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Game Reviews T

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The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date.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
    T-Zero
    Tale Of The Kissing Bandit
    Tapestry
    The Tempest
    The Temple
    Temple of Kaos
    The Terror of Mecha Godzilla -- The True Story
    Textfire Golf
    Theatre
    There's A Hole In Your Bucket
    There's a Snake in the Bathtub
    Threnody
    Till Death Makes A Monk-Fish Out Of Me
    Time: All Things Come To An End
    Time to Shine
    Tinseltown Blues
    To Hell In A Hamper
    TOOKiE'S SONG
    Toonesia
    Tossed Into Space
    Tough Beans
    The Tower of the Elephant
    The Town Dragon
    Tales of the Traveling Swordsman
    Trading Punches
    Transfer
    Trapped in a One-Room Dilly
    Travels in the Land of Erden
    Treasure
    Trinity
    Triune
    Tryst of Fate
    Tube Trouble
    2112

    T-Zero
    From: Neil Yorke-Smith <neilys SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    [Note: In the original version of Neil's review, the game's title was
    maintained in strict lower case -- "t-zero" -- after the game's own
    fashion of referring to itself. I've changed the case for the sake of
    readability only. --Paul]

    NAME: T-Zero
    AUTHOR: Dennis Cunningham
    DATE: 1991
    PARSER: Custom
    SUPPORTS: PC
    AVAILABILITY: Shareware ($20)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/t-zero.zip
    VERSION: 1.04

    T-Zero is an anomaly of IF. Released in 1991, after the heady Infocom
    days but before Inform and the renaissance of IF, T-Zero is a
    surprisingly modern game. Dennis Cunningham's puzzle-based work evokes a
    rich atmosphere in a land familiar and yet unknown.

    Cunningham sees himself as a programmer with literary leanings and -- on
    the evidence here -- succeeds in both. T-Zero runs as a stand-alone DOS
    game, released in full as shareware.

    "An Adventure for the Time Being", the subtitle, sums up the story.
    T-Zero is an adventure game. A literate, immersive piece of IF, but
    foremost an adventure game. The player-character must locate six objects
    "scattered across ages and landscapes", objects which are to be
    transported "somehow...to progressively future time zones where they can
    right the troubled times." Echoes of other games, such as Level 9's
    Lords of Time, and premonitions of Nelson's seminal Curses and Jigsaw.
    (Cunningham had hoped to quote extensively from T.S. Eliot -- compare
    Jigsaw -- but permission was not granted.)

    As the subtitle also suggests, time is the motif running through the
    game. Time and words, although there is much more going on than
    chronological word-play. A typical example is this extract from the
    opening:

       It's just as well that you were dismissed from the museum--your
       duties as combination custodian and librarian involved either
       re-shelving books and dusting off clocks or rewinding timepieces and
       dusting off books. However, you were onto something.

    An ex-libris librarian, then, the PC has an account to straighten with
    the mysterious owner of the museum (a museum devoted to time,
    naturally), Count Zero. Just what the Count is up to, and how the
    troubled times might be righted, is pieced together as the game
    progresses.

    As the game opens, the status-line, in addition to the usual location
    and score, reads "6:00AM * Day 1 * Present"; there is a strange compass
    in the initial inventory. It is clear that the PC could be visiting time
    zones other than the Present. Indeed, once inside the museum, there is
    time for the Past, Present and Future...and beyond.

    While T-Zero is not overly large, much more exploration is required than
    in other games of a similar size. Time is realistically modelled (how
    could it be otherwise?); each move takes five minutes of game time. The
    world reflects the current time: the sun rises and sets, hours are
    chimed, and so on. Exploration is also necessary since some objects do
    not appear at once and some actions must be performed at the right time
    -- although precise move-counting is uncommon.

    The writing is strong, often thematic. Responses defy the conventional,
    sometimes cheerfully breaking mimesis, but always seem appropriate (try
    'g' or 'turn'-ing a fixed object). A favourite is the response to a word
    not understood by the parser, "That word comes from an unknown realm."
    Cunningham is not afraid to impose his eclectic world upon the player
    and the effect can be entrancing:

       Moebius Strip.
       The racing strip here twists in on itself to form a continuous band
       without inside or out. Contenders, defying gravity, adhere to the
       track whether right-side up or upside down.

       There are a tortoise and a hare here. The hare is running moebius
       strips around the tortoise which assuredly continues with measured
       progress.

       > get hare
       You miss by a hare's breadth.

    T-Zero is impressive technically, particularly considering that it was
    written without the aid of an authoring system. Unlike some stand-alone
    games, the parser is well up to Infocom standard, handling full
    sentences and even genuine adjectives without a murmur. Cunningham
    appears to have implemented an object system of sorts: the parser knows
    that poppies and marigolds are both types of flowers, for instance.

    Most interesting are the meta verbs that become available later in the
    game: 'find', 'where', 'copy' and 'imagine', the latter which "allows
    [the] player to 'visualise' unencountered objects or locations."

    The parser does not pretend to understand more than it does -- which is
    commendable -- but can lack synonyms and, if rarely, lack objects
    mentioned in the room descriptions, which is less commendable. It can
    become confused between verbs and nouns, for instance with 'lever' and
    'plant', and plural objects must be referred to as 'it', not 'them'.

    Version 1.04 of T-Zero is available on the IF archive. The interface has
    all the conveniences expected: command history, scripting, customisable
    colours. Function keys are programmable, the arrow keys can be used to
    enter directions, standard short-cuts (except 'z') and undo all work.
    Cunningham has added some neat touches, too, like an inline menu for
    disambiguation and selection, and careful use of colour.

    The puzzles, on the whole, are not hard in themselves provided the
    language, time or popular culture references are familiar; the game has
    built-in context-dependent hints. However, a certain amount of waiting
    around and verbal dexterity is required, and I found the insight for
    some of the puzzles slow in coming. When the insight comes, the
    consequences can be delightful. There is a well-signposted maze early in
    the game, one which exhibits Lewis Carroll-like qualities.

    On occasion, I was reminded that the game does not neatly sit in the
    Infocom tradition. Exits, to take one example, are not consistently
    listed in room descriptions because an 'exits' verb is provided instead.
    The descriptions thus seem more natural and concise, at the cost of the
    repeated use of 'exits' when first exploring. Increases to the score, to
    take another example, are signalled as default by a small tune, not by a
    textual message (although of course the status-line changes).

    There are three main criticisms that can be brought against T-Zero. The
    first is that the expectations of contemporary IF have shifted from
    those of the early 1990s. Death, for instance, can occur instantly
    without warning in the most unexpected ways. While UNDO will remedy the
    situation, such happenings only irritate. Similarly, some puzzles (to my
    mind) assume too many Americanisms. And finishing with full points is
    harder than it ought to be. The player has a Bill of Rights, remember?

    The second criticism is that sometimes Cunningham's world is too
    detailed. The PC has a limited carrying capacity, as do all the
    containers to be found. Objects in or on another object are tediously
    listed (sand in an egg timer, for instance). The world seems rounded and
    understanding -- but too easily the parser is seen to be lacking real
    knowledge. None of these things is wrong by itself but their cumulative
    effect can become tedious.

    Finally, on occasion, Cunningham over-reaches himself. While not quite
    guess-the-verb, the syntax to perform a desired action can be elusive: I
    found the moebius strip infernally demanding, for example. While often
    delightful, the linguistic ingenuity can be frustrating and the parser
    trying (no more trying than Inform or TADS, it should be added). When it
    works, however, the game works splendidly.

    It's unclear whether the author is still accepting registration for
    T-Zero. Various email addresses are given in the documentation, but a
    search of the web reveals no homepage. Other shareware IF from the time
    -- see the review of Humbug in SPAG #11 [or, indeed, in this very issue!
    --PO] -- has now passed into the public domain.

    T-Zero is an anomaly. Although not to the liking of everyone, definitely
    recommended: it is, arguably, a piece of modern IF before the modern
    era, so always lacking the full attention it deserves. An unusual game,
    unwittingly reflecting its unusual place in the history of IF.

    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G pangea.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    One day, about 10 years ago I found myself ready to give up on my amber
    colored IBM XT. Maybe it was the flicker of a screen too old to be any
    good, or the speed of a processor so slow that words didn't appear until
    10 seconds after I was finished typing, but I'd finally had enough and
    was getting ready to get rid of the old hunk of junk.

    My real lament was that outside of some word processing and spreadsheet
    programs, there was really nothing I could do with my old XT. So, I
    explained my dilemma to a programming buddy and asked for a little help.
    He promised he would download a few games for me off a local BBS and
    when the disk finally arrived it turned out to be only one game and
    something called a "text adventure" to boot.

    Now I was sort of familiar with text adventure games, as I had played
    the Zork trilogy way back in the early 80s, but what I was unaware of
    was that the quality for most shareware games produced during the early
    nineties was very low (relative to today, at least). It was a stroke of
    fortune then, that my friend downloaded for me the competently created
    T-Zero.

    T-Zero chronicles the bizarre plight of a recently fired and evicted
    Museum custodian who is charged with figuring out what his former
    employer and game antagonist Count Zero is up to. The story starts off
    with you waking from uneasy dreams with the realization that you were
    onto something incriminating about the Count just before he fired you.
    The bulk of the game then revolves around you trying to get back into
    the museum to rediscover what exactly it was that you'd latched on to.
    It's a simple premise to get started on that eventually turns complex,
    with bit players galore, conspiracies, plans for anti-utopic world
    domination, and time travel to a past and future world vastly different
    from the one you started out in. Confused yet? Well there's more afoot
    here than a simple time travel game where the same room's locations
    change to reflect your temporal journeys. The plot goes from the
    mundane, to the prehistoric, to an Orwellian nightmare with landscapes
    that are as evocative as So Far's surreal worlds but held together more
    succinctly, with the common thread of slightly familiar settings that
    change notably over different time periods. Here for example, is a
    sketch of a sawmill described in the present, past and future:

    Present:

       Abandoned Mill
       Yellow dew-drenched mushrooms pop through the scattered timbers and
       redwood sawdust that mark the site of an abandoned mill.

    Past:

       Sawmill
       You've lumbered onto a mill with a conveyor belt that lazily leads
       under whirring sawteeth.

       Since all the forests you've encountered in this era have been
       characterized by immature growth, you vaguely wonder about the
       purpose of the mill.

    Future:

       Gristmill
       Although nothing is being ground here, a host of befuddled joggers
       relentlessly power a series of studded treadmills. Their emaciated
       bodies suggest that they are attempting something more than mere
       exercise.

    That's some pretty awesome prose in my opinion. The beauty of
    Cunningham's writing style is that it's so economical, with nary a word
    wasted. His room descriptions give the reader enough information to
    accurately describe the setting and mood, while leaving a good part of
    the surrounding scenery to the reader's imagination. The only criticism
    about these beautifully rendered scenes is that Cunningham seldom if
    ever puts in exit descriptions. I've always found that writing exit
    descriptions tends to break up the flow of a room description, and
    certainly, one of the reasons I think I enjoyed T-Zero's prose as much
    as I did was because of the lack of phrases like "There are exits
    leading east, north, and southwest," tacked on to the end of each
    paragraph. Having said that though, take a look again at the text in the
    preceding sawmill description. Do you have any idea how to exit this
    location? Yeah, me neither. One of the real drawbacks of T-Zero is that
    you'll probably have to try all 8 cardinal directions upon entering each
    new room (until you become more comfortable with landscape), and that
    can be a real pain; especially in a day-and-age where we would expect
    exits to appear in every room description. A small quibble however, and
    it does very little to detract from this game.

    The prose was also particularly good when it came to NPC dialogue. The
    NPCs by-and-large tend to be pretty one dimensional in terms of their
    conversation. More often than not you'll get responses like,
    " is too preoccupied at the moment." when you ask a question.
    But when you find a conversation topic that the character has something
    to say about, the responses are typically witty and reflective of the
    absurd nature of the NPC and the game's surroundings. Here's an example:

       > Ask Prufrock about Count Zero
       "My former Prince seems to be intent upon squeezing the universe into
       a ball and rolling it towards the future without regard to who's
       flattened in the process. I'd like to see his head, grown slightly
       bald, brought in upon a platter."

    What's more, the principal NPCs, like many of the game's items, are
    "reusable", which is to say that you need to utilize their skills on an
    ongoing basis at different points in the game.

    The fabulous prose also fleshes out what is in essence a big
    house-o-puzzles-type game, making the substantial differences between
    the game's diverse surroundings seem, well... almost seamless. The puzzles
    themselves are genuinely hard. Not many of them are unfair, but there
    are 3 or 4 incredibly obscure puzzles, that will probably irritate you
    to no end. One of them revolves around a Nord-and-Bert-style
    turn of phrase, a culturally biased colloquialism; another two involve
    some extremely suspect lateral thinking; and finally there's an
    ultra-obscure puzzle centering on a reference to a Beatles song that I
    didn't get until I saw Oasis do a cover version a few years back. By and
    large however, the puzzles are well done and integrate effectively with
    the story. All the puzzles are clued (Hmmm... I won't say well-clued,
    because not many of the solutions are exceedingly obvious) in one way or
    another, with a huge emphasis placed on the way object, dialogue and room
    description text is worded for some of the tougher puzzles. In fact,
    word association may be a good exercise when you find yourself stumped.
    Among the more standard-type puzzles there are some interesting spins,
    with perhaps the most novel maze I've ever seen (It's actually a
    pleasure to map out once you find the key), the most original key I've
    ever encountered, and some great lateral puzzles that involve actions in
    one time period affecting the landscape of another.

    The game's objects are also many, varied, and interesting. Some of the
    more notable ones include items that enable you to look at your
    surroundings as they're presented in the future and in the past, which
    results in a few hilarious descriptions like this one: "It's a good
    thing you're merely looking into the past because if you were actually
    present, you would be impaled on the sharp point of a... etc.", and
    objects that speed up, distort, and even reverse the flow of time (the
    status line in this game takes one heck of a beating!). There's also a
    huge amount of reusability with the game's items with an adventurer's
    backpack full of many, apparently single-use, items that can be
    transformed or broken apart to form other important items. If that isn't
    enough, still other items have interesting mechanics or physics all
    there own, and I often found the experimentation process with these
    items to be as much fun as solving some of the more satisfying puzzles.

    So, to wrap up: T-Zero is a well-crafted game in almost every sense. In
    fact, considering the production date of this game (way back in 1991), I
    was surprised to find how easily I felt it could rival some of today's
    better games in terms of story, puzzles, and game design. Now, that's
    not to say that it doesn't suffer from typical problems associated with
    shareware games of that era, because at times, it most certainly does.
    I've already mentioned the problems with listing exits in room
    descriptions and one-dimensional NPCs, but there are also problems with
    the parser handling very few synonyms, and the parser demanding exact
    and complex syntax for what should be very easy commands. The game
    unfortunately can also be put into an unwinnable state in many
    situations without player notification, and I can't begin to imagine how
    frustrating it would be for a player to make it all the way to the
    game's end only to realize that something crucial was rendered
    unattainable near the game's beginning. Still, there are more than
    enough user-friendly player aids to make up for these shortcomings. As
    the game progresses, new verbs may become available to you such as
    "WHERE" (a command which lists the last place you left an object once in
    your possession) and "FIND" (a command reminiscent of the "GOTO" verb
    from Irene Callaci's Dangerous Curves, that effectively puts the parser
    on autopilot until you've reached the destination you just typed in.)
    Similarly, the parser is extremely helpful in pointing out where it
    didn't understand your message, with menus to help choose between
    ambiguous objects and arrows pointing out the parser's problems with
    your commands. Here are a few examples:

       > Get go
         ^   ^
       Please one action at a time

       > Get xyzzy
             ^
       That word comes from an unknown realm.

       > Drop book
       You possess more than one of those. Please choose between them:
          > Scarlet book.
          > Tan book.
          > None.

    All this, and with a parser that appears to be home-brewed to boot! Wow!

    All I can say is I was lucky that T-Zero was the first shareware
    text-game I played. T-Zero spoiled me, with its nifty puzzles, beautiful
    story, and delicate prose, and in a way I've been looking for that same
    playing experience ever since (and, I've of course found it on occasion
    :). You can imagine my chagrin when a few years later, I found the IF
    Archive and began playing the easily executable crop of AGT games, and
    found them nowhere near as entertaining, challenging, or playable. On
    that fateful day when my friend downloaded T-Zero, imagine what path my
    life may have taken had he instead given me a copy of Space Aliens
    Laughed at My Cardigan. I'd probably be homeless and penniless on the
    street as I write this!

