, and I was caught properly flatfooted by revelations
    related to the amnesia (though I suspect that speaks more to my lack of
    proper attention than to the game itself.)

    That having been said, I should admit that I relied heavily upon the
    walkthrough all the way through, which I blame partially upon myself but
    partially upon the author. I try not to spoil things in reviews, so I
    will be as vague as possible. There was a puzzle in the very first room
    that I did not get... and the HINT command completely failed to
    recognize it as a puzzle. This seems unfair; I gained points after I
    completed it, so I should have been able to get a hint for it. (It
    wasn't quite "guess the verb", but I took something for granted that the
    system did not take for granted, and confusion ensued.)

    I stopped using the walkthrough after a bit, and, lacking its advice and
    support, I then did something that I thought was a correct course of
    action. After a great deal of frustration, I returned to the
    walkthrough, and that is when I discovered it is possible to do
    something that puts the game into an unwinnable state without warning.
    As far as I could tell, I was stuck at that point until I starved to
    death. I didn't look forward to starvation. (There may have been a way
    out even then -- the author of this piece was obviously more cunning
    than I was. I didn't spend too much time looking for it, though.)

    Two puzzles seemed telepathic to me -- one was a "guess the verb"
    situation, while another required me to abandon the grammar I expected
    to need in favor of another grammar structure. (Something like "(verb) X
    on Y with Z at A" seemed like the most logical grammar to me, and what
    the game wanted was "(verb) X at A". I really needed the game to give me
    more information there.) One puzzle in a later sequence seemed
    transplanted from another game idea entirely, and it did not seem to fit
    with the "feel" of the game world to me. Aside from those objections,
    all of the puzzles seemed both fair and intelligent. Many of the puzzles
    apparently had multiple solutions, which impressed me appropriately. In
    a similar vein, it was apparently possible to end the game in more than
    one way, which I appreciated.

    Guess-the-verb and trouble with the hint system aside, I liked the
    interface a great deal. This game went out of its way to be as helpful
    as possible to the player. Among other commendable features, you could
    mouse-click your way through the help system, through exits from the
    room, and through footnotes. I'm not sure how much of the system was
    inherent to TADS 3 and how much was written by the author, but it was
    quite nice. The conversation system was both quite powerful and quite
    subtle. When I was conversing with the NPCs, the game provided me with
    the exact syntax I needed to do the things I already wanted to do
    without beating me violently about the head and shoulders with it.
    Serious kudos.

    Although the NPCs and the setting were quite interesting, there were a
    few peculiar flaws in the game world. Considering the game world in
    question, I really couldn't understand why one specific NPC hadn't been
    taken out and shot long ago, especially considering his proximity to an
    area where he would be particularly unwelcome. (I hope that was both
    vague enough to avoid spoilers and precise enough to make sense!)
    Another major figure in the game world also had an inappropriate name...
    to wit, "Dunderhead". I could see the name as a placeholder until the
    author gave him a real one, but having this jokey name in such a serious
    game was very jarring. Yes, the situation had elements of satire, but
    that pushed me past my limit in the issue. Maybe others won't react that
    way. I can't be sure.

    Despite excellent writing and a chilling world view, there was something
    about the game world that I found quite dry. I could certainly picture
    the areas described in the various rooms, but that was in large part
    because they were so generic in their description and flavor. (You've
    seen one forest, you've seen them all?) On the flip side, I have the
    feeling that many of the areas were *supposed* to feel dry and generic,
    and there were often some remarkably subtle shifts in scene and
    situation (for example, an area that changed its room description
    depending upon whether or not I was wearing something specific.) I'm
    torn between whether or not the generic nature of the area was
    intentional. It lessened my enjoyment, but it enhanced the message of
    the game. Hrmph.

    One last issue: I was disappointed to have the PC remain such an enigma.
    I wanted to know what he actually looked like -- "you look much as you
    always did" was a serious disappointment. I understood his political
    motivations by the end, and that was good, but I wanted to set those
    motivations aside and learn some more about the PC as a person. The
    hints of emotion were wonderful, but I wanted more!

    Directory with .t3 TADS3 file and walkthrough

    Starcross
    From: Stephen Granade <sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #1 -- May 15, 1994

    NAME:  Starcross                PARSER:  Early Infocom
    AUTHOR: Infocom                 PLOT: Excellent
    EMAIL:  ???                     ATMOSPHERE: -
    AVAILABILITY: LTOI 1            WRITING: Excellent
    PUZZLES: See Difficulty         SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
    CHARACTERS: Somewhat Weak       DIFFICULTY: Logical yet challenging

            In Starcross you play a black-hole miner who is captured by a
    drifting alien vessel.  You must enter the hulking ship and, once inside,
    figure it out in order to get home.  The game, written in 1982, was one of
    Infocom's early efforts; its parser lacks some of the nicer features
    incorporated later (I kept wanting to type 'g' for 'again').  The writing was
    very well done.  It presented the alien artifacts without making them too
    bizarre or cryptic.  The plot allowed for plenty of exploration, yet kept
    things moving towards the final goal.  The game's main weakness is its NPC's.
    Your ship's computer is mildly amusing, and the leader of a band of lizards
    reacts nicely to you; however, the other NPCs are not as well fleshed-out.
    My wildcard points went to the puzzles.  They are some of the most
    logically-presented yet challenging I have ever worked on.  The raygun puzzle
    and the force-bubble puzzle are two of my personal favorites.  It is an
    excellent puzzle-oriented adventure, one of the first "explore an alien
    setting" games.
            Starcross is available in Activision's Lost Treasures of Infocom
    package.  This repackaging has leeched much of the character from the
    original.  I found the hint book structure to be particularly annoying.
    Starcross is rather difficult and requires a lot of logical thought and
    experimentation to solve.  It ranks with some of the best interactive fiction
    games I have played.

    Solution (Text)

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

    NAME: Stargazer
    AUTHOR: Jonathan Fry
    EMAIL: jfry SP@G WOPR.skidmore.edu
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/stargaze
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    The author admits that this is a prologue for a much longer game, and
    as that it succeeds perfectly, with easy puzzles to set up Ali for his
    quest, and a limited area to explore at the outset.  The layout (a
    village with townspeople to interact with) reminded me of my own "Path
    to Fortune."

    Some clever, obscure name references, if you can find them (Keraptis,
    for instance, is the name of a winged beast from the "Pirates of Dark
    Water" cartoon serial of a few years back).  All in all, though, it's
    pretty standard fantasy stuff, remaining relatively enjoyable without
    breaking any new ground (or trying to, for that matter).  But given the
    current opinions toward D&D-based fantasy I-F, perhaps it's for the
    best that the game in its entirety was never finished.