    PC game files (.zip)

    Solution

    Tale Of The Kissing Bandit
    From: Adrian J. Chung <ajchung SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #29 -- June 20, 2002

    NAME: The Tale of the Kissing Bandit
    AUTHOR: J. Robinson Wheeler
    EMAIL: rob.wheeler SP@G stanfordalumni.org
    DATE: February 2001
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.plover.net/~emily/smoochie/bandit.zip
    VERSION: Release 1 (SmoochieComp original)

    Oh this is sweet -- a delightful little story of a night of adventure.

    You play a mysterious secretive character who steals kisses from women
    caught unaware. The whole game is like this. Well, most of it. Really.
    Go play it if you have 5 minutes to spare. The game is as compact as it
    is amusing.

    The light-hearted mood is sustained by excellently conceived prose
    heavily peppered with overt prompting to move the player along. I found
    myself using verbs I would never think to use in any other game. There
    are no puzzles to speak of and the story is very much on rails after the
    first few rooms. It never ceases to amaze me what can be accomplished
    with such sparse geometry, objects, and NPC interaction -- a sign of
    very effective writing.

    And lastly, if you haven't done so already, play through "Shade" (Zarf's
    Comp 2000 entry) prior to this one for maximum effect. That should quiet
    any feelings of missing out that those who're not ifmud regulars may
    have.

    .zip package with all SmoochieComp games

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

    NAME: Tapestry
    AUTHOR: Daniel Ravipinto
    EMAIL: ravipind SP@G linux.kirbynet.lafayette.edu
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/tapestry
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    This is the first one I played (if that makes a difference).

    I loved the writing in "Tapestry," particularly the purgatorial prologue
    scenes.  Vivid and absorbing, the prose makes you feel, which is rare
    for I-F.  The author of this game seems to have put the most effort into
    his writing of any of the Inform entries, as indicated by the fact that
    it's both the longest Inform entry and one of the shortest actual games.

    The depth comes from the "fiction" aspect, not the "interactive" aspect.
    All the interactive scenes are short and small and offer relatively
    little room for experimentation, since the major choices you must make
    are limited to one of two paths.  Still, I'm a sucker for multiple
    endings.

    Most surprising to me: Neither of the paths is decidedly "better" than
    the other.  Doing what the web-weavers say changes nothing, but gives
    Timothy an impression of strength and willingness to accept what has
    been done.  Doing what Morningstar says is right always ends in someone
    else's tragedy.  Yet the insightful, non-judgmental epilogue makes
    either choice feel proper in the grand scheme of events, adding depth to
    the otherwise simplistic plot.

    All in all, a nicely polished entry, with imaginative characters, and
    a story that could do with perhaps a bit more overall interactivity.
    Daniel Ravipinto is either a new author to watch closely, or a
    pseudonym, and if he's the latter I'm dying to know his true identity.

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

    PLOT: Simple but effective (1.3)         ATMOSPHERE: Not much (1.3)
    WRITING: Quite good (1.5)          GAMEPLAY: A bit clunky (1.1)
    CHARACTERS: Sketchy (1.1)          PUZZLES: Few (0.8)
    MISC: Ambitious, not wholly successful but interesting (1.8)
    OVERALL: 7.0

    Daniel Ravipinto's Tapestry is the sort of game that can really only
    be done once: any imitation would lose the impact that the original
    had. It tries to do something, moreover, that very little IF tries to
    do--defend a position--and if the overall experience isn't entirely
    successful, the player should at least recognize the novelty of the
    ground it's breaking.  Though less a game than a philosophical
    position, Tapestry does what it sets out to do reasonably well; it
    didn't, however, make a persuasive argument as far as I was concerned.

    The basic idea is relatively simple: you play a man named Timothy
    Hunter who has died, who meets one certain personage offering a choice
    and then three others who offer two more choices, distinctly
    contrasting, and who is given the option to replay key scenes from his
    life and reconsider certain moments. The choices--you discover this
    immediately, so I don't feel that I'm giving much away--include your
    decision to attend a key meeting to help a client when your mother was
    dying, your decision to kill your wife when she was suffering from a
    painful disease, and your failure--it's hard to construe it as a
    decision--to avoid a pedestrian in the car accident that ended your
    life. You are given three choices; I won't spell them out, but they
    hinge on changing the events as opposed to changing what you make of
    them.

    It may fairly be said that the game element of Tapestry isn't
    extensive; there aren't really any puzzles, and what there are, I'm
    afraid, mostly derive from choosing syntax or figuring out fairly
    specific responses that the game demands. There's one moment in the
    second scene where I knew perfectly well what I wanted to do but
    couldn't figure out the precise wording, and the hint menu didn't
    help. In that respect, Tapestry might work better as straight fiction
    than as IF: giving the story its own pace, rather than tying its
    advancement to figuring out actions, might have made it more
    powerful. (Though the game is technically proficient in several
    respects--the hint menu adapts to your situation quite skillfully, for
    one thing, and the situation changes to block off certain paths in
    subtle but effective ways.) At any rate, the game element is good
    enough to tell the story/make the argument, which is all that's really
    needed.

    The nature of the paths you're given and of the way the game treats
    them makes it reasonably clear that there's a "right" way, and two
    "wrong" ways, to go about this; the game locks you into your path once
    the choice is made, and the eventual consequences and the terms in
    which the games sums up your decisions at the end leaves little doubt
    about that. While I don't dispute the logic or philosophical force of
    locking you onto your trajectory, on the game's terms, it does limit
    the realism element somewhat; in theory, you might have learned from
    one experience and want to take a different sort of path at the next
    decision point. At the very least, having to play through the thing
    when your decisions are foreordained--when the game is simply waiting
    for you to input the correct things, not giving you choices as
    such--is a bit frustrating; I'm not really sure whether it would have
    been better to let it all scroll by than to provide the illusion of
    interactivity. It also limits the realism of it all somewhat to
    suppose that, if certain key life decisions were changed (and these
    are about as key as they get), everything that follows would have
    turned out the same, or sufficiently so that your decisions aren't
    changed. Even if the game is more an argument than a real-life
    depiction, these things affect the persuasiveness of the argument;
    when the author is both setting a somewhat contrived scene and staking
    out a position that depends on it, it feels like he's stacking the
    deck.

    I bring all this up because, on the terms that the game presents them,
    one can't really argue with the "right" choice; the others are laden
    with awful consequences and negative adjectives. But it's not clear at
    all to me that this is a fair depiction of the choices; at the very
    least, I think I could rewrite key moments of the game without
    changing the basic plot or structure to make either of the other two
    plots the preferable one. The game didn't, in short, convince me that
    my choice was actually justifiable or correct, merely that the author
    wanted me to know that he believed it was. That's interesting, in its
    way, but not very persuasive.

    My main problem with Tapestry, in short is one that I can't really
    blame the author for, as such, but it impeded my enjoyment of it
    regardless: there was no path that actually reflected what I, speaking
    for myself, wanted to do. I should probably say that I'm a
    moderate-to-conservative Christian with very definite ideas about what
    would or wouldn't imperil the state of one's soul, and it's not at all
    the author's fault if the game's outlook leaves me a little cold. That
    said, though, I found a certain incoherence in Tapestry; the ending
    struck me as so nihilistic that nothing that came before really seemed
    to matter much. I can't really explain without spoilers, but suffice
    it to say that all the endings seem agnostic--if not outright
    atheist--about the protagonist's ultimate fate, which made all of the
    foregoing feel a little hollow. Put another way, the game stacks the
    deck again, by making it seem as if everything depends on your
    decisions but not actually giving you much difference in the
    resolution. The author is, of course, free to say all this, but
    implicit in the nature of the argument is that the player has to
    swallow the author's entire worldview, not simply look at the validity
    of what he's saying. And as I resisted accepting the author's
    assumptions, the story didn't work very well for me.

    Tapestry did, I must admit, make me think about the situation it
    presented; it was hard for me to give a clear answer regarding what
    I'd do (besides "not do the things in the first place") because it's
    such a bizarre situation and because the terms aren't spelled out very
    clearly.  Am I actually reliving my life? If not (as noted above) how
    could it be that I can change parts of it and not change the whole
    thing? There are Christian arguments for all of the positions, but I
    found that the weakest ones were for the path that the author clearly
    preferred, which struck me as interesting. It could fairly be argued
    that I should have seen where things were going from the beginning and
    qualified my objections, and I did have a sense from the first quote
    and from the identity (which I did get, along with the Trinity
    reference) of the first NPC. But I still think there's an incoherence
    in setting the one figure against the other three, since they come out
    of specific traditions that presuppose specific things, and putting
    them together just never feels like it makes a lot of sense. More
    accurately, I don't think the first character really belongs in the
    game, at least not in the role he inhabits; the author is free to
    rethink the real nature of that person, of course, but the rethinking
    isn't well enough developed for me to buy it. I don't, in other words,
    think that the presence of that specific character makes any sense
    outside a certain context; it may be a product of my biases, but those
    specific biases are not uncommon in the world.

    Despite my differences with it, though, I must grant that Tapestry is
    a well-written and, mostly, well-crafted work, with plenty of thought
    behind it. Whether or not I agree with the views expressed in
    Tapestry, I look forward to future works by Mr. Ravipinto.

    Directory With Inform .z5 File, instructions, and walkthrough

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

    NAME: The Tempest
    AUTHOR: Graham Nelson
    E-MAIL: graham SP@G gnelson.demon.co.uk
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform, sort of
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/tempest/tempest.z5
    VERSION: Release 3

    PLOT: Um...borrowed (1.0)     ATMOSPHERE: Not bad (1.2)
    WRITING: To the extent that Graham wrote it... (1.4)
    GAMEPLAY: Clunky (0.7)
    CHARACTERS: Fine, but borrowed (1.0)
    PUZZLES: Few, not very good (0.6)
    MISC: Brilliant idea, execution so-so (1.3)
    OVERALL: 5.6

    Of the 1997 competition entries, among the most memorable, and the
    most ambitious, is Graham Nelson's "The Tempest" -- but it may also be
    the hardest to rate. Certainly, the extensiveness of the Inform
    hacking is impressive, and the sheer concept of adapting a drama and
    making it interactive is novel -- but the game does not, in truth,
    meet all the challenges the task presented.

    For the few who don't know: this is an adaptation of Shakespeare's
    "The Tempest." Your role is that of Ariel, the fairy servant to
    Prospero, the protagonist of the play, and you must complete a series
    of missions given you by Prospero to (a) move the plot along and (b)
    win your freedom. The text of the play is virtually all there within
    the game, and, essentially, when you do something right, the play
    moves along; you're given a series of situations within the play where
    the action stops, in a sense, and you need to do something to restart
    it. After the first scene, you can never make the game unwinnable; you
    can take as long as you like to hit upon the right thing to do to move
    things along, and no one will complain. The responses to your actions
    are written entirely in Elizabethan, perhaps the best part of the
    whole thing for me; an unrecognized verb elicits "That instruction,
    that verb, doth elude me," and "get violets" brings this response: "I
    pluck me nodding violets from this darling bed." Swearing will yield a
    rich variety of insults, including this: "Mind thy tongue, thou
    paunchy pottle-deep plume- plucked strumpet!" There is, in short, wit
    aplenty.

    There are also, however, some serious problems. Your required actions
    are not always obvious, even with a copy of the play in hand, and
    there is no walkthrough or hint system to help you along. Though there
    are very few puzzles as such -- though one, requiring that you unlock
    a cabinet, is rather confusing and frustrating -- simply figuring out
    how to do whatever Prospero has commanded often takes considerable
    guesswork. Limiting the difficulty somewhat, though hardly in a
    positive way, is the small set of commands that the game recognizes;
    once the player figures out the 10 or 15 actions that are helpful, the
    experimentation required for any given problem is reduced
    somewhat. The problem remains, though; a bottleneck at the very
    beginning, in the form of actions that require some intuition even for
    those who know the play, makes the difficulty of the whole enterprise
    obvious. Other problems abound -- at one point, even though you can
    fly, you are required to swim, not an obvious turn of events. The one
    significant puzzle requires such trial and error that it breaks the
    spell, so to speak, in that the other characters involved never
    comment on your presence. And translating some of your tasks into
    interactive-fiction actions sometimes results in some strange
    creations, notably three homonculi that you carry around.

    Nelson takes considerable care to make this a performance of the play,
    not an innovation on it. Most obviously, you are prevented from
    speaking your own words -- you cannot ASK a character about anything
    -- though Ariel will speak lines at the appropriate time,
    independently of you. This isn't generally a problem -- it would
    confuse things if you tried to interact with most of the characters
    anyway -- but given that there are scenes and actions added that
    aren't Shakespeare's, it doesn't seem that a few questions to Prospero
    (with the responses described rather than recorded -- "he tells you
    that...") would break the spell. True, the game does have a note on
    each character available when you type the name at the prompt -- but
    there are other things that bear explanation. The desire to avoid
    dialogue that isn't Shakespeare's is understandable, but it shouldn't
    override the necessity that a player understand what's going on.

    Also problematic is that some of the action does not actually turn on
    anything Ariel does, meaning that, in some cases, _very_ lengthy
    stretches of text go by before you get a prompt again -- which isn't a
    problem the first time, but might be if you have to replay that
    section for some reason -- and in other cases, you set off a scene
    merely by walking into a room. And in a few cases, though your action
    does trigger the advance in the plot, the connection feels a bit
    strained -- and it's those cases where what's required of you is
    particularly hard to guess. Ariel changes shape now and again, as the
    play dictates, but the way you prompt them -- when you do; sometimes
    it just happens -- feels random and impossible to guess.  Though these
    problems speak to the difficulty of the project, it is undeniable that
    Tempest is not, for all its charm, a particularly playable game.

    Even so, I enjoyed the experience -- though, I must say, I enjoy
    Shakespeare as a whole, and being thrust into the middle of the play
    was entertainment enough for me. Simply having a setting to match and
    make sense of the action was in many cases helpful and illuminating --
    it made sense of the plot in a way that Shakespeare's stage directions
    sometimes do not -- and the cut scenes that happen in response to
    certain actions give the player a sense of how the story
    progresses. And even though there is a feeling of being distinct from
    the play, in that the prompts only come when the action stops and you
    have to restart it, that does reinforce the sense that you're
    controlling the events on the island and the various characters are,
    in a sense, puppets. Of course, your ability to manipulate them is
    severely limited by the plot of the play; there isn't much real
    freedom to test your power. But the sensation is interesting all the
    same.  I found the "performance" genuinely involving in a way that
    simply reading the text could not reproduce. The sequence of events is
    variable, to some extent -- certain scenes can be triggered at
    different times -- but never, as far as I can tell, can you delay or
    speed up an event in a way that doesn't make sense. And whatever the
    other faults of Tempest, it must be conceeded that Nelson's
    Elizabethan is outstanding; even the most mundane responses are
    written convincingly.

    The difficulty remains -- how to rate this? Though the gameplay
    limitations of Tempest are considerable, they are there for a valid
    reason, not simply inadequate coding -- and, as such, I decided they
    shouldn't count too heavily aganist the game. Though it doesn't "work"
    especially well, the concept as put into practice works about as well
    as it could, and the author should get some credit for a worthy
    effort. I gave it a 7 on the competition scale, and think that a few
    minor changes -- like the addition of a hint system, ideally in
    Elizabethan -- could make this one highly enjoyable.

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

        "Yet look, how far
        The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow
        In underprizing it, so far this shadow
        Doth limp behind the substance."
                             -- William Shakespeare
                         The Merchant of Venice III.ii.126-129

    The Tempest attempts a great deal, and achieves much of it despite
    being somewhat flawed. The work presents itself not as a game, but as
    an "interactive performance" which asks the player to perform as the
    magical will of Shakespeare's Prospero, guiding the spirit Ariel
    (a.k.a. the parser) through the plot of The Tempest (the play), though
    not necessarily in the order in which Shakespeare wrote
    it. Remarkably, this complicated positioning of subjectivity works
    quite well (and opens some unexplored territory for the mixing of
    first, second, and third person forms of address in IF). It is blended
    with a new approach to dialogue which prevents the player character
    from speaking at all but presents many screenfuls of dialogue between
    other characters (and sometimes including Ariel himself), the
    exchanges broken up by pausing for keystrokes between each character's
    lines. In a sense, the player's commands to the parser become
    essentially stage directions issued to an onstage persona via a
    magical conduit. This idiom also works beautifully, bestowing the game
    with a powerful aura of theatrical performance. The Tempest is
    entertaining and innovative; it often feels quite magical to inhabit
    the Prospero/Ariel connection, and to take part in a groundbreaking
    interactive experience. I think that the game also has great potential
    as an educational tool, allowing readers to experience Shakespeare's
    language in a new and thrilling way.

    All this being said, however, the Tempest is not without its problems.
    Actually, perhaps the game just has one major problem which manifests
    itself in several ways. Although the game does an excellent (sometimes
    astonishing) job of rearranging Shakespeare's scenes and lines to fit
    the interactive mode, the fit is not perfect. Several times during the
    game I felt faced with responses which, if not complete non sequiturs,
    were certainly only tenuously connected to the command I had
    typed. Tempest wrenches in bits and pieces of dialogue from all over
    the play for various purposes, pressing them into service as room
    descriptions, parser rejoinders, and other sundry purposes. Sometimes
    they are perfectly suited to their purpose and sometimes less so. When
    I was on the wrong end of this continuum, my relationship with the
    game became strained -- the parser's responses were beautiful, but
    didn't make enough sense, and not because of any opacity in the
    Elizabethan English. This situation creates a problem with the game's
    puzzles: usually interactive fiction prose can be written in such a
    way as to suggest subtle hints to the problems facing the
    player. However, when control of the prose escapes the author, those
    hints become harder and harder for a player to come by. It is to this
    difficulty with the prose (and, of course, to the lack of any hint
    system or walkthrough) that I ascribe the problems I've seen players
    having, often with the very first puzzle of the game. With a typical
    piece of IF, the game could simply tailor its responses to help the
    player along -- the Tempest often achieves this goal, but all too
    often it falls short.

    Plot: I predict that a certain contingent of voices will raise the hue
    and cry over what they perceive to be the Tempest's lack of
    interactivity. I wasn't able to finish the game in two hours (far from
    it, in fact -- I got only six points, another example of an excellent
    competition game which breaks the two-hour rule), but the parts I saw
    made it pretty clear that the game leads you along rather carefully
    from one plot point to the next, allowing for very little
    branching. My own opinion is that this structure is not a problem --
    after all, the piece bills itself as "more a 'performance' than a
    'game'," and as such it's perfectly appropriate for the Tempest to
    enforce a certain degree of rigidity to accommodate the exigencies of
    its plot. In fact, what this achieves is the inclusion of a much more
    complicated plot than is common in interactive fiction; by limiting
    the player's ability to affect the narrative stream, the game allows
    the complexity of Shakespeare's plotting to shine through even in this
    challenging new form. I'm satisfied with the trade-off.

    Prose: I suppose this is where I ought to weigh in on the debate over
    the originality of a work like the IF version of the Tempest. It's my
    opinion that the IF Tempest is absolutely a different piece of work
    from the Tempest, the play. Yes, the author uses almost the entire
    script of the play, but I would argue that such usage is not
    plagiarism, because whatever Shakespeare's intentions, I think it's
    safe to say that the play was not written to be adapted into
    interactive form. Consequently, I don't see the IF Tempest as any less
    an original work than Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility or, for
    that matter, Shakespeare's MacBeth (whose plot was lifted from
    Holinshed's histories.) Yes, the seams do sometimes show between the
    author's additions and Shakespeare's text -- these are the work's
    weaker moments. However, in judging the Tempest's prose, I judge not
    the quality of Shakespeare's writing, but the quality of its usage in
    its new medium -- on that basis, more often than not, it succeeds.

    Puzzles: As noted above, this is where I identify the major weakness
    of the Tempest. [SPOILERS AHEAD] I cite as an example the first puzzle
    of the game, where Ariel must blow a storm to upset the boat and set
    the plot into motion. The reason that players are finding this puzzle
    so difficult is that it requires rather close knowledge of the play
    (and not just of the play's first scene), which most players, even
    very well educated ones, are not likely to have at their
    fingertips. No hint is given of Ariel's powers or of his purpose in
    regard to the ship. Now, in a typical IF game, there might be a
    sentence or two in the introductory paragraph which introduces the
    idea and sets players on their way. However, because of the
    constraints imposed by using a collage of prewritten text, these hints
    are unavailable and thus players flounder in a
    "read-the-playwright/designer's-mind" sort of puzzle. It won't be the
    last time.

    Technical:
    writing -- The prose did an excellent job with handling a number of
    difficult technical tasks with regard to writing and using Elizabethan
    English.

    coding -- I found only one bug in Tempest (at least, I think it was a
    bug), among a thoroughly reworked library of Inform responses and the
    introduction of a number of excellent devices for the presentation of
    dialogue and clarification of the plot.

    Inform file (.z5)

    The Temple
    From: Mike Russo <russo SP@G its.caltech.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: The Temple
    AUTHOR: Johan Berntsson
    EMAIL: temple SP@G ramsberg.net
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/temple/temple.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Hoary as the genre is, I'm a big fan of Lovecraftian horror, and The
    Temple manages to nail the obscure sense of existential menace that
    makes it work; the city it depicts feels almost like a living thing,
    aged, decrepit, and full of hate, although the descriptions do provide a
    few moments of unintentional hilarity (the "irregular-sized basalt
    blocks of irregular size" spring to mind). Though there are no elements
    that are specific to the Cthulhu Mythos that I could detect, the
    dream-world setup echoes the best of Lovecraft's work, and while
    Charles' longing for his lost love seems more out of Poe than anything
    else, it certainly adds a welcome complexity to the theme; there's hope
    as well as despair, which makes the ultimately positive ending fit the
    story better than it would in a straight Lovecraft pastiche.

    I enjoyed the puzzles and felt them to be generally well-integrated,
    although that could reflect my own bias in favor of messing around with
    rituals. I did need to consult the walkthrough at one point, since
    knowing how much Lovecraft liked cats, I hadn't thought of throwing
    things at the one in the game, but for the most part there were enough
    clues to know both what to do next and why it was important.

    The inclusion of an NPC in the same situation as the player was a nice
    touch, permitting a few fun puzzles that required teamwork, and cleverly
    allowing the author to play up the horror of the situation without being
    forced to manipulate the player too heavy-handedly. I did run into one
    fairly significant design bug -- Charles helped dig me out of a cave-in
    after I opened up a portal and sent him back to his own time! -- but
    aside from that, the game was quite solid.

    It's true that The Temple isn't fleshed out as completely as it could
    have been -- leaving plenty to the reader's imagination is a critical
    part of Lovecraft's style, but it still would have been nice to know
    more about the presence trapped in the vial, or have a better idea about
    where the cultists generally got their victims -- and the puzzles
    generally feel lightweight -- boiling two powders together isn't quite
    as eldritch a ritual as I'd have liked. But it succeeds quite well at
    evoking and sticking to a mood, and presenting gameplay that fits that
    mood admirably.

    Rating: 7

    Zcode .z5 file (updated version)

    Directory with zcode .z5 file and walkthrough

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

    TITLE: Temple of Kaos
    AUTHOR: Peter Gambles
    EMAIL: peter.gambles SP@G admin.ox.ac.uk
    DATE: October 2003
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads2/templeofkaos
    VERSION: Version 3.3.1 (competition release)

    Most of this game's text is written in a rhyming verse that many will
    doubtless find tiresome, but that I actually liked. The sparse, tortured
    syntax captured the feel of the piece quite well. However, it did cause
    a bit of a problem when unaltered library messages were encountered. And
    even when the messages were altered there was some evidence of
    sloppiness, as when a message says you're alone even when you're not.
    But such things remained minor annoyances and overall the text flowed
    smoothly.

    The story, on the other hand, often went in fits and starts. The game
    follows an inverted logic (candles that take in rather than produce
    light, etc.) that can be maddeningly difficult to unravel. While
    checking the clues sometimes provides an "aha!" moment, just as often
    the feeling is more along the lines of "well I wonder why _that_ would
    work?" On the plus side, the game features a unique (as far as I know)
    dual scoring system and a simple yet shrouded back story that I found
    fun to unravel.

    Overall, your mileage may vary, but I found Kaos an enjoyable pastime
    and would recommend it to anyone willing to enter its skewed vision.

    Directory with TADS2 .gam file and hints

    Textfire Golf
    From: Francesco Bova  <fbova SP@G pangea.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #25 -- June 20, 2001

    NAME: Textfire Golf
    AUTHOR: J. T. Adams AKA Adam Cadre
    EMAIL: ac@adamcadre.ac
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    VERSION: 1.01
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/golf.z5

    Do you know why you don't see any extremely tall golfers on the PGA
    tour? Sure there are the odd anomalies, but by and large most
    professional golfers are under 6'2'' (and over 90% shoot right handed,
    but I won't get into that). The reason: Tall golfers have more in the
    way of mechanics that they have to get right to hit a ball properly.
    Because their arms and legs are longer, and correspondingly the arc of
    their swing is bigger, the distance traveled from back swing to contact
    is longer and more can potentially go wrong as the clubface approaches
    the ball. As a result, any mistake (i.e., opening up the club face too
    much) during a tall golfer's swing is magnified to a much greater extent
    than it would be had the golfer been shorter. Having said that, if a
    taller golfer gets all of his mechanics in place correctly, then the
    resulting swing should produce a much better drive, all things being
    equal, than that of a shorter golfer because of the extra power provided
    by the increased leverage of the golfer's longer arms and body. The net
    effect of this concept is that good shorter golfers should be more
    polished and consistent than good taller golfers, but when taller
    golfers get everything done correctly, they should be able to produce
    better individual results than shorter golfers.

    Strangely enough, this concept parallels many an IF piece (nice segue,
    eh?). Before we look at the comparison, let's start with a little IF
    theory. The larger the IF game, the more rooms and more objects to
    implement, and the greater the combinatorial explosion. What it means to
    a game designer is this: Every time you add one object to the game, you
    have to consider how it may need to interact with every other object in
    the game. In essence, by adding one object you're potentially DOUBLING
    the number of interactions that may need to be allowed (or disallowed,
    with appropriate "you can't do that" messages).

    An example of how this can be a problem crops up in one of the largest
    IF releases in recent memory, The Mulldoon Legacy. Mulldoon is a game
    that taxes Inform's memory capabilities with an incredible amount of
    rooms and objects. Although still impressively good, the problem with
    its first release was that players tried to utilize obviously single-use
    inventory items in logical ways, even though the author hadn't accounted
    for all the possible uses of the many items in his game. And, in a few
    cases, alternate solutions were found that were never intended by the
    author. This lead to a bit of frustration on my part, although once I
    thought about it, the sheer task of trying to come up with all the
    possible combinations in a game like Mulldoon would be quite difficult
    even for the most experienced author.

    The point is that the bigger the game, the more little oversights and
    errors can be magnified into bigger ones and, much like a tall golfer's
    swing, can cause adverse affects that affect the bigger picture. Suffice
    it to say that bigger games that are technically competent and
    consistent deserve much praise due to the sheer difficulty of reducing
    this combinatorial explosion. The combinatorial explosion (or lack
    thereof), is also the reason why I would expect a higher degree of
    polish for a smaller game and be much more critical of such oversights.

    Textfire Golf is a fairly small game and so, keeping my previous
    opinions in mind, I would expect a high degree of polish (not as nice a
    segue, I know, but I've been trying to work that golf analogy into a
    review for, like, ever, and this seemed an appropriate place to do it).
    To be honest, I would expect a high degree of polish anyway because of
    the name in the authorial credits, so it was no surprise that Textfire
    Golf impressed me in many ways.

    A halfway Z-abuse (not completely ASCII art-based like Z-snake, for
    example), Textfire Golf also incorporates an interesting storyline for a
    quick 9-hole game of golf. What makes this game really work though, is
    the arcade-like feature of being able to control your ball's pace and
    trajectory. This is done with a power meter that you stop with a press
    of the space bar, and a trajectory meter that will result in you
    slicing, hooking, or driving dead center. The method follows the
    standard arcade power and trajectory meter pretty faithfully, and is
    certainly an improvement on some of the older style golf games I've
    played (the one I'm thinking of involves pushing a little white ball set
    in the arcade's console, which gave the player little to no control over
    the ball's distance and direction).

    The course itself isn't too difficult to play, and with the benefit of
    the UNDO command you can always go back and retry a stroke if you've
    made a mistake (if only it were that easy in real life). I actually
    would have preferred it if the author removed the UNDO command, just to
    keep us a bit honest. It would have, at the very least, provided me with
    more incentive to replay the game in an attempt to get my score a little
    lower. For players who only play the game to fiddle with the golfing
    interface, this is especially true. Still, even with the UNDO feature
    enabled, there are many reasons to try replaying this game as there are
    multiple endings that take into account almost every contingency you can
    think of (i.e., hitting your ball out of bounds 20 times in a row, or
    putting with your driver). I came up with roughly 16 endings myself, but
    I'm sure that there are more I didn't find.

    The fiction side, as is typical of a Cadre game, is well written with
    witty dialogue and Mr. Cadre's trademark snarky parser. The best bits of
    prose for me came from your foursome's bastardized golfing lingo and
    constant cheap shots. Here is a typical example:

       Ted's ball sails over the bridge and lands on the far side of the
       lake.

       Ed taps the ball off the tee and onto the fairway. "You do realize
       that if you keep us here till eleven it's coming out of your pay,"
       Ted points out.

       Fred shanks the ball into the lake. "Maggie, call Aquaman!" Ted
       yells.

    Although interaction with the NPCs is limited (all you can really do is
    ask your caddy for a certain club type), the interaction with the game's
    environment is surprisingly rich, as the author has allowed for many
    common golfing actions (common cheating techniques for example), and
    some not-so-common actions that generate some interesting non-default
    responses. Each hole is described creatively as well, and that's more of
    a challenge than you'd probably think considering most golf holes have
    similar types of scenery.

    The storyline also proves to be more substantial than its initial
    premise of a simple foursome of golf. You play the part of Ned, a lowly
    hack who works for a construction company and wants to play with the big
    boys. When an opening in the usual foursome appears, you're invited to
    play and with the invitation comes an opportunity to assert your
    position within the company's hierarchy. What may get lost while you're
    enjoying the mechanics of swinging your golf club and taking in the
    beautifully described scenery however, is that there are lofty issues
    afoot with the PC. Ned, as it turns out, is a character fraught with
    insecurity; so much so in fact that his constant overanalyzing leads to
    an abnormal inability to act. In this respect, he reminded me of the
    2000 XYZZY-award-winning PC from the 2000 IFComp game Rameses. When I
    played through Textfire Golf I could see shades of J. Alfred Prufrock's
    quote, "Do I dare to eat a peach?", creeping into the protagonist's
    mindset as his constant self-critiquing leaves him unable to act, and
    this was similar to my playing experience with Rameses.

    Comparing Rameses' protagonist with Ned, the big difference is that
    while both are overanalytical in their mindset and are therefore unable
    to act proactively, the Rameses PC WILL NOT act regardless of what the
    player types. This essentially relegates the player to the role of
    conscience or voice of reason that the protagonist refuses to listen to.
    Ned, on the other hand, can be broken out of his cocoon to do just about
    anything. Also, unlike the Rameses PC where the failings of the
    protagonist are specifically driven by his own inabilities, Ned seems to
    have a streak of bad luck working against him that affects him
    regardless of his actions. Of the 16 or so endings I found in the game,
    none were positive (although it may be the case that I never saw the
    optimal one). It's as if the golfing gods are punishing him for having
    the hubris to elevate himself above his current place in the corporate
    chain.

    Hmmm... maybe I'm overanalyzing a bit. I suppose it could also be the
    case that Ned's just unlucky and a bit shy. Also, keeping the author's
    previous works in mind, there seems to be a real trend towards more
    realistic endings as opposed to the overly happy, utopic ones. The
    comment here may be that Ned was naïve in the first place to think one
    golf game could change his future. Whatever the case, Ned is an
    interesting PC to be sure, and more than I expected considering this
    game was initially labeled a Z-abuse.