    Directory With Inform .z5 File and walkthrough

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

      NAME:  Stationfall                  GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
      AUTHOR:  Steve Eric Meretzky        PLOT:  Detailed & developed
      EMAIL:  ?                           ATMOSPHERE:  Excellent
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 1               WRITING:  Excellent
      PUZZLES:  Very Good                 SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Very Good              DIFFICULTY:  Above Average

         The sequel to Planetfall, Stationfall takes place 5 years later.
    Sent in a shuttle on a routine bureaucratic errand to a local space
    station, you arrive to find the station deserted, a strange alien space
    ship in one of the docking bays, and mechanical devices behaving
    erratically.  You must discover what happened to the crew, and deal
    with the unknown threat before your limited supplies run out.
         Generally, the problem with sequels is that they are either a
    boring rehash of the original, or they are so completely different that
    they are sequels in name only.  Stationfall strikes a marvelous balance
    between these two extremes, and provides a quintessential example of
    what a sequel ought to be.  The old happy-go-lucky Stellar Patrol charm
    is still there, but it only partially covers a new and more somber
    tone.  Whereas in Planetfall, we see only empty buildings to show us
    that something is wrong, in Stationfall more grim clues show through
    the cracks:  bloody notes; log entries that break off in mid sentence;
    common household appliances that may blow up in your face, and strange
    sounds coming from the sealed off lower decks.  Where in Planetfall, we
    are able to undo virtually all of the damage in the end, in Stationfall
    all of the laughs can't change the feeling that somehow things won't
    work out so neatly this time, nor do they.
         The characters are few, but well developed, and disturbingly not
    always what you would expect.  The puzzles go beyond the normal Infocom
    style at points.  Deciphering ability will solve one, a trip to the
    dictionary may help with another.  A few are quite obscure, but
    generally even these have some clue, generally in the form of a piece
    of guesswork made by the former occupants.
         The plot is extremely well detailed, and pieces of it are hidden
    all over the station.  Some of the puzzles are almost as good as those
    in Starcross, but rather than being isolated, they all contribute to
    supplying a piece of the story.
         All in all, Stationfall is an outstanding blending of humour and
    suspense; puzzles and story.

    Solution (Text)

    Sting Of The Wasp
    From: Jess Knoch <jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: Sting of the Wasp
    AUTHOR: Jason Devlin
    EMAIL: jdevlin1984 SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 2004
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/zcode/wasp/wasp.z5
    VERSION: 1

    Overall: Me gusta mucho. A lot of fun to play, good characterization,
    great story, with room for improvement in certain areas.

    I think "Sting of the Wasp" (hereafter SotW) is the only "Interactive
    Damage Control" that I've played. It certainly seemed like an unusual
    premise: you've been caught in a compromising position, and someone took
    a picture. You've got to find out who and destroy the evidence before
    anyone has a chance to tell your husband.

    The game begins with a warning about the strong language and sexual
    references. I am almost universally in favor of these types of warnings,
    and I much appreciate being told about things like that ahead of time.
    The warning also says "Despite the first scene, this is not a
    pornographic game." That originally gave me a good deal of pause, but I
    decided to try it out anyway. It turns out to be mostly true: the game
    is not pornographic, but the first scene *is* -- or at least it's rated
    R. But none of that part is interactive, so those who are uncomfortable
    with such things can close their eyes until that first room description
    rolls around.

    The player character, Julia, is not the nicest person in the world -- we
    know from the first scene that she's having an affair -- but her
    personality is very distinct, and it is shown very well throughout the
    game. This description of her clothes says an awful lot about her:

       >x clothes
       Nothing but the best for you. Pumps from Prada, skirt by Yves Saint
       Laurent, a gorgeous silk blouse from the much-coveted Vera Wang
       collection which is currently hanging about your shoulders, exposing
       your three thousand dollar chest.

    The setting is the country club that the PC and her husband belong to.
    There are suspects everywhere -- apparently none of these people
    particularly care for the PC. Everyone is competing for status, snidely
    putting the PC down and trying to make each other look bad. Interaction
    with the NPCs is pretty thorough -- they even react (usually by making
    catty comments) to weird things you do as the PC, like search the
    bushes, or try to walk east when there is no exit that way. It's too bad
    the game doesn't recognize "talk to ", because that seems very
    intuitive and makes sense, especially given the special note in the help
    menu -- "talk to  about " *is* implemented.

    The hint menu has an attitude, which I like. The first hint I saw was an
    excellent one, which really gave me an idea of what I needed to do
    without making me feel like I had been told what to do. Unfortunately,
    not all of the hints were quite that helpful. For instance, a simple
    "Have you talked to Rodrigo" (names have been changed) doesn't do me
    much good if I don't remember who Rodrigo is, or know where he can be
    found. A different hint might tell me he's on the polo field (places
    have been changed), but if the only reference to the polo field I can
    find is a location titled "Outside Stable (next to the Polo Field)" with
    no mention of how to get there, then I'm still kind of lost. Especially
    since the game is pretty consistent about listing the exits in all the
    other rooms.

    Speaking of listing the exits... that brings me to the part of the
    review where I talk about the stuff that doesn't work so well in the
    game. There's one location that just flat-out lists the directions to
    other rooms wrong. It wasn't too hard to figure out, though. Worse was
    trying to figure out what to do when all of the hints said "don't
    continue until you've..." and I didn't qualify for any of them. A few
    misleading responses threw me off, like when I tried to take an object
    that I thought would come in handy (and indeed, was required to solve a
    certain puzzle): it said nah, let  take care of that. I
    didn't know I had to search for it before I could take it. I had just
    assumed if it was there that I would find it.

    I had a few troubles finding the syntax required for certain actions,
    but eventually (with the help of the hints) I made my way through the
    puzzles. And oh, what fun puzzles they were! If I have a choice between
    knowing what needs to be done but struggling with the syntax, and
    wandering around trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing,
    I'll take the former every day of the week. Still, I ran into trouble
    again when I needed to use the phone and the hints said "See 'Xavier
    won't let me use the phone!'", but I couldn't find any such hint. I
    thought I was in an unwinnable state, having missed my opportunity to
    use the phone, but it turned out I was wrong. The game was pretty
    forgiving, right up until the endgame, and I had plenty of warning that
    it wasn't going to be forgiving. I'm not sure how many times it would
    have taken me to solve that on my own, but I had the hints, and that
    took care of it nicely.

    But what about the story? you ask. It wasn't just all running around
    solving puzzles, giving x to y and unlock doors, was it? Well, maybe,
    but it didn't feel like that because of the characters. You see, in
    order to get what she wants, Julia (the PC) has to find out some secrets
    of the other people at the country club and exploit them. The parts that
    I started guessing ahead of time (like the two people I suspected were
    "an item") were very satisfying to confirm! Then I suspected that
    someone else was after someone else -- the whole thing was a cross
    between a soap opera, a detective story, and some type of show where
    you're the criminal and you have to cover your tracks. I can't think of
    what that would be. Anyways, I liked it.