    OK, I think I've said enough. Let's wrap this baby up. For you golfing
    fans, I think you'll get a real kick out of Textfire Golf and it's novel
    golfing interface, and for everyone else, the dialogue and scenery
    descriptions coupled with a more-than-skin-deep NPC are worth the time
    it takes to download.

    Golfing score: BIRDIE

    DOS executable (.exe)

    Inform file (.z5)

    Theatre
    From: Gareth Rees <gdr11 SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

      NAME: Theatre                           PARSER: Inform's usual
      AUTHOR: Brendon Wyber                   PLOT: destroy the evil
      EMAIL: cctr120 SP@G cantua.canterbury.ac.nz, brendon SP@G caverock.co.nz
                                              ATMOSPHERE: Lovecraft horror
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive             WRITING: good spelling, no style
      PUZZLES: good                           SUPPORTS: Infocom ports
      CHARACTERS: not convincing              DIFFICULTY: easy

    [This review contains some plot details, but spoils no puzzles.]

    The introduction to "Theatre" explains that you are an estate agent,
    trying to sell an old run-down theatre in a slum area of town.  It is
    late in the evening, and you're in a hurry to see off the buyer and set
    out to the opera, when you remember that you left your pager in the
    basement.  After collecting it, you discover that your car has been
    stolen, and a nasty thug turns up to make sure that you don't wander
    off.  It looks as though you're going to have to spend the night in the
    theatre unless you can find a phone and call the police.

    You have to play through the above.  It takes a minimum of about ten
    turns, but it feels very forced because the game won't allow you to
    explore until you have finished the opening, and the "You can't do that
    yet, because that would be contrary to the plot"  messages come thick and
    fast.  Perhaps the author could have found a more natural way to
    restrict access to the rest of the theatre until the opening was
    finished.

    After the opening, the game becomes much wider.  You explore the haunted
    theatre, at first in search of a way out, and then in search of magical
    items necessary to thwart a certain evil power.  You find yourself
    collecting the scattered pages of the 1898 journal of Eric Morris, the
    man who drew the architects' plans for the theatre, which gradually
    reveal a tantalising story of how he fell in love with Elizabeth, a
    mysterious and beautiful woman who persuaded him to alter the plans in
    nefarious ways.

    My first impressions were very favourable.  The developing plot was
    intriguing, and the atmosphere well-judged.  I imagined that the focus
    would be on some tragic and melodramatic incident in the history of the
    theatre (perhaps, I speculated wildly, this would be a jealous rivalry
    between two leading actors over a woman, or a spurned prima donna who
    killed herself).  The puzzles were logical and not over-hard, and the
    programming was excellent: almost everything I tried produced an
    intelligent response, and there were never any problems guessing verbs.
    The developing journal entries kept me interested in looking around for
    more.

    If anything lets the game down, it's the quality of the prose, which
    feels as though it has been very hastily written, without much attention
    to grammar.  There are few memorable or vivid descriptions, and lots of
    clumsy phrasing.  This is a particular problem with the journal entries,
    which have an unfortunate Adrian Mole tone.

    However, the game becomes weaker as it progresses.  The early sections
    are original and interesting, but there comes a point where the game
    loses its atmosphere and becomes a standard fantasy set in
    H. P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu" mythos.  A couple of scenes (the monster in
    the library and the rats in the tunnels) feel as though they could have
    been lifted straight out of Infocom's game "Lurking Horror," also based
    on Lovecraft's books.  The interesting exploration eventually comes to
    an end with the disappointing realisation that this has been a simple
    treasure hunting exercise: you have to find a collection of colour-coded
    jewels of power and leave them in the correct place.

    The author explained to me that because of time constraints, he hadn't
    been able to spend as much time on the ending as he would have liked.
    "Theatre" certainly feels as though it reached a certain point and then
    was finished off in a desperate rush.  There are many loose ends: for
    example, it is hinted that there is a cellular phone in the theatre, but
    this never materialises.  Some of the closing scenes are very
    unfortunate: for example, the appearance of Elizabeth near the end
    completely spoils the characterisation of her that was established
    through the journal.  It's very disappointing that there is no real
    attempt to link the plot with the potentially interesting milieu of
    early twentieth century theatre.

    I don't want to sound too negative.  "Theatre" is excellent when
    considered only as an adventure game, with good puzzles and superb
    game-play.  I felt that it lacked the consistency and prose that would
    have made it a good piece of fiction too.  But then I feel the same way
    about Zork .

    From: Julian Arnold <jools SP@G arnod.demon.co.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995

    In this game you are a property agent who, having just shown some clients
    around a decrepit theatre, are annoyed to realise that you left your
    electronic pager in the old building.  The game begins as you re-enter the
    theatre with a view to retrieving this object before meeting friends at the
    opera.  Suffice to say things do not go quite as planned.

    _Theatre_ is very distinctly split into the traditional opening, mid-game and
    end-game.  Indeed, the three sections seemed rather too distinct from each
    other, lending a rather disjointed feel to the game.  Also contributing to
    the feeling of disjointedness is the atmosphere, which changes about half way
    through from ghostly psychological horror to semi-Lovecraftian `icky' horror,
    more reliant on physical revulsion than a sense of `something's wrong'.  This
    is a shame, as it reminds the player too much of _The Lurking Horror_ which
    is the better game.  The opening is nice 'n easy for beginners with plenty of
    advice in case you don't know what to do next.  This may be frustrating for
    more experienced players as it is very linear.  The middle game opens up
    more, with several well thought out but familiar puzzles open to the player
    at once.  However, as mentioned above, there is a sudden change of direction
    in the atmosphere and style of the game, which was not to this reviewer's
    tastes. The end-game is where _Theatre_ really falls down though, with a
    short sequence of ill- or un- explained puzzles which, once finally solved,
    leave the player with an unsatisfactory ending and a bitter aftertaste.

    Hmm, the previous paragraph gives the impression that I didn't like
    _Theatre_.  This is not true, there are many good points to recommend the
    game.  For a start it seems an excellent game for the beginning IF player,
    boasting several pages of a well written `Introduction to text adventures' as
    well as a short non-interactive demonstration and a useful explanation of the
    way the parser works.  The parser itself, in common with all Inform games, is
    excellent.  The puzzles, although they've mostly been seen before in various
    incarnations, are both logical and fair (again apart from the last few).
    There are also some nice little touches along the way, such as the system for
    reading the diary pages which you pick up along the way (a clever use of
    Inform's menu system), the adaptive on-line hints, and the fact that the game
    starts in verbose mode rather than brief.

    To summarize, _Theatre_ is far from perfect but is perfectly adequate with
    several enjoyable moments and a nice `polish' to it.  It is a damn sight
    better than many shareware games out there, and it's free.  Try it, you might
    like it.  Akk!  I can't believe I wrote that...

    Inform File (.z5)

    Solution (Text)

    There's A Hole In Your Bucket
    From: Audrey De Lisle  <adelisle SP@G earthlnk.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998

    NAME:     There's a Hole In Your Bucket
    AUTHOR: Karen Tyers
    EMAIL:   karvic SP@G tesco.net
    DATE:     1998
    PARSER: PAW (Professional Adventure Writer)
    SUPPORTS:      Spectrum and emulators
    AVAILABILITY:  Adventure Workshop, 36 Grasmere Road, Royton, Oldham,
                   Lancs, OL2 6SR, England
    Also: Adventure Probe Magazine,
          52 Burford Road, Liverpool, L16 6AQ, England
    Other games may be had for C64 and Amiga, inquire of author.
    Price:  A small fee for postage and handling to the Workshop
    or an optional donation to Adventure Probe magazine if emailed by Karen.

    Adventure Probe is a small, hand assembled magazine published by Karen
    Tyers.  It contains reviews, hints and a walk-through each month.
    Most of the games are for the C64 or Amiga, but some are pc.  Its
    listed price is two pounds sterling (in England).  There is no
    provision for foreign money.  The February issue has 50 pages, 6" x
    8.5".  For those in UK, there is a telephone help line and solutions
    can be downloaded.

    BUCKET is a charming small game based on a folk song, "I've Got A Hole In
    My Bucket, Dear Liza".  The player first learns that his wife, Liza, wants
    some water to wash the windows and there is none.  During his search for
    a water source and a bucket, he finds the duck pond is empty and the ducks
    are miserable.  Blossom, the sow, is most unco-operative and the chickens
    are hungry.  By frequent use of the LOOK command coupled with BEHIND, IN,
    or UNDER, the player's search is rewarded with objects leading to success
    in achieving this goal.  Besides the farm area, there is a five room house.
    Liza does not contribute much, but is an npc.  The only HELP is a reminder
    to follow the words in the song.

    Emulators: the Lunter Z80 emulator (registered) is used by the author
    with Win 95 and she reports that it works fine.  OTOH, I use DOS and
    found that the Lunter emulator (shareware) did not work well with the
    pentium/60MHz, but does work well with a 486/30MHz.  I downloaded the
    other pc emulator and it does work with the pentium, but not .z80
    files.  Of course, that may just be my pentium.  I was playing with
    the PAW .z80 file and not with a .sna file.  The author now has a
    proper .sna file ready.  At some future time, she hopes to have pc
    versions written with Inform or TADS.

    The song: There's a hole in my bucket dear Liza, dear Liza.
              There's a hole im my bucket, dear Liza.
                  Well, mend it dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.
                  Well, mend it dear Henry, mend it.
              With what shall I mend it, dear Liza? (etc).
                  With some straw, dear Henry (etc)
              But the straw is too long, dear Liza, (etc)
                  Well, cut it, dear Henry (etc)
              With what shall I cut it, dear Liza? (etc)
                  With an axe, dear Henry (etc)
              But the axe is too blunt, dear Liza (etc)
                  Well, sharpen it, dear Henry (etc)
              With what shall I sharpen it, dear Liza? (etc)
                  With a stone, dear Henry (etc)
              But the stone is too dry, dear Liza (etc)
                  Well, wet it, dear Henry (etc)
              With what shall I wet it, dear Liza? (etc)
                  Try water, dear Henry (etc)
              In what shall I fetch it, dear Liza? (etc)
                  In a bucket, dear Henry (etc)

    I prefer not to rate games.  I enjoyed playing this one or would not
    offer a review.  There were two 'hunt the verb' problems; one easily
    resolved, but the other could be a sticker.  However, this could be a
    difference in culture, so Americans might have more trouble than
    others.  I am not sure younger players with no experience with C64, RS
    Color Computers, Spectrum, etc, would be interested.  These games do
    not resemble MYST, et al, but are great for older players.

    There's a Snake in the Bathtub
    From: Emily Short (emshort SP@G mindspring.com)
    Review appeared in SPAG #45 -- July 17, 2006

    TITLE: There's a Snake in the Bathtub
    AUTHOR: Edward Griffiths
    EMAIL: ?
    DATE: 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/bathtub.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    I came across this game largely by chance: it was announced in the usual "recent
    additions to the archive" post, but I don't think it was mentioned on
    rec.games.int-fiction or otherwise promoted to the community. So it may not have
    gotten much notice.

    Mild spoilers about the structure follow; if you want to avoid all contact, stop
    reading now, though I think I would have been glad to know these things, myself.

    The premise of the game is exactly as given in the title: you get home from a
    hot sticky day, ready for a nice long soak, only to find that the tub is
    occupied. From there, everything just gets increasingly surreal and out of hand,
    eventually requiring visits to alternative dimensions and so on. "Slice of life"
    this is not.

    There are a number of implementation details that add up to make things a bit
    frustrating. There's very little here by way of implicit action handling;
    everything has to be explicitly opened and closed for use, for instance.
    Disambiguation is sometimes inelegant. There is some mild verb guessing, too.
    You'll want to read the list of understood verbs (type HELP at the outset of the
    game), but even then, there is one important command where ATTACH FOO TO BAR
    works, but ATTACH BAR TO FOO gives a generic failure message, and it's not clear
    what's gone wrong. Moreover, there are inventory limits, and they do get in the
    way. A hint system is provided, but it doesn't cover nearly everything one might
    want hints about, and in most cases it only told me the things about the puzzle
    that I'd already worked out myself: my notes say "More of a taunt system than a
    hint system." Well, I was feeling cranky.

    There are also lots of low-level immersion-breakers (or possibly bugs): for
    instance, you can fill a bathtub with water, but this doesn't seem to affect the
    other contents of the bathtub in some of the ways you might expect. Sometimes
    it's possible to interact with creatures or objects even though they are
    technically untouchable at the moment. An action that broke an inventory item
    produced the change only some of the time, and I wasn't able to figure out why
    (though this turned out not to be game-critical). Likewise, many sensible
    actions aren't dealt with; you're not allowed to throw things at a certain
    object, even though that would be my first approach if I were in the same
    situation.

    Worst of all, there is an absolutely fiendish 100-move time limit on the whole
    game. I replayed and replayed, trying to optimize, but without any luck. I was
    only able to finish the game when -- quite belatedly -- I realized there was
    actually a way to disable the limit entirely. It might not hurt to have further
    hinting in the game about that possibility.

    For all that, "There's a Snake in the Bathtub" is not without charm. Much of the
    game revolves around defeating various malevolent figures, and it is generally
    quite rewarding when you finally succeed; in this respect the snake reminded me
    a little of the lobster in Gourmet. Many of the descriptions and events are
    fairly entertaining, and there's pleasure in the sheer absurdity of many of the
    solutions. I have less to say about this than I do about the game's flaws,
    because enumerating all the funny moments would ruin them -- but I did find
    enough here to keep me playing despite the detractions listed.

    In the end, then, this is an exuberant, slightly old-fashioned puzzle-fest,
    probably taking several hours to play without outside help. Some of those hours
    will be spent retracing your steps. Players in the mood for that kind of
    experience will enjoy this piece. Those looking for a strong story or a deeply
    implemented setting would be best advised to look elsewhere. "There's a Snake in
    the Bathtub" is not for the impatient -- though if you find yourself replaying
    endlessly to make that 100-move deadline, do consider ways to make the deadline
    go away.

    Zcode (.z5) game file

    Threnody
    From: Mike Harris (M.Harris SP@G spi-bpo.com)
    Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006

    TITLE: Threnody
    AUTHOR: John Schiff
    EMAIL: john SP@G dopplerfx.com
    DATE: March 13, 2005
    PARSER: TADS 2
    SUPPORTS: HTML TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2005/Threnody.zip
    VERSION: Release 1.0b

    Threnody bills itself as "a lighthearted, puzzle-rich fantasy game" and as such
    hits the mark.  The backstory is a pedestrian "castle full of treasures" meme,
    with the mildly interesting twist that in addition to treasure “points”
    accumulated, each of the NPC’s has a "Catena" which must be located and
    destroyed to "release" the NPC, a tally of which scores in a parallel point
    system.

    The player must choose at the beginning whether the PC will be a warrior, wizard
    or thief, as well as the gender of the PC.  While the former affects what
    options the PC has available to solve portions of the game, the purpose of the
    gender choice seems only for fleshing out the story thread.  The verbiage is
    standard "fantasy 101" with the exception that objects’ and sometimes NPC’s
    descriptions contain horrible puns.  The title NPC is a talking cat and is
    generally helpful as a guide but which purpose seems more to further the story
    than the game.  I delight in both bad puns and cats; those not so enamored might
    find the game less charming.

    I prefer to be very methodical when playing IF, searching and examining
    everything in a room and solving as many puzzles as possible before moving on to
    the next room.  This approach works poorly with Threnody.  Those who prefer a
    brief visit to every accessible room before beginning any puzzle solving in
    earnest might find Threnody less frustrating.  Firstly, objects that might aid
    in solving puzzles are often available; I did a lot of guessing.  Secondly, many
    rooms and locations are empty, there as "place holders."  Lastly, the game is
    full of objects that seem to be nothing more than red herrings.

    This leads us to bugs.

    It is possible to locate and destroy the Catenas of some NPC’s before
    encountering the NPC’s themselves.  While the disappearance/destruction of the
    NPC should mean its absence when its location is eventually found, this is not
    always the case.  Taking the Catenas to unusual locations to be destroyed will
    sometimes trigger the same bug.  In any case, this bug allows the game to be put
    in an unwinnable state as the NPC can not be vanquished.  I also stumbled upon a
    sequence of moves that "recreated" the Catena of one particular NPC, which I
    could then destroy repeatedly for points.

    In some cases there is more than one way to "beat" the NPC, but I found another
    bug involving engaging a NPC in a game of chance using an object found
    elsewhere.  While defeating the NPC in the game of chance should achieve
    success, and the NPC states that you can take the (blank) because you’ve won,
    any attempt to actually do so results in the pre-defeat response.

    I found the "red herrings" to be frustrating as well.  While they may not be
    true "red herrings" but have some purpose in solving puzzles when the PC is in a
    different iteration, their sheer number gets tedious – "open (blank) with
    (blank)"; "put (blank) on (blank)" is fun for the first thirty or forty tries
    but does start to pall once one gets into triple digits.  Furthermore, while the
    PC’s carrying capacity is large it’s not unlimited.  Three quarters of the way
    through the game I found that I was no longer able to pick up objects and had to
    decide which objects in my vast inventory to jettison, hoping that I would not
    rid myself of anything truly useful in the process.

    While some puzzles are ludicrously simple, some are so difficult that I had no
    recourse but to refer to the hints or the walkthrough.  There is some trouble of
    the “guess the verb” variety but in many cases there seems to be no way to solve
    the puzzle except through brute force, trying every possible combination hoping
    that one works.

    Some minor squawks – default responses sometimes come up when the story would
    dictate otherwise.  For example, upon entering a room there are often lavish
    descriptions of furnishings, floor etc., further examination of which elicits
    "you see nothing special about the (blank)" type responses, or directly
    contradictory responses – "The floor is made of large slabs of a dark, rough
    stone" after the description states something very different.  The story
    emphasizes the importance of the Catenas to the NPC’s, but (with the exception
    of the title NPC) showing the catena to the NPC elicits a default "(NPC) is not
    impressed."  And speaking of "guess the verb," during play I could often not
    recall the term "Catena" or names of NPC’s and more generic descriptions such as
    "man," "crystal" or "blue" were ineffective.

    In summary, while Threnody is a mildly entertaining diversion exactly as
    advertised, its flaws and generic storyline made it less than compelling.  The
    optional graphics are very much like the game itself – workmanlike, well
    executed but ultimately unremarkable, and doing little to enhance the storyline.
    Once played through as one PC I had no desire to play more than a small amount
    with the PC in a different iteration, just enough to get a feel for that
    particular PC and some of the differences in puzzle solving.  On a scale of 1 to
    10 I would rate it a 5 for difficulty and an overall rating of 5.5 to 6.

    Zip file with HTML TADS 2 game file, multimedia resources, and walkthroughs

    Till Death Makes A Monk-fish Out Of Me
    From: Jessica Knoch <jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: Till Death Makes A Monk-fish Out Of Me
    AUTHOR: Jon Ingold and Mike Sousa
    EMAIL: jonnyingold SP@G netscape.net, mjsousa SP@G attbi.com
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: TADS 2
    SUPPORTS: TADS 2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/tads2/tildeath/tildeath.gam
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    Heh. Great title. One of the neatest things about this game is the way
    the TADS is made to look like Inform, the way it used to look on my old
    interpreter no less. This is indeed very kewl. But on to the game!

    You play a scientist at some unspecified point in the future with a
    nifty device that allows people to transfer their consciousness to other
    people's bodies, apparently for a short time. You are going to use the
    device to vacation on the surface for a while (oh, you and your fellow
    scientists are at an underwater base, did I mention?) when something
    goes horribly wrong. The scene where something goes horribly wrong is
    actually sort of funny, and well-coded, and in general fun. For
    instance, there's an emergency switch to open the door and get out. If
    you try to pull it first, the game says "It's a push switch," and if you
    try to push it first, it says "It's a pull switch," just to make you
    take that extra turn. This is great. Normally, this sort of artificial
    time-wasting is not great, it's just annoying, but it works here because
    the game doesn't start until after you don't make it out of the first
    scene. Clear?

    Ah, there are some great moments in this game. The first two puzzles,
    involving getting out of where you wake up, are terrific and clever (and
    I solved them without hints). By the way, the hints come in three
    different levels of helpfulness, and are location-dependent, so that
    when you are in a certain room you get the hint for the puzzle it thinks
    you're working on. Not always the right one, but it does take into
    account what you have in your inventory, or at least it sure seems to.
    It's very cool, although (as I said) problematic. Come to think of it, I
    solved the next puzzle or two on my own also. Very well done.

    What's also fun about the game is that you, as the player, actually know
    more about your situation in some ways than the PC does. Then again, the
    PC knows what the machine was supposed to do and you, the player, do
    not. So it's kind of a trade-off. Still, the quirkiness and, well, I
    almost want to say naiveté of the PC are really very humorous. I lose
    the humor a bit when I suspect that the PC knows things about how the
    computer works that he isn't sharing, but with a few hints you can get
    by. The password and key puzzle from the latter section of the game is
    very very tricky, but quite novel and very good. By the way, when I was
    halfway through the puzzle I thought, "All right! What's 'dog' in
    French?" and typed "chien" without thinking much about it. When that
    didn't work, I spent five minutes trying to remember how on Earth you
    say "dog" in French (since I had it wrong). But as I said, the actual
    solution was terrific.

    Where does the game miss out? Well, there was the frustration of not
    being able to do something and not finding any hints, because I was
    going about the solution in the wrong way. I assumed I needed to
    re-enter a room to get something, when actually I needed to be in a
    different location to get what was in the room (thus the problem with
    location-based hints). And there are some spelling mistakes and
    punctuation quirks. At one point, the status line lists you as being "on
    on the trolley." And an item is "far to heavy" to pick up. There are
    also a few missing synonyms, like using "Rosalind" after she's in
    pieces. And it's tough, I know it's tough, to implement being in a
    location within a room by implementing it as a separate location (which
    is what seems to have happened with the metal drawers). It's tricky
    because there are basic things in the larger room that you want to be
    able to refer to from the smaller section of room. Let me clear things
    up: You are on a large drawer, pulled out from a wall of drawers, and
    the room description mentions both metal drawers and a ceiling. But from
    where you are you "don't see any ceiling here," nor the metal drawers.
    It's a bit misleading, but very forgivable.

    Anyway! For most of the game, the writing is either effective but not
    attention-getting, or startlingly funny. For instance, a metal plate
    sticks up from the ground "like a wafer in an ice cream," and later a
    particular item is sticking up "like a cocktail stick from a sausage."
    Those are attention-getting phrases, and while not smooth or sweet, they
    do bring a chuckle. I did feel pretty involved in the story, even if I
    didn't realize it until I was racing down the corridor on a metal
    gurney, being pursued by God knows what, and it occurred to me that I
    was pretty caught up in it. The best part was, I wasn't anxious or
    worried about being caught by the thing because of the overall light and
    amusing tone. Very impressive.

    There was one programming trick which, while I liked it at the time,
    caused me some puzzle-solving problems. If there was one particular
    object that the game wanted to draw your attention to, it would prevent
    you from examining other things by saying "Your eyes slide back to the
    ." That's pretty slick, and also effective because the player
    looks at whatever the thing is. The problem is, a line like that at the
    bottom of a room description makes me skim the room description faster,
    which means I missed critical objects that were listed and had no idea
    (for instance) that there was a hand scanner in the control room.

    My only other complaint would be that the ending is somewhat
    anticlimactic. I always like a good long ending that really wraps up all
    the loose ends, or just hits you over the head with them, and I wasn't
    really sure that the ending I got with Monk-Fish was the best one. I
    don't see what I could have done differently, but I still wonder.

    Overall, a very strong work with excellent writing and clever puzzles.
    Great job all around!

    Directory with TADS .gam file

    Time -- All Things Come To an End
    From: C.E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME: Time -- All things come to an end
    AUTHOR: Andy Phillips
    EMAIL: pmyladp SP@G unix.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk
    DATE: October 1996 (Release 4)
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Version 8 ZIP Interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/tatctae.z8

    [This review contains minor spoilers for the beginning of the game.]

    It would seem to me that 1995-1996 was the Year of the Time-Travel
    Game.  Over the past 12 months, we've witnessed the appearance of "A
    Night at the Museum Forever", "Jigsaw", and "Lost New York", heard
    rumors of Jon Drukman's not-yet-released "Forward into the Past", and
    are now faced with "Time: All Things Come to an End."

    Yes, "Time" is another time-travel game (!), and a more believable one
    than "Museum", but not quite up to the levels of realism attained by
    Graham Nelson and Neil deMause.  It is well-programmed, and for the
    most part well-written (though there are a surprising number of run-on
    sentences, considering the author is from the U.K.).

    I personally found the introduction rather hard to swallow.  As the
    game began, a brilliant scientist (me) was in danger of having his
    temporal translocator research project shut down due to lack of
    progress.  Within 20 turns, however, I'd figured out how to power the
    machine, taking advantage of an overhead lightning storm.  Considering
    that the storm is described as "typical English weather", the notion
    of it taking YEARS to get around to considering lightning as a power
    source seems positively ludicrous!  ("Great Scott!" as Dr. Emmitt
    Brown himself might put it.)

    To be fair, though, once you get the machine working and are whisked
    into a cyberpunk-like dystopian future (perhaps the direct
    consequences of your meddling with the timestream?), suspension of
    disbelief kicks in, and "Time" becomes an enjoyable and surprisingly
    playable work of I-F.

    This came as quite a surprise to me, because the game itself is very
    linear.  It's a single-path story with little room for
    experimentation, puzzles requiring a great deal of note-taking and
    foresight, and plenty of opportunities to become irrevocably stuck.
    Normally I dislike stop-and-start gameplay.  For some reason, though,
    this didn't make me hate it, even after a dozen or so setbacks.  I
    can't quite explain why: The writing is good but not spectacular; The
    settings aren't all that inspired; Most of the individual puzzles are
    no more clever than the average game.

    Yet for some reason it was very, very fun for me to play, and
    discussions with other players led to the same conclusion.  There's
    something about the *way* the puzzles are presented -- never
    gratuitous, but as part of the story, giving the sense of plot
    unfolding before the player; layered, interwoven with one another;
    with virtually all reasonable actions accounted for -- that makes one
    want to keep trying, even after dying countless horrible deaths.  Just
    when you think you've finally gotten somewhere, "Time" tells you that
    you don't.  But you're close, you just know it.  Maybe one more try...

    Unfortunately, if you're weary of games that make you use information
    gained from past lives, there's nothing I can do to disguise the fact
    that "Time" is one of those games.  But I found it to be so enjoyable
    that this so- called "design flaw" didn't even matter.  I recommend
    that even crusaders for "realistic" I-F give this one a try.  You
    might be pleasantly surprised.

    Just save often.

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

    As a reviewer should, I took it upon myself to replay Andy Phillips'
    Time: All Things Come to an End before reviewing it, thereby to
    produce a transcript. The exercise, such as it was, afforded some
    insight: when the solutions to puzzles are so illogical or obscure
    that they stump me completely -- even when I've _already_ finished the
    game once -- something is gravely amiss. When getting through the
    first half of the thing, even after I remember the solutions to the
    puzzles, takes many, many tries because I forget stupid little items
    that prove essential much later on, it says nothing positive about a
    game. And when I am unable to keep a coherent transcript because of
    all the saving and restoring required to get through the
    every-move-accounted-for sections, well, the resulting review will be
    less than glowing.

    Trashing Andy Phillips has, admittedly, become a trend of late, so I
    will try to be as positive as possible in reviewing Time... To wit:
    somehow, for some reason, I plowed through this thing to begin with;
    it kept me interested enough to forgive its faults and push on to the
    end. I can't explain what it was now, and I certainly don't feel
    compelled to slog through games I genuinely dislike. But on some
    level, for me at least, Mr.  Phillips did manage to craft a game that
    held my attention, and he deserves recognition for that.

    On, then, to the game. As has been pointed out, Time... is an example
    of a heavily linear game, meaning that fairly narrow sections of the
    thing are available at any given time -- and, moreover, past sections
    become unavailable once apparently disposed with. Handled well, this
    sort of game can tell an interesting story and keep the plot moving
    along with the game; handled poorly, it can be both frustrating and
    dull -- because the confines of the plot can keep the player in a
    small section of the game for a long time, with nothing to do but
    examine the same objects over and over and beat his head against the
    wall. More importantly, if not designed well, the player can lock
    himself out of winning the game without realizing it.

    And Time..., I'm sorry to say, is linear in just about the worst way a
    game can be. Things like manipulating the scenery, holding onto
    objects that seem fundamentally single-use, and obtaining objects with
    no apparent use -- all are required actions for unforeseeable later
    events. Players are advised never, NEVER, to assume an object has
    exhausted its usefulness, or to leave a game area -- for the first
    quarter or so of the game, you'll be doing that every few moves --
    without taking absolutely everything that isn't nailed down. Except,
    of course, for those objects that get you killed if you keep carrying
    them past a certain point. And then there's the object that you break
    in one scene but pick up and use later, and the murder weapon that you
    are expected to take with you and use in an unforeseeable way, and, of
    course, the many puzzles that you must solve for no other reason than
    that there are some strange objects sitting around... I trust the
    problems are becoming apparent.

    There are many and various puzzles in Time... that require knowledge
    obtained by death. The most egregious of them involves an apartment
    where, let's see, failing to hide your means of getting into the
    apartment (since they are noticed by a search that begins only after
    you enter the apartment) and otherwise cover your tracks before anyone
    actually starts looking for you, failing to realize that the police
    are outside watching the apartment and will charge at the least sign
    you are there, failing to realize that the police will kill you if you
    are holding certain items when they get there, failing to realize that
    another person will kill you if you are holding certain different
    items when the police get there, and failing to disable an bomb that
    will kill the police when they get there, all result in death -- plus,
    of course, there are items to obtain while you're there, and the whole
    thing is time-sensitive. If this one section of the game didn't screen
    out quite a few would-be players, the IF world is more persistent than
    I realized.

    The problem with learning by death, quite aside from the realism issue
    ("I'd better drop the gun because I remember from the last time that
    the police will kill me if I'm holding it when they get here"), is
    that it makes a game less enjoyable; there's nothing like playing
    through a scene 50 times to make it unspeakably boring. The advantage
    of linearity is that the author can control the story he tells, but
    Mr. Phillips largely sacrifices that advantage by making the puzzles
    so obscure that the story does not exactly move along.

    How unfair are the puzzles in Time?... There are sections where the
    plot resembles an action movie and the puzzles require action-movie
    suspensions of disbelief, like, say, that no one notices you stealing
    a helicopter, that you can learn to pilot the helicopter instantly
    (well, that a reasonably with-it first grader can pilot a helicopter,
    I guess), that you can get into a second-floor apartment using the
    materials that come to hand -- and these, while a bit annoying, are
    part of the genre. But there are far worse moments -- for example, the
    instructions at one point are that you should "use the stasis field,"
    which I found less than helpful. You miraculously sense that a statue
    is actually something completely different in disguise, with no hints
    to that effect. You wait seven turns in a location for the means of
    solving a puzzle to appear -- though it was there all along; you just
    hadn't "noticed" it. Other things are likewise hidden until you type
    certain sensory commands, and so on.

    The game is largely devoid of helpful hints, requires absurdly exact
    syntax in many cases -- notably, getting out of the map room, which
    required both a huge intuitive leap regarding the procedure and a game
    of guess-the-verb for the final action. Another puzzle involving a
    crate is looking for a certain verb that is, in truth, used fairly
    frequently in IF these days -- but not in the context you find it
    here.  Magical/technologically advanced objects (the line between them
    is fairly blurry here) do things that could not possibly be foreseen
    -- the same object, even, will have several uses that have little in
    common. There is a time-paradox puzzle that, well, seems frankly
    absurd -- not only for the objects that cannot logically exist, but
    for the reactions to you by someone who, even accepting the paradoz,
    could not have encountered you before. (It also serves no real purpose
    in the game -- it provides information that could easily have been
    provided another way.) One puzzle requires such a ludicrous disregard
    of scale that when I saw it in the walkthrough, I assumed I had missed
    something important earlier on. And whenever you are under duress --
    meaning that someone is about to kill you, which is the case virtually
    every moment -- objects in your backpack are unavailable on grounds
    that you have more important things to do than "fiddling with"
    whatever -- and inventory management before the scenes (requiring
    amazing foreknowledge of what you'll need) is, of course, necessary.