    Oh, and SotW doesn't get full marks for writing/story because of some
    punctuation issues. Not a big deal, just something to clean up. I did
    give it full marks for entertainment/puzzles, because it was just that
    much fun to play through and figure out. Extra-fun, in fact.

    Directory with .z5 Zcode file and walkthrough

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

    TITLE: Stone Cell
    AUTHOR: Stephen Kodat
    E-MAIL: skodat SP@G blazenet.net
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/tads/cell/cell.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    Stone Cell is one of the most uneven works of IF imaginable. The game's
    world is complete and thoroughly rendered--yet many of the most
    important details either are inaccessible or require
    information-gathering techniques that I never ran across. Some of the
    puzzles are clever, but most are also so poorly clued that there is no
    way to solve them other than looking at the walkthrough. And bits of the
    writing are colorful and vivid, but long stretches are ludicrously
    turgid and overwritten. The overall impression is a game with potential
    for a terrific story, let down by poor game design.

    It appears you're a young girl, in a medieval village, who has appeared
    at church improperly attired and is facing imprisonment as a
    consequence--excessive, it seems, though the game never puts the excess
    in any sort of context. Beyond that, you understand very little at the
    outset: the game elects not to explain anything about the setting. This
    is actually an interesting way to immerse the player in the story, in
    that the action starts right away without explaining who or where you
    are, and leaves you to piece together the salient details. Realism
    suffers somewhat (i.e., when your character asks other people about her
    own basic biographical information), but not excessively so. And there
    are lots and lots of things to figure out--the game name-drops left and
    right, and you accumulate unexplained references much faster than you
    can ask people about them. The game fairly drips with information:
    virtually no scenery is left unimplemented, for one thing, and there are
    lots of doors that you simply cannot get through. The effect is that the
    game's world seems much larger than it is--you have the sense that you
    have seen only a small portion of it by the end of the game--which is
    certainly a nice touch. Unfortunately, the masses of detail available
    mean that it's easy to fail to discover something important, or to lose
    an important name in the shuffle--and even at the end of the game, I
    could not discern how I should have learned a few key bits of
    information. The author has taken care to make the world of the game
    complete, but it ends up being almost too detailed, with too many names
    to keep straight. Still, an excess of detail is arguably more
    interesting than an underdescribed game, and Stone Cell certainly does
    put together an interesting setting.

    Sadly, the puzzle-solving spoils the fun of the setting, by and large,
    by requiring mental telepathy on a grand scale. Particularly egregious
    in that regard is the dungeon cell of the title, which the author splits
    into nine parts, each with a one-line description--and a certain key
    object is hidden entirely, without even an oblique reference in the
    description that might lead to it. This is the most peculiar design
    choice in a game filled with such peculiar choices--the author's powers
    of description appear to be up to the task of rendering each portion of
    the cell vividly enough that the scene wouldn't be boring or
    repetitious. Indeed, it becomes apparent that there are quite a few
    things worth noticing scattered around the cell, and why the author
    chose to shortchange the descriptions is unclear. That poses one
    artificial barrier to solving puzzles, but there are others--you are
    supposed to sense, somehow, that you can signal a certain person a
    certain way from a certain spot in the cell, and how you know this
    remains a mystery to me. There is a measure of logic to most of the
    puzzles, but usually it's the sort of logic that is apparent only in
    retrospect--a player is unlikely to hit on most of the solutions other
    than by blind guess. (Particularly so in the case of the guardians that
    are distracted by a certain object; it is not apparent why those
    guardians react the way they do--or in the case of the solution that
    requires an adversary to be almost unfathomably stupid.) The unfairness
    of the puzzles detracts considerably from the effectiveness of the
    story, since most players will wind up relying heavily on the
    walkthrough. (A few of the puzzles, particularly the one where you open
    the door of your cell, are rather ingenious, though.)

    The writing occasionally works and more often is ridiculously overdone,
    as in the following passage when you emerge from your cell:

       During your time underground, time has passed as if you were here to
       witness it; the world has fallen into the drowse of deep night,
       without the least concern for your whereabouts. At this moment, a
       realization holds you captive: all shall continue as it always has,
       long after you have expired and returned to the loam.

    Or this, from the initial description of your cell:

       This is a sepulcher for the living. You are ensconced in the tomb
       where you shall surely perish, with no one to anoint your body, no
       one to assuage your throes, no one to hear your final lament.

    The grammar here is fine, and there aren't really all that many unneeded
    adjectives and adverbs, but the cliche and melodrama levels are
    painfully high--it really isn't necessary to hand-wring about the
    awfulness of your prison cell, or exclaim over your sudden discovery
    that the world goes on without you. The author here can put sentences
    together, clearly, but knowing when to stop is a problem. Some of the
    descriptions that aren't supposed to be fraught with melodrama are
    acceptable:

       >examine beams
       Hewn from trees felled on the surrounding hillsides. You used to run
       wild through those trees, on those rare days you'd complete your
       chores before nightfall.

    Nothing special, but it sets a scene and doesn't call attention to the
    writer unnecessarily. Stone Cell is a little too quick to ascribe
    emotions to the PC, and to maunder on about those emotions; the more
    restrained scene that leave the player to make inferences about the PC's
    feelings work much better. The other problem with the writing is that,
    in many cases, there's simply too much of it--some descriptions go on
    for more than 200 words, much more than necessary. Conciseness is a
    virtue in IF writing, and there's not a lot of it here.

    The story itself is uneven, in the end--the story ends up being about
    the feudal lord's family as much as yours, though the introduction made
    it seem like the focus would be injustice, as visited upon those in
    small communities who transgress in minor but symbolic ways. It isn't
    apparent at the outset that you should care about the details of the
    lord's family, in other words, and the game never really signals that
    the PC does care about said family. The author seems to have been so
    eager to develop the various narrative threads that he never got around
    to making any of them work as a story--why do you care about the
    internal politics of the castle (as you seem to), when you're a twelve-
    year-old? Depending on how you approach it, the failure here is either
    an incoherently written PC (who's a lot more worldly than she appears),
    or a backstory that didn't fill out the necessary details as it should
    have.

    Stone Cell is an interesting mess, in short--there's a whole lot of
    story running around with very little to tie it together, and the shape
    of the game is unfortunately provided by several badly done puzzles.
    There are clearly good intentions at work, though, and the setting was
    intriguing enough that I ended up giving the game a 7 in this year's
    competition.

    Directory with TADS .gam file and walkthrough

    Stranded
    From: Stas Starkov <stas_ SP@G mail.rb.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #28 --March 20, 2002

    NAME: Stranded
    AUTHOR: Jim Bayers
    EMAIL: bayers SP@G honors.arizona.edu
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (GNU General Public License Version 2)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/stranded.gam
    VERSION: 1.0

    What would you say if you saw a room description like this:

       Main Street
           This is Odduck's main street which is also Highway 13. Huge elms
       grow to each side, their leaves casting mottled shade on the
       pavement. It's safe to cross as there are few cars. Set in the center
       of the street is a manhole cover. From here, Main Street stretches
       east and west. To your north is the Odduck Diner, home of world
       famous jerked chicken. South of you is a park filled with trees.

    What was your first thought after reading the paragraph above? Let me
    guess -- you thought, "The author can't write at all". Yes, it's obvious
    that the writing is icky, that the sentences are put in the wrong order,
    that the sentences themselves are very short and unamusing, that ... but
    that's enough.

    And what would you say if you saw a whole game consisting of such
    passages? I can imagine your answer being short -- a four-letter word.
    :-)

    But I haven't told you all the truth. Those stylistic lapses were done
    deliberately! Why do I think so? Hmmm... Because it looks _too_ babyish,
    _too_ art brut, _too_ simple-hearted. But: "Stranded is an interactive
    game for educational use," the game author says. (Have you noticed the
    absence of the word "fiction"?) And believe me, he doesn't lie -- the
    game was _intended_ for a young, very young player. But the mere
    intention is not enough to make a good game, I think.

    I don't know much about nurturing children, but when I was a child, I
    read well-written books; they were true literature by true authors. And
    I've never read a book written by a child for children, but I'm aware
    that there can be other approaches to literature for children.
    Apparently, the author of "Stranded" took one of those other approaches.
    I think, during game creation, he was under the impression a child's
    book should express itself in baby-like language. Was he right? Do
    children enjoy the same lowbrow language that they talk themselves?
    Maybe -- I can't judge: I'm neither a child, nor a schoolmaster.
    Nevertheless, I can't disregard the game's language, because it's _me_
    who has to express my opinion of it (and the game in general), and it's
    _you_ who have to make a decision whether to play the game, or not, on
    the basis of that opinion.

    However, it's not as easy as you probably think. The game also contains
    graphics, which look as if made by a child. The pictures were not drawn
    by hand and then scanned -- rather, they were created with the aid of a
    vector graphic editor ("CorelDraw", I suspect). They are not ugly, but
    they are _intended_ to look like a kid's work: unrealistic perspectives,
    askew lines, flat two-dimensional depictions of 3D-objects. But wait --
    there is a style of art that uses this very approach. It is called
    "primitivism". The disciples of the style think that art must be
    uncomplicated and jolly.

    Primitivism is mainly a pictorial art, but when I look at the writing of
    the game I notice it's primitivistic, as well. Thus, "Stranded" is a
    work of primitivism. See -- the game is a work of art! But not everybody
    is ready to enjoy that art style. I wasn't, for instance -- to me, the
    writing seemed just ... umm ... not good. But I'm sure somebody will
    like the style, at least because it's so unusual.

    But let's go into further detail of the game.

    As I said, "Stranded" is intended for novice players, so there are not
    many puzzles or other challenges. The game is quite straightforward and
    easy: your protagonist -- a young pupil -- missed a bus in a small town
    called Odduck. Now he/she wants to leave the town to go home, or
    get back on his/her bus. And to do that, he/she needs money for a
    ticket. In such a situation, the only possibility is ... to find a job.
    To be more specific, he/she runs errands. All the errands are easy, and
    not very interesting.

    From a hardcore IF-player's point of view, the game's dialogue system is
    not done very well. It's menu-based, so you can choose one of its
    options at a time, but it also lets the player have the same dialogue
    again and again and again. Well, the usual graphic adventure features
    exactly this type of dialogue system, and children might find it more
    convenient; but again, I'm not a child, so I didn't like it.

    Some of the puzzles are purely educational, some didactic. That's good
    for a young player.

    The number of locations in the game is quite large, but the locations
    can be accessed easily and they look ... uhm ... bright. And the whole
    game is lighthearted. The town the PC gets stuck in is a big, sunny, and
    almost trouble-free place, inhabited exclusively by kind people. The
    town residents, who are speaking a funny vernacular, lead a peaceful,
    happy life. But the PC needs to get home. Like in real life.

    Unfortunately, I've found a bug in the game; it wasn't terrible, but it
    let me win the game without solving all the puzzles. I sent a note to
    the game author saying about the bug, and he promised that it will be
    fixed in a next version.

    Let me sum it up: "Stranded" is a short cushy game either for young
    novice players or for somebody who feels nostalgic about innocent
    childhood. Hardcore IF players probably will find the game weak.

    PC Executable

    TADS .gam file

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

    TITLE: A Sugared Pill
    AUTHOR: Colin Borland
    EMAIL: colin SP@G colinborland.com
    DATE: December 30, 2005
    PARSER: TADS 2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; Author's site or IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/pill.gam

    VERSION: 1.0

    Although A Sugared Pill has a few flaws, its story and its puzzles were
    interesting enough to keep me feeling involved all the way until the end of the
    game. It's worth a play.

    As the game opens, you are walking out of a social club, when suddenly a hit
    man tries to kill you. This is rather unexpected, since you are more or less an
    everyman character (or maybe an "everywoman" character, considering your
    character's taste for Whitney Houston). Anyway, your first job is to prevent
    yourself from being killed by the hit man. After that, you will naturally want
    to uncover the reason for your attempted assassination. By the time you solve
    this mystery, you will have gone through both the upper crust and the shady
    underworld of modern-day Scotland, and you will be in a position to stop the
    plans of your would-be killer.

    Certain elements of this game are rather impressive. At the bottom of the game
    window, there is an attractive, custom-built set of icons, telling you where
    the exits are, and giving you shortcuts for driving, walking around, and
    talking to people. Also favorable is the fact that many of the puzzles are well
    designed and satisfying to solve, and the story is likely to hold the attention
    of anybody who likes mysteries. There's also quite a bit of humor in the game,
    poking fun at bureaucrats, executives, security guards, and other components of
    modern-day society. For instance:

       The clerk opens a desk drawer and takes out a box of staples. He
       then fills in the relevant form, recording that he has done this.

    Unfortunately, the game also has quite a number of bugs. For instance, "open
    car" and "close car" doesn't work, while "close car door" actually produces an
    error message in some cases. There are also annoying aspects of game play, such
    as the fact that, in more than one case, you have to look behind objects in
    order to win the game, even though examining those objects gives you no hint
    that there is anything behind them.

    The worst aspects of the game involve puzzles that are harder than necessary
    due to flawed game design. A couple of such problems are created by the game's
    conversation system, which is not implemented in a consistent manner, thus
    making things harder than they should be. You can talk to characters using a
    number of methods, including (1) the traditional system of "ask," "tell," and
    "character, command"; and (2) the command "talk to character," which sometimes
    brings up a list of options and sometimes doesn't. The problem is, these two
    systems are not interchangeable. There is a case where you need to tell a
    character about something, but if you use the "tell" verb, you will never
    accomplish this. You must instead use the "talk to" verb. Then, after you've
    gotten used to the idea that "talk to character" is the primary format for
    conversation, it later turns out that there is a puzzle you cannot solve
    without using the "character, command" format; the ability to give the
    corresponding command is not available in the "talk to" conversation menu.