    And then, of course, there's the writing. There are worse sins than
    the occasional comma splice, but the writing here is littered with
    them -- e.g. "A fire burns in one corner of the room, its red glow is
    highly appropriate to the surroundings." The syntax of many room
    descriptions is so tortured that the idea doesn't come across, as in:
    "To the north of you is the vast expanse of the park's solitary lake,
    looking dull, a reflection of the dark sky and equally dark feeling
    about this whole place." Er, what? There is a genuine attempt here to
    provide atmosphere, but too often it produces results like these:

            A well-worn road running from west to east, with the park
            gates to the north. Some distance to the east, the street ends
            in a bricked up wall, while it opens up into some kind of
            large square to the west. The area is deserted, almost as if
            the inhabitants have given up on this terrible world.

            You are in what appears to be the central area of the town,
            market stalls lie abandoned and a few people hurriedly walk
            from one area to another, as if in a hopeless attempt to avoid
            this apparent centre of the evil. Most areas have been
            cordoned off, except for the seemingly important stone
            building to the south.

    Good writing usually tries to show the reader the scene and let him
    infer from there, rather than telling him outright what to feel or
    think; the scenes above might have been quite effective if they had
    included, say, descriptions of passers-by who walk by with their heads
    down without speaking to each other, or if the player had encountered
    someone who was clearly afraid of a certain building and nervous about
    speaking too loud.  As it is, the atmosphere here becomes
    self-parodying, since evil and menace are so obvious and ubiquitous
    that they become unremarkable. ("And our weather report: partly
    cloudy, with an undercurrent of evil throughout the afternoon.") At
    times, the author lays off the brooding menace and dread, and the
    results are effective...

            The moonlight casts eerie shadows onto the buildings that
            surround the central courtyard. The western edge is dominated
            by a building seemingly still in use, but the Schloss is
            otherwise deserted.

    ...but those moments are, alas, all too few. In one region, you are
    given the message "Somewhere nearby someone screams with pain, you
    don't even want to imagine the horrors taking place in these depths"
    so often, with no variation, that it loses whatever power it had to
    shock. Ho-hum, more screams of pain. Now and again, the prose turns
    deep purple:

            The shocking handiwork of your murderous psychotic enemy is
            evident again, notably from the red marks left by the
            murderous tool on the man's neck.  From the depths of the
            lifeless eyes seems to come a pleading for mercy which was
            coldly rejected by the smiling sadist responsible for this
            barbaric slaughter.

    The point of all this is not simply to make fun of the writing,
    tempting though that might be after slogging through a game worth of
    it, but to show that bad writing can reduce enjoyment of a game by
    wrecking the scene it tries to set.

    True, many readers will forgive excess -- but when you force a player
    to inhabit a small section of the game for a while, and hence
    encounter the same descriptions again and again, it behooves you as a
    writer to make those descriptions effective -- or, at least, not
    ridiculous. The "enemy" is an obvious example here; she is everywhere,
    her motivations are wildly unclear, and upon your every encounter with
    her, she spouts bad-guy lines from action movies that break whatever
    tension had been achieved. ("You fools, did you really think you could
    oppose the ultimate race?" "You know, I'm going to have to put a stop
    to your interferences.") Said by someone like John Malkovich, things
    like this are forgivable; as written text, no. So often did I stop to
    chuckle at this or that in Time...that the plot became rather
    uninvolving after a while. And a game this big needs to be involving
    -- the writing needs to be passable -- to keep the player's attention.

    It should be reiterated that there are enjoyable moments in Time... --
    one scene involving assumption of another's identity does build up
    tension well (even if the situation is a bit oversimplified), and
    there is a genuinely clever, if not wholly logical, puzzle involving
    the repair and use of a strange machine. And the author is quite good
    at the principle of providing payoff for puzzles solved -- virtually
    every discovery rewards you with a good bit of text and more things to
    explore -- which helps in a game with lots of puzzles. The climax is
    suitably climactic (though unfairly difficult -- very time-sensitive
    and involving a thoroughly obscure riddle), and even the overwritten
    scenes have their interesting moments, notably the segment in
    London. On the whole, though, there is more to learn here about what
    can go wrong in a game than about what can go right.

    Inform file (.z8)

    Commented stepwise solution (Text)

    Time to Shine
    From: David Jones <drj SP@G pobox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #46 -- October 17, 2006

    Title: Time to Shine
    Author: Sophie Frühling
    E-mail: sfruehling SP@G aon.at
    Date: September 22, 2006
    Parser: Inform 6
    Supports: Z-code
    Availability: Freeware
    URL: http://creaturecomp.tripod.com/creature.zip
    Version: Release 1 / Serial number 060922 / Inform v6.31 Library 6/11

    Time to Shine was the sole entry to David Fisher's CreatureComp.  I'm unaware
    of the premise of the competition, but I assume it is one where the PC is a
    non-human creature.  In this case the PC is a Caputman.

    Time to Shine takes place amidst a lot of humans.  The way their behaviour and
    appearance is described does do a good job of making the PC seem very un-human
    but initially in a kind of vague odd way.  This accentuates the chasm between
    the PC and the player.  Normally this sort of thing gets in the way in a game,
    but here it's intended; part of what makes the game interesting is that the
    player has to investigate the PC by having the PC investigate the game's world,
    and thereby acquire an understanding of the PC.  The various actions, and
    responses to inaction, cause the player to form an increasingly refined model
    of the PC as various hypotheses are entertained and rejected.  The resulting
    form that the Caputman's take in this player's mind is deliberately comical; a
    light-hearted theme present throughout Time to Shine.

    Quite a large amount of the early game appears to be about exploring the PC's
    nature, so it's important that this be handled believably.  The Caputman PC, it
    would seem, has little knowledge of human behavour, appearance, etc, and is
    suprised by certain aspects of their anatomy (their _feet_ for example).  But
    Caputmans are apparently just as familiar with, for example, PVC as humans are.
     Is describing something in inches a convenience for me the player or a metric
    norm shared by Caputmans and humans alike?  The game never provides answers for
    such questions.

    The writing is good, error free and occasionally knowingly self-referential: "A
    few dustbins help create an original urban back alley atmosphere".  The author
    is milking a cliché here and plainly know that dustbins are not an original
    atmospheric device.  Describing them as such serves only to heighten their
    importance, drawing the player to investigate them.  As if I somehow wasn't
    going to EXAMINE everything I could see anyway.  The writing has a good voice;
    it's funny without being overly comedic, and is consistent from beginning to
    end.

    The PC's motivations, to get a key NPC to fall in love with him, pretty much
    have to be taken as given.  Whilst some attempt is made to establish these
    motivations and engage the player along the same lines, the attempts are a bit
    weak: "You could probably get in there unseen, but what good would that do? You
    need a plan to make your beloved love you." Do I?  Oh, okay then.  Similarly,
    one of the early puzzles revolves around acquiring an object (of apparent
    value), but in terms of the plot it's not really clear why the PC would want
    the object; the solution to this puzzle, whilst clued and fair, doesn't really
    seem sensible, though it does enrich the player's model of Caputmans.  Only
    after solving the puzzle does the purpose of the object become clear; an NPC
    provides a blatant opportunity to fill-in some of the background and purpose
    behind this puzzle but that opportunity isn't exploited.  In fact the NPC in
    question appears to be nothing more than a mysterious prop unti!
     l the puzzle is solved.

    The key NPC is never described concretely and this one of the reasons why I
    think the player fails to be as motivated as the PC.  The following transcript
    fragment:
      X HER
      Words are failing you. Sadly, she doesn’t notice you.
    is typical.  I assume the author is deliberately refraining from describing the
    beauty of this person, but I think it would help the player.

    Hmm, I did something innocuous but immediately am overcome with a sense of
    unwinnable state.  I restart.  On solving a relevant puzzle it becomes clear
    that I did achieve an unwinnable state (an accident of programming rather than
    deliberate design).  Still, restarting was hardly any trouble at all. Oh,
    sudden death with an attempt at comedy that isn't quite convincing.  Still, the
    action is only an UNDO away.

    One early location that is revisited later on changes materially, but the only
    purpose behing the change seems to be to make you solve another puzzle
    essentially isomorphic to the first one.  Which is kinda annoying.

    The game is short, very linear, and has about 3 or 4 puzzles (depending on how
    you count).  I expect most players will breeze through it in half-an-hour or
    so, I didn't use the hints.  The ending feels rushed and a bit unsurprising; it
    left me feeling underwhelmed.  To be honest I think some of the puzzles are
    reasonably solvable only because of the relatively few things available for the
    PC to do, so you'll pretty quickly hit upon the solution by trial and error.
    HINT (which is I used for the purposes of review) does indeed provide "cheap
    and easy hints", just as ABOUT avers.

    The whole thing, whilst being very small and very linear, is competently done.
    There are a few missing verbs, some synonyms for puzzle-solving actions might
    help the action flow a little more smoothly, but on the whole I get the
    impression that the author knows how to do all this stuff, she just didn't,
    either through constraints of time or laziness.  ABOUT says that "this game
    hasn’t been tested by anyone at all, and it probably shows", but actually it
    doesn't really show.  Sure, some of things I complain about would probably have
    be found and fixed by a bit of testing, but there's no mistakes with the text,
    all the puzzles work technically, and there's no glaring runtime-type bugs.  It
    presents the level of polish and completeness of a playable game as opposed to
    one which is in dire need of debugging.

    Whilst Time to Shine is obviously deliberately short and frivolous it does
    leave me with good impressions about the author's ability.  It would be
    possible to clean up Time to Shine a bit and thereby improve it, and this would
    probably be worthwhile for the more niggly things, but what I'd really like to
    see is the author having the confidence to produce more notable works.  I think
    she's clearly capable of it.

    Zip containing Z-Code game file

    Tinseltown Blues
    From: Eytan Zweig <eytanzw SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002

    TITLE: Tinseltown Blues
    AUTHOR: Chip Hayes
    EMAIL: chiphayes SP@G attglobal.net
    DATE: June 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/blues.z5
    VERSION: Release 1.1

    Tinseltown Blues is nothing more, and nothing less, than a competent
    puzzle game. It tells no story -- there is a plot, but that plot is
    deliberately paper-thin, and makes sure that it doesn't get in the way
    of the puzzles. The game itself has a simple, and well-tried goal: the
    scavenger hunt, where you must find objects that have been placed in
    totally arbitrary, but always hard to reach, locations. The nice thing
    about Tinseltown Blues is that it has no pretensions of being anything
    more than that -- it's a game, to be played and enjoyed, not anything
    more, and it knows it.

    While the game doesn't have a plot to speak of, it does have an
    interesting choice of location: Paramount Studios. The choice of a
    Hollywood studio, while obviously at least partially motivated by the
    fact that the game's author actually works there, is a nice touch --
    where else would you expect to find office buildings side-by-side with
    mechanical reconstructions of Zork I? At times, however, the liberties
    that are taken with Paramount seem so strenuous -- all the NPCs have
    totally cartoonish names, and some geography seems to have been tampered
    with for the sake of the puzzles -- that I'm not sure the game wouldn't
    have worked better in a fictional studio. If there was more in the game
    that actually spoke of the real Paramount Studios I may have felt
    differently, but other than a reference pamphlet and some celebrity
    graves, there really wasn't anything there that had any particular
    resonance for me.

    That, however, is a minor quibble, since the real heart of the game is
    its puzzles. And, as far as puzzles go, it has some good ones. There are
    quite a few of them, most of them in medium difficulty -- not so easy as
    to not require any thought, but not hard enough to make me run to a
    walkthrough at any point (which was fortunate, since the walkthrough was
    written after I won the game, by myself). There are precious few
    guess-the-verb situations, and it is very rare to be in a situation in
    which you don't know what to do next -- it's usually a question of how.
    Some alternate solutions are available, though not to all puzzles. The
    puzzles aren't perfect -- there is one particular puzzle (the parrot),
    for instance, where it was very clear to me what I had to do, but not
    why it would help me -- I had to solve the puzzle in order to discover
    why I needed to solve it. It is also possible to lock yourself into an
    unwinnable state by missing certain events, but the time window given is
    so wide that it's very unlikely that this would happen, as long as you
    remember to wander around.

    The interface presented a couple of issues, however. The game features
    an item bulk system, where some items are too large to brought into
    certain places, or to be carried simultaneously. This works quite well
    as a way to narrow down the field of possible solutions to one or two of
    the puzzles. The problem is that there is also an item weight system --
    carrying heavy items tires you, and gives annoying messages and even
    more annoying effects. There is absolutely no reason for this and it
    doesn't contribute anything to the game.

    There are some minor bugs -- a few typos, and one or two places where
    items give incorrect descriptions (one locked door has the deadbolt on
    the wrong side in the descriptions, though it functions correctly). None
    of them seriously impaired my enjoyment of the game. Tinseltown Blues is
    not an ambitious game, but what it does it does well, despite a few
    minor nitpicks. If you enjoy puzzles, and want some that won't have you
    pulling out your hair in frustration, I suggest trying it out.

    Zcode .z5 file

    Walkthrough

    To Hell In A Hamper
    From: J. Robinson Wheeler <jrw SP@G jrwdigitalmedia.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #36 -- March 16, 2004

    TITLE: To Hell In A Hamper
    AUTHOR: J.J. Guest
    EMAIL: jason_guest SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: 2003
    PARSER: ADRIFT
    SUPPORTS: ADRIFT interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adrift/ToHellInAHamper.zip

    This is a short game with a good amount of wit and charm to it, and it
    shows that it is possible to make a one-room, one-puzzle (albeit a
    layered, Babel Fish type puzzle) game that's entertaining.

    The situation is that you are Professor Pettibone, eminent Victorian
    Balloonist, on his attempt to circle the world in a balloon. Your
    traveling companion has been replaced at the last minute by a Mr. Hubert
    Booby, a rather shady character with a suspiciously bulging overcoat.
    The puzzle of the game involves throwing enough weight out of the
    balloon to clear an erupting volcano, and you have to prise items one at
    a time (or sometimes, a half-dozen at a time) from Mr. Booby.

    I turned to the walkthrough rather soon, just to get the game moving,
    and relied on it a bit too much thereafter, worried that I was going to
    do something out of order and make the game unwinnable. In fact, the
    author was sometimes careful in this regard, and made it so that you
    couldn't toss some items you still needed over the side. (But some you
    could.) I had a few challenging guess-the-verb moments, including
    figuring out the syntax for throwing things overboard, and the rather
    dodgy necessity of using the non-standard verb 'MAKE' at a crucial
    late-game step.

    Having gotten that far, I decided to play the rest of the game without
    looking at the walkthrough, which turned out to be the one time I should
    have used it, because the ultimate turn of the game is a win/lose
    scenario. I typed "PULL ROPE" instead of "PULL GAS VALVE ROPE," and I
    lost. Since I hadn't saved the game, I had to start all over again and
    replay the whole thing just to see the winning outcome, which was
    irritating.

    There were a couple of spelling errors, including one in the concluding
    text of the winning scenario, and there were some odd tussles with the
    parser on occasion:

       > cut buttons
       [...] finally, with a great rending sound the coat bursts
       open, spilling a multitude of diverse objects onto the floor
       of the basket! These items consist of a large framed painting,
       an enormous carpetbag, a bundle of twigs, a boomerang, an
       ear-trumpet, a toy donkey and a sleeping Saint Bernard dog...

       > throw twigs out
       I'm afraid the meaning of your words escapes me. Could you
       possibly rephrase that?

       > get twigs
       Take what?

       > get bundle
       I pick up the smudge stick.

       > x it
       (the smudge stick)
       A bundle of cedar twigs and sprigs of sage bound together with
       coloured thread. [...]

       > throw twigs overboard
       I'm afraid the meaning of your words escapes me. Could you
       possibly rephrase that?

       > throw stick overboard
       I don't understand what you want me to do with the smudge stick.

       > throw stick
       I don't understand what you want me to do with the smudge stick.

       > throw smudge
       I'm afraid the meaning of your words escapes me. Could you
       possibly rephrase that?