    Due to these problems, A Sugared Pill can be quite a frustrating game, and I
    probably wouldn't have solved it if I hadn't emailed the author more than once.

    On the other hand, most of the puzzles are satisfying to solve, and the game
    has plenty of funny moments. What's more, the game's story may well appeal not
    only to mystery lovers, but also to those who are interested in the author's
    ideas about a few things that are wrong with modern society. As far as I'm
    concerned, that makes A Sugared Pill well worth playing.

    TADS2 executable

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

    NAME: Sunset Over Savannah
    AUTHOR: Ivan Cockrum
    E-MAIL: ivan SP@G cockrumville.com
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/tads/savannah/savannah.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    PLOT: Intriguing (1.7)     ATMOSPHERE: Very good (1.5)
    WRITING: Mostly strong (1.6)  GAMEPLAY: Consistently good (1.6)
    CHARACTERS: Not many (1.3) PUZZLES: Some quite original (1.5)
    MISC: A genuinely innovative premise (1.9)
    OVERALL: 8.3

    This year's competition had a fair crop of "ordinary person doing
    ordinary things" games, for want of a better description, but few of
    them confronted the central problem associated with such games: how to
    make the game interesting, more than a collection of dull tasks. After
    all, if the player wants to relive the joys of washing dishes or
    finding phone numbers, in theory he or she doesn't need interactive
    fiction to describe it for him; a good work of fiction, interactive or
    not, manages to transport the player to another world, and one would
    hope that the new doesn't look exactly like the old. But Ivan
    Cockrum's Sunset Over Savannah is up to the task; the game give the
    player an apparently ordinary situation and invests it with unexpected
    life. Indeed, the goal of the story lies in the process of discovering
    the hidden wonders of your environment -- and the experience for the
    player may fairly be called unique.

    The initial premise of Sunset is unrevealing: you are on the last day
    of vacation from your office job, and you're discontented with your
    work and thinking of quitting. With no more direction than that, the
    game deposits you in front of the boardwalk in front of your Savannah
    hotel -- and it might seem that the background is a way to explain
    your presence before the real plot, yet to be discovered, starts. But
    if you assume that you'll encounter an adventure game with a little
    poking around, you're wrong, because that prologue really did give the
    plot: the key developments are all in your mind, involving your
    decision on whether to quit your job.  Handled poorly, this could be
    fairly silly -- "you find a brochure for a job on an ocean liner, so
    now you're thinking of doing that" -- but the beauty of Sunset is that
    the developments feel plausible. Mr. Cockrum employs an innovative
    device for keeping track of the internal action: a status line with
    your state of mind on any given turn. Some actions -- jumping over a
    railing and landing with a crash on the beach -- lead to temporary
    changes ("stunned"), and other developments are more permanent. And
    though many of the pivotal actions are far from ordinary -- some
    merely unusual, a few simply fantastical -- very little conscious
    suspension of disbelief is required, simply because the setting feels
    so real. Mr. Cockrum integrates the ordinary and fantasy elements
    skillfully: those parts of the story that go beyond ordinary
    experience are few, carefully chosen, and clearly surprise the
    player-character as much as the player. Just as importantly, those
    elements are out of your control and mostly independent of your
    actions, so the feeling of ordinariness juxtaposed with the fantastic
    is enhanced.

    The idea of tracking your feelings and making them central to the plot
    is original to this game, to the best of my knowledge, and Mr. Cockrum
    carries it off skillfully. The connections between your experiences
    and your corresponding thoughts are sometimes a bit forced; an
    experience involving a sand sculpture starts you thinking about the
    sculptor and his artistic vision about your job "and how infrequently
    it lets you pursue your own visions." And there is no real sequence to
    the required actions, though some inevitably come before others; the
    plot is not so integrated with the puzzles that certain tasks address
    certain moods. But one could argue that realism dictates against such
    manipulation -- the idea is supposed to be that you stumble across
    experiences that affect your thinking, not seek out those experiences
    in order to force a certain decision on yourself -- and the
    arbitrariness of the connections mirrors the arbitrariness of
    real-life decision-making, to some extent. Moreover, the plot requires
    a certain degree of aimlessness to be realistic; no one sets out to
    wander around a beach and pavilion with certain goals in mind, and
    though several of the things you need to do require more effort (and
    some semi-suicidal motivations in a few cases) than might be expected
    in real life, exploration and experimentation are what move the story
    along.

    The puzzles themselves are quite good -- few of them are very hard,
    though a few, as noted, require whimsy that borders on suicidal
    tendencies, and others require wanton destruction of property that,
    while unremarkable for an adventure game, break the feel of the game
    somewhat. I must admit that one puzzle, if puzzle it can be called,
    eluded me completely when I first played the game -- I didn't see any
    reason for doing one particular vital thing -- and the prospective
    player should know that logic occasionally yields to simple
    impetuousness for this particular player-character. That aside,
    though, there is plenty of creativity at work, particularly in the way
    you use the objects at hand to get around problems; the way you catch
    the crab is one of the more inventive puzzles in this year's
    competition.  The description-to-puzzle ratio of the writing -- the
    amount of text that is there simply to be read -- is unusually high,
    as might be expected, but that is hardly a drawback.

    The writing, for its part, is strong and descriptive, though
    occasionally Mr. Cockrum piles on a few too many adjectives and images
    at once. At one point, we are informed that "somehow this amazing
    spectacle has cut through your ingrained layers of cynicism to
    revitalize your waning belief in a world full of wondrous novelty."
    Er, maybe, but there are simpler ways to put it. And the tone wavers
    now and again -- at one point, the sun is described as a "fat, ripe,
    blood orange," inadvertently deflating (at least, I assume it was
    inadvertent) what was otherwise a picturesque description. A few flaws
    aside, though, Sunset is compellingly written: most events and
    descriptions are portrayed with a wealth of detail, consistently
    absorbing and almost never tedious. Some particularly strong examples:

        Pavilion
        You're standing in the center of a colossal gazebo that
        provides shade for sunburned tourists like yourself.  The
        octagonal floor is made of unbroken grey concrete, bordered
        on each face by a waist high railing.  Tall beams support a
        sloping wooden canopy that rises over three times your
        height.  A red brick enclosure squats in the southwest
        corner and a small snack bar nestles up against the
        enclosure to the south.  To the east lies the foot of a
        seemingly endless pier.  A number of wooden benches sit
        along the north face of the pavilion.

        Damp Sand, North of Pier
        The damp, hard packed sand is darkened almost to bronze by
        the relentless tide to the east, while to the west it
        lightens to a powdery gold before ending in tall dunes.  To
        the south, you can pass through the pylons supporting the
        long pier that stretches east from the pavilion.

    Though the writing in Sunset is not always as economical as it might
    be, the moments that get described with particular detail warrant the
    attention; the game's interest in detail mirrors the
    player-character's observations of the surroundings, and the
    circumstances justify more attention to the scene than your average
    passerby might give. Particularly effective in that regard is a series
    of random messages involving your scenery that recur now and again...

        A slight gust of wind sends eddies of sand swirling over the
        brick path.

    ...or...

        A young boy wearing a bright blue bathing suit and matching
        flip-flops runs by.

    ...which, though not precisely relevant to anything in the game, do
    plenty to set the scene. An extensive "fun stuff" section available at
    the end of the game testifies to the wealth of attention that went
    into writing Sunset, and there are many things in the game that reward
    curiosity, notably collecting the various shells and chatting with the
    old man.  Several line-break descriptions amplify the effect, notably
    this: "Grains of sand on the concrete floor twinkle as the light of
    the setting sun streaks through them at just the right angle." (And,
    naturally, there is humor here and there; hitting return without
    entering a command elicits one of the following -- "Beg pardon?",
    "What?", "Sorry?", and "Mumblemumble?", the latter of which amused me
    immensely.) Though there are several moments where text takes up at
    least a full screen, it is a tribute to the writing that those are
    highlights, invariably clear and vivid. In short, Sunset is
    well-written enough that even aimless wandering and experimenting
    feels intriguing; there are few games that can say that.

    Whether Sunset will appeal to a given player is, I think, largely a
    matter of taste; some might simply regard the subjective approach dull
    or mechanical, or find the story too aimless to be involving. My own
    enjoyment of the game no doubt owes something to my biases. But there
    is no denying the skill that Mr. Cockrum brings to bear on this game,
    nor how well it achieves its objectives, and given that and the
    novelty of the concept, I feel comfortable rating Sunset as my only 10
    in the 1997 competition.

    TADS file (.gam) (updated version)

    BinHexed Macintosh format (.hqx) (updated version)

    PC Executable (.zip) (updated version)

    Directory with TADS .gam file and walkthrough (competition version)

    Suprematism
    From: Mike Harris <harriswillys SP@G grandecom.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #49 -- August 18, 2007

    TITLE: Suprematism
    AUTHOR: Andrey Grankin
    DATE: February 3, 2007
    PARSER: TADS 2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/suprematism.zip

    In the non-IF world, Suprematism is a Russian art movement originated in 1915 by
    Kasimir Malevich during a very turbulent time in Russia's history.  It consists
    of bold geometric shapes such as squares, circles, rectangles and the like.

    Malevich's original Suprematist works were Black Square and Black Circle (1915),
    both featuring the eponymous shape on a stark white background; the viewer being
    meant to appreciate the strong contrast - a bold yet simple black vs white being
    allegorical for despair vs hope, confinement vs freedom, structure vs openness
    and so forth.

    Grankin has brought this artistic concept to IF.  The zip file contains two
    "games," black.gam and white.gam, the player being meant to contrast the two.

    As far as play goes - well, nothing really happens, as of course they aren't
    really intended to be games.  By intent, they don't respond to the usual typed
    control commands (e.g. quit) and must be closed through the interpreter.  One
    can get a feel for each module with just a few minutes of entering commands.

    It can't be easy to translate visual art to IF, but Grankin has done a
    creditable job.  That said, if one does not "get" Suprematism as an artistic
    style or has little appreciation for its cousins in the modern art world, one is
    unlikely to appreciate Grankin's IF creation.

    Out of 10 I give it a 1 for simplicity and 6 overall.

    Zip containing the two TADS 2 game files that make up the whole work

    Suspect
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME:  Suspect                      GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
      AUTHOR:  Dave Lebling               PLOT:  Good
      EMAIL:  ?                           ATMOSPHERE:  Not Bad
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI 1               WRITING:  Not Bad
      PUZZLES:  Very Good                 SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Very Good              DIFFICULTY:  Advanced

            In Suspect, you start as a reporter covering Veronica Ashcroft's
    halloween party.  When she is murdered in a back room, with some of your
    personal possessions found at the scene of the crime, you are the prime
    suspect (hence the name!), and you've got 12 hours to find the real killer.
            Suspect may be a victim of ratings inflation.  My numbers for it
    totalled 5.8, and assuming that 5.0 means an average game, this still
    indicates a pretty good effort.  However, it seems to be especially low for
    an Infocom game, though I didn't dislike it by any means.
            The puzzles are generally well done, but it suffers from a lack of
    vividness, and a lack of feeling that you're really there.  This problem
    afflicted some of Infocom's earlier efforts (except Planetfall which was
    extremely well written, and Suspended, where you really aren't there!), and
    their early mysteries in particular.  One problem might be that in several of
    the early Infocom games, there seemed to be a set of stock responses to
    various commands that stayed the same from game to game, while later on they
    began to tailor them from game to game.  For example, in many early Infocom
    games, if you try to enter something that you can't, you're told simply "You
    hit your head on the [NOUN] as you attempt this."
            Also, Infocom's early mysteries, which took place in a single private
    residence seemed to lack the sense of exploration and discovery that one
    comes to expect in an Infocom offering.  This is of course purely a matter of
    taste, and may not be experienced by a different player at all.
            All in all though, Suspect remains a very solid effort, and well
    worth a play through.

    Solution (Text)

    Suspended
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

      NAME:  Suspended                    GAMEPLAY:  Early Infocom
      AUTHOR:  Michael Berlyn             PLOT:  Save the World
      EMAIL:  ???                         ATMOSPHERE:  Changing viewpoints
      AVAILABILITY:  LTOI1, Sci-Fi Coll   WRITING:  Good
      PUZZLES:  Save/Restore              SUPPORTS:  All Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  All-Robot              DIFFICULTY:  Expert

         The implicit promise of a good adventure game is that the gaming
    experience is just like really being there, or as one of Infocom's
    early brochures put it, "It's like waking up inside a story."  In
    Suspended, the promise is broken, deliberately.  You aren't really
    there, and you don't wake up.
         In Suspended, you play the part of an alien being frozen in an
    underground cryogenic chamber that is part of an underground complex
    that controls the planetary weather control devices.  In the event of
    emergency, your mind (but not your body) is activated in order to
    coordinate repair efforts.  The main characters are your six repair
    robots; Auda, Sensa, Iris, Poet, Whiz, and Waldo (Where's Waldo?), who
    perform the game's vital tasks, and report to you what they see and do.
    Each one has different abilities (one can only see, one can only hear,
    et cetera), and must be directed by you to the point where they will do
    the most good.
         Suspended is a game that will appeal to some players and infuriate
    others.  It is the ultimate save/restore game.  It is flatly impossible
    to solve it on the first play through; you must acquire vital knowledge
    through failures before you can put it all together to be able to win
    the game.
         Also, simple knowledge is not enough.  The game works on a very
    strict time limit, and to win, you must not only know what to do, but
    be able to optimize the time it takes to do it.  Since the robots take
    time to travel through the complex, you must have the foresight to have
    them in the proper locations at the proper times, which means ordering
    them there earlier.  If you take too long, a team from the surface will
    enter the complex to take control from you.
         It might be best not to think of Suspended as a work of
    Interactive Fiction at all.  It is a pseudo-simulation game, written
    before software technology was developed enough to develop real
    simulation games.  It is a game for frustrated would-be air traffic
    controllers who enjoy coordinating multiple activities from a central
    location, much more than it is a work of fiction.  It is a game for
    people who like to play WITH games, not merely play them.
         To help you, the game supplies a game map (the only Infocom game
    apart from Seastalker to do so), and markers to track the movements of
    your robots.  The original edition gave a good, mounted map with rubber
    markers.  The thin-paper map included with Lost Treasures I is much
    more difficult to work with.  I haven't yet seen the components for
    Activision's new Science-Fiction Collection.
         The parser is one of Infocom's early ones, and is missing several
    convenient abbreviations that players will be used to.  Not merely "x"
    for examine, but also "z" for wait, and "g" for again are missing.  The
    very handy "Oops" feature is also missing.
         Suspended features three different levels of play, of increasing
    difficulty, designed to give the game more replay value.  It might not
    be the best computer game ever written, as Rolling Stone said in their
    review, but it is worth a look.