       > throw smudge stick
       I toss the smudge stick over the side of the basket. After all
       I can't imagine what I might have needed it for...

    I enjoyed the pop-up introductory picture that set the scene. The
    dialogue of the game was very funny, as was the surprise of one of the
    last items to be revealed hidden about Mr. Booby's person. If I had run
    across this game in the Competition, I probably would have ranked it a 7
    or an 8, depending on how charitable I was feeling. Overall, nicely
    done.

    ADRIFT .taf file and walkthrough

    TOOKiE'S SONG
    From: J. Robinson Wheeler <jrw SP@G jrwdigitalmedia.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003

    TITLE: TOOKiE'S SONG
    AUTHOR: Jessica Knoch
    EMAIL: jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com
    DATE: September 2002
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/tookie/tookie.z5
    VERSION: Release 1.0

    This game has the same relentlessly cheerful narrative tone that Laura
    Knauth's "Trapped in a One-Room Dilly" did. I don't know whether such a
    tone is good or bad on its own, but if the player happens to be in a
    surly mood when it comes belting out at him, it can be a bit much.

    However, I don't take off points for friendliness; I just thought I'd
    mention it.

    The first comment I'd like to make is a general one, but I'll use
    "Tookie" as an example. I think that authors need to exercise restraint
    when it comes to opening text. One brief paragraph will usually suffice,
    if carefully crafted. If you need more than that to get across all of
    the material you have imagined, perhaps what you need to do is start the
    game in a different place, and have the exposition unfold interactively.

    Here is the first third of "Tookie"'s opening text:

       It started out a normal enough Saturday...

       You slept in late and watched part of the ball game in between naps,
       until Tookie, your faithful hound, ran over with the leash and would
       not be refused. You set out on a walk through the neighborhood (fully
       intending to be back in time to see the last few minutes of the
       game), when you spotted a rather strange thing in the sky.

    By this point, I was already thinking to myself, "Gee, this could have
    been done as IF, instead of as a cutscene." I could have started the
    game plopped out on the couch, or whatever, and Tookie could have run in
    with the leash and nagged at me until I figured out that I needed to put
    the leash on his collar and take him outside. And then I could have been
    alerted something in the sky, perhaps by Tookie, and EXAMINEd it for
    myself.

    It continues:

       Before you could say "Golly, I wonder what that is," an alien
       spacecraft had landed and three beings that looked like giant cats in
       silver jumpsuits had hopped out, grabbed Tookie right off his leash,
       and hustled him back into their spaceship! A voice hissed out at you,
       "Perhaps if you're clever enough, you can have him back, earthling,"
       and then the spacecraft jumped right into the ground, leaving nothing
       behind but a small hole and some scorch marks!

       Well, naturally enough, you started down the hole in pursuit of your
       dog! Man's best friend, and let's not forget this one is a purebred
       bloodhound, but the point is that no alien cat is going to steal your
       Tookie! The tunnel twisted and turned, but you followed it all the
       way down, slipping a bit at the end to find yourself here.... but
       where is here?

    See what I mean? This material also could have been part of the game. It
    might have been more fun, and more engaging of my interest. Although, if
    it had started that way, I might have ended up being disappointed with
    what I found down in the hole, which was a "collect the four gems"
    set-up, with multiple puzzles obstructing the path to each one.

    I can enjoy a good collect-the-gems game now and then. This one was not
    bad, although I was groaning a bit when I discovered that one of the
    puzzles was an algebra problem and another was a bowling match, even
    though I knew there would probably be a sensible solution to each of
    them.

    I was going to complain about the very first puzzle in the game, the
    acquisition of a ring of keys to the four locked doors, but I found out
    later on that the element I was going to complain about reappeared to
    more useful effect later in the game. Uh oh, thing-in-the-well won't let
    me touch the keys! I'd better figure out how to defeat it! Except, uh, I
    don't have anything to defeat it with. This turns out to be
    misdirection, and you can get the keys anyway, and the defeating of the
    thing in the well comes later on, for a different reason. Still, it kept
    me thinking along the wrong lines enough so that I went to the hints
    instead of solving it myself. I think that could have been designed a
    bit better, because the actual solution to the keys problem, and the
    in-game clues to solving it, were fairly original and clever, but I
    didn't appreciate it very much because I had to look up the answer.

    The game slightly confused me at one point, when I saw two rooms with
    holes in the wall, one of which had a gigantic aquarium tank, and I put
    a bowling ball through the hole in the wall upstairs from the tank,
    heard a smashing of glass, and returned to the tank to see that nothing
    had happened. I thought there was a bug, and I restarted, only to find
    out the bowling ball had shown up again in a completely different place,
    with no clue as to why. The in-game hints say that the aquarium is a
    completely useless bit of scenery -- so, er, why is it there? Just
    because the author had fun coding up a giant squid in a tank? I guess
    that's allowed. I guess.

    I had some gripes about the ring of keys, in that the game almost acted
    like it was smart enough to disambiguate automatically which one I meant
    -- I went south first, and the game took it upon itself to try the key
    for that door for me. But, for the other three doors, the process was
    more tedious. Once I have the key ring, the doors should just fling
    themselves open when I walk in the right direction.

    I want to point out two strange authorial choices that were irritating
    when they did not need to be. First:

       >x door
       You can't put your finger on it, but something about the large door
       in the wall makes you think of it as a "dropping" door. There is a
       row of colored leaves hanging from the top of the door.

       >x leaves
       See the row of icicles text.

    If you're going to bother to make a scenery object and give it a
    description, just put an actual description there. Especially when a)
    the reference is mimesis-breaking (mentioning game "text"), and b) the
    reference, if consulted, doesn't make any sense:

       >x icicles
       Cool, sharp, aloof. Each icicle looks to be about a handswidth long,
       perfectly symmetrical, and slightly bluish. I suppose that's to be
       expected.

    So the leaves are also cool, sharp, aloof, a handswidth long, perfectly
    symmetrical, and slightly bluish, as to be expected?

    The second example, similarly, shows the author taking the time to code
    a response that provides an unhelpful redirection, instead of being
    practical:

       >u
       The wide staircase curves around to enter the upstairs room on the
       north wall.

       Space Bar
       The walls here are decorated with black paint and pictures of stars
       and planets, which, coupled with the futuristic-looking tables and
       chairs scattered about and the bar, lead you to believe that what you
       are in is supposed to be, well, a space bar. The room is brightly
       lit, and all of the tables are empty of people, but there is a
       strange looking figure standing behind the bar. Finally, you can see
       the top of a curving staircase set in the north wall.

       >d
       There are two ways of going down from here: you may walk north to the
       spiral staircase, or enter the hole in the corner of the room.

    If I can go "UP" to get here, why can't I go "DOWN" to leave by the same
    staircase? You know where I want to go when I type that, because you put
    the code there to print this message. Maybe it's that you wanted to make
    sure I tried "ENTER HOLE" (which isn't actually an exit, either),
    because the response to that command provides a hint for a puzzle. Bad
    form.

    I had some gripes about the solution to Eddie's math problem. [Rob's
    answers have been changed to prevent the spoiler. --Paul] The problem
    was that I was saying "4" instead of "FOUR," but I think that the author
    could reasonably have accounted for this, sparing me trying a dozen
    different variations:

       >say 4 p.m. to eddie
       >say "4 p.m." to eddie
       >eddie, 4 p.m.
       >answer 4 p.m. to eddie
       >answer 4 pm to eddie
       >answer "4 pm" to eddie
       >answer "4" to eddie
       >answer 4 to eddie
       >eddie, 4
       >say 4
       >say "4"
       >say "4 P.M."

    My final gripe is that once the puzzle about Fred the bowling cat has
    been "solved," you shouldn't have to sit through all ten frames of a
    simulated bowling game. There really is no entertainment value to it,
    especially when it's padded out with [More] prompts for some kind of
    attempt at suspense. I can understand why coding this up was fun for the
    author, but the effect on the player is, unfortunately, tedium.

       >BOWL
       >G
       >G
       [repeat 7 more times]

    There is enthusiasm and energy to spare here, and some neat ideas. In
    the endgame, your "performance" is assessed, which I thought was
    amusing. Because I finished it after restarting, I took a few shortcuts
    (such as grabbing the key ring directly), and was marked off for this.
    Once again, I look forward to this brand-new author's next works, now
    that they've gotten this initial batch of IF ideas out of their system,
    and will have to dig a little deeper the next time.

    Also, "TOOKiE'S SONG"? What song? And why the lowercase i in "TOOKiE"?

    Directory with zcode .z5 file and walkthrough

    Toonesia
    From: Magnus Olsson <mol SP@G df.lth.se>
    Review appeared in SPAG #7 -- October 14, 1995

      Name: Toonesia                                Parser: TADS
      Author: Jacob Weinstein                       Plot: Linear
      Email: jweinste SP@G alcor.usc.edu                 Atmosphere: Excellent
      Availability: F, IF Archive                          Writing: Very Good
      Puzzles: Original and rewarding               Supports: TADS ports
      Characters: Good, but a bit non-interactive
      Difficulty: Rather simple

    In this delightful little game you assume the persona of Elmo Fuld,
    millionare and hunter. When the game starts, it seems as if your
    eternal adversary, Bud Bunny (that rascally rabbit!), holds a distinct
    advantage: not only has he stolen your gun, but he's imprisoned you in
    a room without an exit. But don't despair: you're as resourceful as
    ever, and in this world the laws of nature are quite flexible...

    Does this sound familiar? It should, since this game is a loving
    re-creation of the world of classic cartoons (with the names slightly
    changed, probably for copyright reasons). During your adventures in
    Toonesia (don't worry, you do escape your doorless prison) you'll meet
    not only Bud Bunny but Dizzy Duck and other characters, and you'll end
    up in a number of typical cartoon situations, hauntingly familiar yet
    with certain new angles, situations posing problems that can only be
    solved by thinking in the slightly twisted way of a 'toon.

    This game may not be very profound, but it's clearly one of the most
    entertaining adventure games I've ever played. It's not very large and
    not very difficult (and comes with extensive online hints if you're
    stuck), the puzzles are all very much in character and have logical
    and satisfying solutions (possibly with one exception: the helmet
    problem seems a bit contrived), the ending is very appropriate, and
    above all it's funny.

    My only complaint is that the game seems to have been rushed out in a
    hurry (it was even released a week before the competition deadline),
    giving it a slightly unpolished feeling in places. The NPCs could be a
    bit more interactive, and there are a few inconsistencies (such as the
    Tazmanian (sic) Devil escaping through a tunnel that ends inside a
    locked cage - yet when you follow him, he's gone!). I found one quite
    serious bug: for some reason, the room description of the mesa
    reverses east and west, which made me quite frustrated when trying to
    escape, until I literally stumbled onto the solution by
    trial-and-error.

    These are relatively minor things, however. I hope that the author
    will step forward after the competition to accept our congratulations;
    with products of this quality, there's really no reason to be
    anonymous.

    From: Gareth Rees <Gareth.Rees SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

    I enjoyed playing "Toonesia".  It captures a good deal of the flavour of
    the cartoons it pastiches, and makes excellent use of the logic of the
    cartoon world it takes place in: I found all of the puzzles were
    solvable on the first attempt, and the majority were very good.

    There were problems with the descriptions (the directions on the mesa
    were reversed), and a few minor bugs (e.g., you could type "enter hole"
    from the mesa and get there directly, rather than messing about with the
    blindfold), but the main reason why I ranked "The One that Got Away"
    higher was because "Toonesia" seemed to lack energy.

    Palmer Davis  wrote the following in the
    newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction:

        The writing could use a bit more polish, but still manages to
        capture the spirit of Saturday morning.  The NPCs don't, however --
        if you encounter Daffy Duck or the Tasmanian Devil in a "real"
        cartoon, he'll be in your face until Porky Pig shows up for the
        fadeout, rather than just standing around like they do here.

    I agree entirely; the characters in "Toonesia" are too static, and the
    game is directed too much by the player's own wanderings to be a
    completely successful pastiche.  In a typical cartoon, Bugs would appear
    right at the start and his running battle with Fudd would continue to
    the end, with Fudd setting traps for Bugs and Bugs always escaping and
    turning the tables.

    You can make an NPC more interesting by giving him or her a strong
    motivation and an ability to do things on his or her own initiative, not
    just in response to the player's actions.  They are more interesting if
    they react to each other's actions as well as to the player's.  And it
    helps a lot just to give them many different things that they can do.
    So in "Toonesia", the player should have had to make several attempts to
    deal with Bud, with interaction at each stage.  The other characters
    should have had their own motivations and schemes which would either
    provide additional hindrances, or present opportunities for subversion
    by the player, or be just there for background.

    From: Walter Sandsquish <Sandsquish SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000

    Each storytelling medium has its own strengths and weaknesses. Animated
    films, for instance, are wonderful at presenting frantic, surreal
    absurdities. And text-adventure games are, unfortunately, poor at
    creating and maintaining the pace of action in a story.

    Now, why, exactly, would I choose to point out that particular strength
    of animation in the same paragraph as that particular weakness of IF?

    Because "Toonesia" is a light, pleasant hodgepodge of Warner Bros.
    cartoons. And, while it effectively recreates the environment of a toon,
    solving its puzzles will wreck the rabid tempo of the cartoons it's
    paying homage to.

    Not that the puzzles are difficult. On the contrary, once you catch on
    to their theme, which should be obvious from the game's title, the
    conflicts in "Toonesia" are fairly simple, and entertaining, to resolve.

    Unfortunately, "Toonesia's" other major flaw is not inherent in the
    medium the author chose. While Weinstein did capture the essence of the
    Warner Bros. characters, he failed to make any of them very interactive.
    In the Warner Bros. world of hyperactive, clever, sarcastic characters,
    this just doesn't work. The most interactive one, Dizzy Duck, is also
    the most frustrating one. Oddly, Dizzy will react to Elmo's actions, but
    to nothing that Elmo, the player character, says to him!

    "Toonesia" is too short to have as many settings as it has. Weinstein
    shoveled the desert of Wylie Coyote and the Roadrunner, the woodlands of
    Bugs Bunny, and an abandoned jewel mine into this game.

    One of the settings, the mine, complete with a greedy Dizzy Duck, isn't
    even directly related to Elmo's goal, which is to kill the rabbit! And
    the ending, lifted directly from the Bugs Bunny short with a Wagner
    theme, jars the player. While the Wagner episode worked for the toon,
    because it was an unusual setting and an odd story-telling method for a
    series of shorts that are a little too similar to each other, it only
    emphasizes the mismatched environment of this game.

    Although the programming is fairly transparent, you should beware of one
    nasty bug. The description of the cliff walls from the Mesa will kill
    your player character if you pay attention to it. The east-west
    directions are reversed.

    Despite these weaknesses, "Toonesia" is still an agreeable game. The
    writing is solid, and, although the author's voice rarely comes out,
    when it does, it's funny. Try referring to the characters by their
    Warner Bros. counterparts' names and you'll discover a mildly, and
    amusingly, paranoid author denying any involvement in copyright
    infringement.

    TADS .gam File

    Tossed Into Space
    From: Stefan Jokisch <jokisc00 SP@G marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>
    Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995

      NAME: Tossed Into Space                 PARSER: AGT
      AUTHOR: Graeme Cree                     PLOT: Non Linear
      EMAIL: ???                              ATMOSPHERE: Not Bad
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive             WRITING: Not Bad
      PUZZLES: Simple                         SUPPORTS: AGT Ports
      CHARACTERS: Simple                      DIFFICULTY: Very Easy

            "Tossed Into Space"  tells a slightly weird science fiction story:
    You are Dr. Schmidt, a saboteur who is trapped on the new colony of Alpha
    Centauri.  Since the colonists (the Rob-&-Son family) refused to take you
    home to earth, you have waited for an opportunity to steal their space-
    ship "Jupiter 8".  Finally, your time has come: The Rob-&-Son family is
    not at home and the Jupiter is only guarded by a robot.  You have to get
    rid of the robot, refuel the ship, set the course data and lift off.
            Apparently, "Tossed Into Space" was written for beginners; the
    game is very short, simple and easy.  All the player has to do is to
    perform the most basic exercises of text adventuring: bringing light to
    a dark room, wearing appropriate clothes in a cold place or unlocking an
    object with a key.  Experienced players will solve 'Tossed Into Space'
    within an hour or less.  In fact, this game is so short that I cannot say
    more without spoiling the entire game.
            Nevertheless, playing "Tossed Into Space" was fun.  The story is
    amusing and the writing is all right as long as you don't mind a few
    spelling mistakes.  The (AGT) parser is not comfortable, but satisfying.
    'Tossed Into Space' is worth taking a look at, if you don't expect too much.