    Solution (text)

    Swineback Ridge
    From: Mike Harris <M.Harris SP@G spi-bpo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 -- July 17, 2006

    TITLE: Swineback Ridge
    AUTHOR: Eric Eve
    EMAIL: eric.eve SP@G hmc.ox.ac.uk
    DATE: May 8, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Swineback.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Eric Eve described Swineback Ridge as “a fairly easy, slightly tongue-in-cheek
    game that should provide brief amusement for an occasion when you're looking for
    an IF-Snack rather than an IF-Meal.”  It’s a well put together little game, no
    more than a diversion really, with no obvious or glaring bugs and fairly well
    written text.  The puzzles are straightforward and not terribly complicated;
    objects and functions are well implemented and despite its short length and
    relatively small number of locations it’s clear that it was no throwaway.

    The PC is a general with a sword and worn battle armor, who must defeat an enemy
    encampment across the river, and that’s pretty much all you need to know about a
    slightly hackneyed backstory.  The writing is well done which saves the game
    from cliché – “As you stoop over him, you recognize General Chorza, your old
    friend and comrade, who was meant to be commanding the army here until your
    arrival.”

    That said, such writing and the game’s subtitle - “A Desperate Battle” - is
    somewhat over the top for such a short game which somehow manages not to convey
    any desperation whatsoever.  To be fair, this may be the “slightly tongue in
    cheek” part of the author’s description.  If it’s meant to be taken at face
    value, however, extremely limited opportunity to interact with NPCs doubtless
    contributes to this lack of a sense of urgency, as does a lack of progression or
    “time passing” based on number of moves, which I half expected based on the
    premise and subtitle.  Nothing changes in the enemy camp except in reaction to
    the PCs actions.

    I can only speculate at the author’s intent but the game as it stands gives the
    impression – in its writing at least - that it’s a part of a much larger game
    yet to be fleshed out.   The simplicity of the puzzles is slightly disappointing
    and somehow unsatisfying given such florid verbiage.

    All in all, Swineback Ridge isn’t a bad way to kill an hour or so, but
    ultimately is no more than a simple object-puzzle game with a needlessly complex
    backstory.  On a scale of 1 to 10 I rate it a 3 in difficulty and a 6 overall.

    From: Emily Short <emshort SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 -- July 17, 2006

    Swineback Ridge is described by its author as snack-sized and light-hearted, and
    both of those are accurate. The premise isn't that funny -- you've been sent to
    lead your country's army in a last defense against the invading enemy -- but
    when you consider that this enemy worships the demon-god Malodor, it's hard to
    take the whole situation seriously.

    The puzzles are of moderate difficulty, and are quite well-designed: objects are
    reused in inventive ways; physical relationships are described clearly and make
    sense; there's plentiful feedback on partial solutions; all of the props have
    some logical in-game reason to be there. There were perhaps one or two points
    when it wasn't immediately obvious to me what I should try next, and the game is
    perhaps a little less perfect at articulating your goal at a couple of points
    than at prompting you through the puzzles once you've identified them -- but
    then again, I was never stuck for long, so I can't complain too much. Though
    I've seen the game described as Fantasy, there's nothing all that fantastical
    about what you have to do; if your enemies worship a strange deity, well,
    there's no clear evidence that he actually exists. The player's activities are
    non-magical; the puzzles can be solved through the application of real-
    world principles.

    There are admittedly a few points where, in order to make sure the player
    doesn't lock himself out of victory, Swineback refuses to allow an action purely
    on the grounds that the action isn't something you want to do at the moment.
    This makes the game easier, but diminishes the sense of immersion just a bit.

    This is a minor and perhaps unavoidable blemish on a charming piece, though.
    Swineback Ridge may not be terribly ambitious, but it has a focused story and
    tightly designed puzzles; it is also highly polished, with an adaptive hint menu
    and plenty of responses to unlikely actions. If you're looking for a puzzle game
    that you can play in an hour (or a little less), you'll probably find Swineback
    Ridge quite satisfying.

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

    (Disclaimer: in this review, I express a few rather daring speculations about
    the development process for Swineback Ridge, as well as about the motives behind
    its creation. It goes without saying these speculations are based entirely on my
    own opinion, and all I do describe is nothing other than my personal thoughts
    and impressions of the game; I also would like to apologize to Mr. Eve if they
    have nothing to do with reality.)

    By pure coincidence (and it really *was* coincidence -- somehow, I managed to
    remain unaware of Swineback Ridge author's name until I looked at the credits
    after starting the game) I reviewed another game by Eric Eve, All Hope Abandon,
    not too long ago. This fact undoubtedly left its trace on my impression of
    Swineback Ridge: it was as if Rolls Royce produced a subcompact. And by
    subcompact, I don't even mean a puppet doomed to become a cult object (like the
    new Mini), but a genuine mass consumption product -- pretty much the way
    Japanese cars used to be in the 1970/80s.

    Most of the things a reviewer could say about Swineback Ridge are covered in the
    game's own ABOUT section. From there, we can learn that this work was intended
    to a) be an exercise in Inform for its author, and b) provide a few (by my
    estimation, 30 to 60) minutes' amusement. It seems to succeed in both roles: I'm
    quite sure IF-authors having the skill and patience to polish their first
    attempt in an IF development system new to them to such an extent are in vast
    minority, and the game's entertaining value, albeit relatively modest, can't be
    denied, either.

    However, speaking objectively, the game's adequacy with the aims and goals set
    by its author doesn't save it from being totally unremarkable. Sure, it'd help
    you to while away an hour or so -- but after a few weeks, you wouldn't remember
    it.

    At this point, the reader could ask a completely justified question: so, why did
    I bother writing this review at all? Well, because Swineback Ridge is the
    perfect mass product, or very close to being it. To explain what I mean, let me
    refer to that example with Japanese cars again: they were supposed to transport
    a handful of people together with some luggage from point A to point B -- and
    they'd never let down their owners in doing so. Of course, things like the
    satisfaction of the drivers' ambitions, as well as driving fun were out of
    question -- but they weren't included in the contract, so to speak.

    And that's the case with Swineback Ridge: its author seems to have formulated
    his goals, and then has done everything necessary to reach them -- but not a jot
    more than that. This approach threads the whole game: for instance, there hardly
    is an object in the room descriptions you couldn't examine -- but none of the
    responses are particularly catchy; the puzzles are logical and make perfect
    sense -- but not a single one would evoke an "Aha!" feeling after being
    solved...

    In its current state, Swineback Ridge deserves a place in an IF textbook as a
    pearl of pragmatic game design. It embodies all aspects needed for a work to be
    of a high technical standard -- methodical pre-planning, consequent
    implementation, and thorough beta-testing -- but nothing beyond. Things that
    hasn't been invested into Swineback Ridge at all, or only injected in
    homoeopathic doses, are of the kind one can't learn from a textbook, anyway:
    fantasy, spirit, and ambitions (in a good sense). But hey -- they weren't in the
    contract.

    SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: Straightforward (1.1)
    ATMOSPHERE: The absolutely necessary minimum (1.0)
    WRITING: Even and solid (1.2)
    GAMEPLAY: Adequate, but nothing striking (1.2)
    BONUSES: Thorough implementation (1.2)
    TOTAL: 5.7
    CHARACTERS: The closest approximation were two corpses (-)
    PUZZLES: Well-clued and logical (1.2)
    DIFFICULTY: (Intentionally) pretty easy (3 out of 10)

    Zcode (.z5) game file

    Sylenius Mysterium
    From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998

    NAME: Sylenius Mysterium
    AUTHOR: C.E. Forman
    E-MAIL: ceforman SP@G postoffice.worldnet.att.net
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/sylenius/sylenius.z5
    VERSION: Release 1 (1997 competition release)

    [Because of the nature of Sylenius Mysterium, any or all of this
    review could be considered a spoiler. In addition, spoilers are
    present for "Freefall" and "Robots." You have been warned.]

    There seems to be this strange impulse in the text adventure community
    to recreate the experience of graphical arcade games using the
    Z-machine. The first evidence I ever saw of this trend was Andrew
    Plotkin's "Freefall", a z-machine Tetris implementation using realtime
    opcodes to reproduce the geometrical game with ASCII graphics. Others
    have followed, including Torjborn Andersson's "Robots", which
    recreates one of the earliest computer games, and a DOOM
    implementation which I haven't played. I have to say that this notion
    baffles me. When I first saw "Freefall", I thought it was good fun. It
    struck me as a typically amazing Plotkin programming exercise which
    showcased the versatility of the z-machine. But it didn't become an
    arcade staple on my machine. As a text adventure, it was pretty
    wild. As Tetris, it was pretty average. I played it once or twice to
    see what it could do, then deleted it. "Robots" I kept, but I don't
    play it.

    Now here's Sylenius Mysterium (hereafter called SM), the bulk of which
    is a textual emulation of a horizontally scrolling run-and- jump game,
    a la Pitfall or Mario Brothers. This kind of thing used to come up as
    a joke on the IF newsgroups from time to time, and now here it is, a
    real game.  Unfortunately, SM demonstrates the reason why those games
    were implemented graphically in the first place. Namely, it's silly to
    implement an arcade game in descriptive mode. ("You begin walking
    right." "You execute a running jump." "Beneath you is a low wall.")
    These types of structures are what graphics are best at doing, and
    they were being done 15 years ago.  It's both more fun and less
    confusing to see an arcade environment in graphics, and if even
    ancient computers are capable of doing so, what's the point of making
    a text adventure which simply produces an inferior copy of the
    original? Playing SM just made me wish that the author had sacrificed
    portability and implemented the arcade section in graphics.  Hell,
    even cheesy ASCII graphics would have made for a more fun experience
    than one long room description reading "A panoramic landscape,
    parallax layers of empty, ruined buildings, scrolling by with your
    movements." It seems to me that text is good at certain things and so
    is graphics, and to make a text version of Pitfall makes about as much
    sense as a joystick-and-fire-button version of A Mind Forever
    Voyaging. It's great to know that the z-machine has realtime
    capabilities to produce a text arcade game, but surely those
    capabilities can be put to better use.

    SM does have a prologue which operates in a traditional text adventure
    mode, and this section of the game is quite well-done, with the
    exception of a number of problematic bugs. The game does a very nice
    job of defining an engaging and convincing setting and characters, as
    well as creating a sense of nostalgia for the old gaming consoles. The
    Atari system was my first introduction to videogames that could be
    played at home, and I have many fond memories of days spent at
    friends' houses playing "Missile Command" or "Donkey Kong" or
    "Pitfall." In fact, the game evoked nostalgia so well that my
    disappointment was all the sharper when I realized that its "arcade"
    section was nothing more than realtime text.

    Prose: The prose in the IF section of the game was really quite
    accomplished, so much so in fact that it sent me to the dictionary a
    couple of times to confirm the meaning of unfamiliar words. All the
    game's elements, from the sterile quiet of a mall after-hours, to the
    almost exaggerated "skate punk" main character, to the loving
    descriptions of the old-time game consoles, were written in a style
    that I found quite rich and absorbing.

    Plot: The plot in SM is mainly a device to whisk the player to the
    arcade section. The plot of that section is (intentionally, I think)
    extremely pure and simple: find the bad guy and undo his evil deeds.

    Puzzles: Again, the puzzles outside the arcade section were few, and
    those inside the arcade section can't really be called "puzzles" in
    the traditional sense, though I would argue that the game does propose
    an interesting juxtaposition between the challenges of a Mario
    Brothers-style arcade game and IF puzzles -- the two are closer than
    they are sometimes thought to be. Those puzzles within the IF section
    were usually quite simple, though from time to time bugs arose that
    made the simplest actions seem unintentionally like puzzles
    themselves.

    Technical:
    writing -- The writing was technically excellent.

    coding -- Here there were a number of problems. I was keeping a text
    file of all the major bugs I found until I realized that the author
    had provided no email address (not even an anonymous remailer for
    comp97) to which bug reports could be sent. Suffice it to say that
    there were a number of situations, both inside and outside the arcade
    section, that needed much improvement. That being said, however, I'm
    willing to forgive quite a bit from someone who takes on a project as
    ambitious (even though I personally don't find it to be very
    interesting) as the arcade section of SM. That section suffers from
    game-killing bugs of the "FATAL: No such property" variety (or at
    least it does under WinFrotz), but the working sections of it seemed
    to work quite well, and I salute the serious effort it must have taken
    to create them.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and associated text files

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