            [By the way, if you haven't guessed it yet, this game is a total
    Lost in Space parody, but then, you knew that, right? -GKW]

    AGT files with PC executable runtime, Source and Walkthru (.zip)

    Tough Beans
    From: Mike Snyder <wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006

    TITLE: Tough Beans
    AUTHOR: Sara Dee
    EMAIL: saradee123 SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/toughbeans/
    ToughBeans.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    All in all, Tough Beans is a fine piece of work. It isn’t often where a
    person’s first game (assuming Sara Dee isn’t a pseudonym) is so polished and
    playable. “This is Sara Dee’s first game.” I kept thinking, though, that my
    entry last year was Sidney Merk’s first game, too. Why didn’t she say “…my
    first game” instead? Just semantics? Moving on.

    Tough Beans does a better job of describing a day where everything just goes
    wrong than does Son of a...(another entry in this year’s competition). The
    story hints at something deeper, which remained unexplored up to my 3-point
    ending. Was the early elevator scene a premonition of one possible ending
    (mishap with the firework)? Does Wendy have a mental illness, or some kind of
    tumor that’s causing her numbness and flashbacks, or is that just for narrative
    effect? What was her boyfriend’s motivation, beyond the obvious? The
    walkthrough claims there are five endings, with variations to each. Does that
    include the firework mishap? If not, then I found only one. I did identify a
    key decision early on (it’s pretty obvious – the game tells you it’s a key
    decision, more or less). I played briefly into each, and settled on just one.

    The puzzles aren’t complicated, but they aren’t always easy. For puzzle experts,
    this is probably perfect. The clues are usually just right. I made it to the
    coffee shop before feeling stuck enough to peek at the walkthrough. I felt
    guilty here, though, because I should have noticed what’s important after Rhoda
    broke her pen. Some of it may still walk the border between fair and unfair –
    the form goes unnoticed, for instance, even when looking right at the spot
    where it’s found. I guess if I visualize the scene, and consider what I might
    see walking up to my own desk – the orientation of it, and the angle of
    approach – I guess I can see how a form might remain unnoticed until further
    action is taken. I guess since it did work, and I found the form, then the
    puzzle worked.

    The bugs – what few there are – are minor. Looking at the kitchen table reports
    a bowl, but searching it states nothing is on the table – that kind of thing.
    Errors in the text are almost non-existent. The game succeeds very well as
    fiction, where the level of implementation is deep and the writing stands out
    as descriptive and emotional.

    It’s a story about breaking cycles and standing up for yourself. Some of that
    is obvious from a 3-point play-through, but the scoring hints in the
    walkthrough make it more clear. I couldn’t quite decide what the story was
    meant to achieve, though. Was it meant to be a poignant introspection into
    Wendy’s psyche? Should I have felt bad for her, or should I have resolved to be
    more assertive? Both? It wasn’t easy for me to recognize decision points aside
    from the early one, and it wasn’t easy to think like a weepy 22-year-old
    secretary. This game is going to hit the proverbial perfect note with some
    players, but I never quite connected with the PC.

    Fiction is less about writing main characters that are familiar to the audience
    – that’s a playground for stereotypes – and more about writing main characters
    that will become familiar to the audience. Games with a deemphasis on the PC’s
    identity avoid this almost entirely, except where the PC’s motivations are
    concerned. Whether or not Wendy is familiar to the author, she probably isn’t
    familiar to many of us. The game succeeds in making her real, but not (for me,
    anyway) in making her evolve.

    I think more can be learned in the unseen, alternate endings. It’s a shame the
    author didn’t include alternate walkthroughs, showing a ten-point ending. I’m
    curious about what other actions I might take as Wendy, and how this will
    reflect on those endings.

    My scoring scale fits Tough Beans in somewhere between 8 and 9, so I have based
    it at 8.5. I think it’s a great game even though I couldn’t connect with the
    protagonist, and I think it’s going to do very well in the competition. It
    deserves a +0.5 skew for great writing and a convincing game world. Unofficial
    score: 9.0.

    Zcode executable (.z5)
    Walkthrough

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

    TITLE: The Tower of the Elephant
    AUTHOR: Tor Andersson
    E-MAIL: tor.andersson SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: October 1, 2006
    Parser: Inform 7
    Supports: Z-code
    Availability: IF-archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2006/zcode/tower/The%20Tower%20of%20the%20Elephant.zblorb
    Version: Release 1 / Serial number 060922 / Inform 7 build 3Z95 (I6/v6.31 lib
    6/11N)

    "I have seen no guards. The walls would be easy to climb. Why has not somebody
    stolen this secret gem?" the game begins (well almost).  Indeed, why not?  It's
    the perfect excuse to begin an adventure game.

    The game, it turns out, is based on the Conan story by Robert E. Howard.  You
    get to play the part of Conan the Barbarian as he goes to the Elephant Tower of
    Yara the priest to steal the source of his magic, the Elephant's Heart jewel.
    I've never read any of the Conan stories, though I am vaguely familiar with
    style.

    The writing is a real treat, vivid and undemanding.  Like pulp fiction should
    be.  Most of the writing is Howard's, though Andersson has done a very competent
    job of taking the words from their original linear format and embedding them
    into a text adventure.

    The Tower of the Elephant is well implemented, with close to no outright bugs,
    and is generally polished.  I think the game could definitely benefit from
    implementing a few more scenery nouns.  In a literary adaptation this is, of
    course, a tricky business; how far should Andersson go in adding new
    descriptions?  Well, at least as far as the coping, the sward, the shrubbery
    (these examples from the first few locations).  In the Infocom era, this would
    have gone without a mention, but these days I think people expect a bit more.
    In a way though, I find it quite refreshing; it focuses the mind on the
    essentials.  The same complaint exists in the domain of verbs. Obvious
    manipulations of implemented objects are not always implemented.  You have a
    sword but you cannot draw nor wield it.  The following extract concerning a
    jewel is typical (There are lots of jewels in this game.  Some of them you can
    take, some of them you cannot):

    >> x stone

    A great round jewel, clear as crimson crystal.

    >> look through stone

    You find nothing of interest.

    As someone who was not familiar with the story I would say that the game
    sometimes fails to mark "the way forward" with sufficient clues.  This is mostly
    only a problem early on when room descriptions fail to describe available exits.
    Really, I quibble because a player isn't likely to forget which way the tower is
    (unless they are deliberately wasting time trying lots of different things out
    like I was), and it's a sufficiently small game that it's never a huge problem
    anyway.  Also, the EXITS command is implemented.

    Epistemic object naming comes into play.  An NPC thief is referred to as thief
    until you learn his name (optional), thence he is referred to using his name.
    Managing the player's knowledge is always a bit tricky, and later on the game
    falters when you meet Yag-kosha.  Yag-kosha never directly introduces himself
    directly, indeed at one point he addresses Yag-kosha as if talking to someone
    else, but the game immediately refers to Yag-kosha and apparently assumes you
    know the referent.  I did briefly wonder whether in Yag-kosha's language "Yag-
    kosha" was a pronoun that could be used to refer to self and others equally
    (like some uses of "we" in English).

    One of the puzzles, the spider combat, I found annoying.  Of the many things
    that a player could try only a few are implemented.  Not implementing DODGE and
    PARRY seems reasonable enough, at least the game is clear on that matter, but
    there are some actions that the game describes, but which cannot be executed
    voluntarily.  For example at one point the game says (in response to my not
    doing anything positive in attacking the spider) "You leap high, and the spider
    passes beneath you, wheels and charges back", but I cannot JUMP OVER SPIDER; I
    can JUMP, but I get the library response.  The required actions are not
    particular hard to guess, but they're not particularly well clued either.  The
    combat scene is on a timer (eventually the spider _will_ kill you), so I suspect
    most players will be restoring many times before they defeat the spider.
    Contrast this with the spider combat in Tales of the Traveling Swordsman where
    the actions are better clued (in fact, the clueing is progressive), and the game
    isn't quite so cruel at killing the player off.  It turns out there are
    solutions to the game that avoid the entire spider combat, so maybe it doesn't
    matter if I found it hard?  Well, that would be a more reasonable defense if it
    was possible to escape from the spider.  It's not as far as I can tell, and I
    can't really see why.

    The game exhibits other branches as well (aside from the optional spider), in
    fact the more I play the game the more options and variation I find.  Somehow
    though this variation is presented poorly.  It's almost as if the game is trying
    to hide the fact that multiple solutions whilst letting players discover a
    solution that's natural to them.  It's hard to say what's going on without
    getting spoilery, but consider the spider combat.  Because of the way its
    arranged it's entirely likely that players that discover the spider combat will
    not discover the alternate path, and won't even be aware that there is one.
    Similarly, players that discover the alternate path will probably not discover
    the spider combat.  A similar situation exists with the thief.  It's cool that
    the game admits multiple solutions so some players will naturally discover one
    way and some players will naturally discover another, but I think most players
    will not realise that they have the option.  Tower of the Elephant is quite a
    short game, but exploring the alternate solutions provides a fair amount of
    replay value; and I encourage all players to do that so that Andersson's coding
    isn't wasted on you.

    The game has a cruel moment (possibly more than one).  If you penetrate the
    secrets of the tower sufficiently but then leave before settling some business
    then you can wind up in an unwinnable state, confronting an all too mighty Yara,
    without it being clear and beyond the reach of undo.  This is probably a bug
    more than intentional.  Because of a slight clumsiness in the conversation it's
    perhaps a little bit easy to stumble into accidentally.

    Overall I find the game engaging.  Conan, the PC, is a man of action and the
    writing encourages you to take action; it's compelling.  The situations are
    vivid and unusual.  When I wasn't frustrated by the puzzles I enjoyed them.
    NPCs are well characterized and sometimes surprising.  Conversation (relying
    heavily on Eric Eve's extensions I suspect) mostly works well with an ASK / TELL
    interface with explicitly listed topics.  There are perhaps a few too many
    precious materials around --- once Conan gets to the tower everything is made of
    ivory, topaz, gold, sapphire --- but I guess that's just the in style when
    you're an all powerful priest.  I feel that a small amount of repair work on
    this game --- clueing one or puzzles a bit more, not trapping Conan in the room
    with the spider, a few bug fixes --- would remove the flaws and allow what I
    think is quite a good game to shine through.

    Blorbed Z-code game file

    Walkthrough (plain text)

    Tales of the Traveling Swordsman
    From: Jimmy Maher <maher SP@G grandecom.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #48 -- May 2, 2007

    TITLE: Tales of the Traveling Swordsman
    AUTHOR: Mike Snyder
    E-MAIL:  wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com
    DATE: October 1, 2006
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF-Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2006/hugo/tales_ts

    Tales of the Traveling Swordsman is one of several games from the 2006
    Competition that I returned to recently for another look.  I enjoyed my second
    play-through just as much as my first, even though the game is not the sort that
    generally most excites me.  You see, Tales very much wants to tell you a story
    -- one particular story.  It is very linear, and implemented just deeply enough
    to get you through that story.  And it is a fantasy game, not my favorite genre
    of IF or literature.  The fact that someone like me, who is generally interested
    by more simulation-oriented, open-ended IF set anywhere BUT a world of magic and
    fantasy, finds the game so appealing is a testimony I think to just how well it
    operates within its chosen restrictions.

    The game casts you as the eponymous swordsman, an adventurer who roams the land
    in search of villains to vanquish and fair maidens to rescue.  It proceeds
    through three linear episodes to a suitably exciting climax; then comes a
    wonderful little denouement that casts everything that happened before in an
    entirely different light and really makes the game for me.  The writing fairly
    charges along with lots of swashbuckling vigor right from the opening lines:
    "Thick blades of grass at hip level part and bend with your long strides. Onward
    you go, one hand on your broadsword's sheath, the other clutching a scrap of
    parchment, and your water flask dangling from the opposite hip. The town of
    Homesdale is now a morning's journey behind you."  Mr. Snyder also takes modest
    advantage of Hugo's multimedia capabilities to display some nicely-done
    scrollwork chapter titles that add to the atmosphere.  I hate to always refer to
    games by name-dropping books and other games, but in this case I can't resist.
    In the book department, this reminds me of a Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story
    with a rather less roguish protagonist; in the game department, of a less
    aggressively silly Eric the Unready.

    It does have plenty of puzzles, but they are quite straightforward and likely to
    stump you just long enough to make them satisfying.  You won't find any
    brain-twisters here to derail the story, and that's a good thing.  In fact, you
    won't find any of the things you might be used to seeing in next-generation
    titles by the likes of Emily Short and Eric Eve, or even the author's own 2005
    Competition entry Distress.

    So why do I want to give this one such an excellent review?  In short, because
    the atmosphere is just so darn innocent and fun... and because at the end, when
    you realize what you have really been experiencing, it manages to be both very
    funny (especially the bit about the cat!), and poignant, a reminder -- for me,
    anyway -- of childhood summers that seemed to go on forever.  Without the
    epilogue, it would be a competent but unexceptional little piece of lightweight
    fantasy.  With it, though, it rises to mingle with the cream of the 2006 crop.
    I can't think of a better choice for the 2006 XYZZY award for best story.

    I could happily go on for several more paragraphs, but to do that I would have
    to spoil the central surprise about which I've possibly already said too much.
    I have to say, though, that a huge source of confusion for me as I was playing
    the first time, the fact that I couldn't seem to TALK to anyone, gets explained.
    In fact, I realized on my second play-through that there was no sound at all in
    the story, and, again, when you get to the end yourself you will understand why.
    I'm not sure if I'm quite happy with the point of view switch that happens
    inside the epilogue, as it felt a bit jarring to suddenly be somebody else after
    going all through the game through behind another set of eyes, but I'm also not
    sure if the real situation could have been communicated quite so economically if
    this hadn't been done.

    The overall level of polish is excellent, bugs seem well-nigh nonexistent, and a
    play-through will take no more than a couple of hours at the outside.  So go to
    it, and if you have any heart at all prepare to laugh and even be a little bit
    moved.

    Hugo game file

    Graphics resources

    Configuration file for those using the Gargoyle interpreter

    Walkthrough in PDF format

    Author's notes in plain text

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

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

    A fantasy quest with a reasonably innovative spirit, Town Dragon is
    well-intentioned but plagued by gameplay problems. Several of the
    puzzles are painfully obscure, and others rely on examining things
    that the game doesn't do much to bring to your attention--and others
    require learning by death. A "story" file that the author provides is
    virtually essential to understanding what's going on--not a bad idea,
    and the story is nice, but it would be good to have it integrated into
    the game a bit better. The writing is competent, but overly terse at
    points when it would be nice to have some thorough desrciption (for
    example, in a dragon's cave).

    Despite the technical problems, the underlying story is fairly
    effective, as IF fantasy stories go. There is a damsel in distress,
    but rather than striding to her rescue, you let others volunteer while
    you collect treasure--an amusing send-up of the brave selfless
    hero. (Moreover, those that do volunteer are comically stupid, and get
    carried off by the dragon in amusing ways.) Even then, the plot isn't
    quite what it seems, and though the central motif feels lifted from
    the Chronicles of Narnia, it works well enough here to keep the player
    involved. The best thing about Town Dragon is that, particularly in
    light of its fantasy setting, it doesn't reliably go where the
    player's expecting; some of the subversions work better than others (a
    maid who speaks Valley-Girl style--"ya know?"), there are signs of
    originality here that belie "another fantasy game" complaints. And
    some of the writing is quite good--there's a transformation scene
    that's drawn out over about 20 moves and works very well.

    This, in short, is a good effort that needed some testing. There isn't
    enough in Town Dragon as it stands to overcome the technical problems,
    but the author shows some promise; some more Inform experience might
    yield a solid game.

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

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

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

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

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

       South Road

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

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

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

       >ne
       You found a secret passage!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Inform file (.z5)

    Trading Punches
    From: David Whyld <me SP@G dwhyld.plus.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #39 -- January 7, 2005

    TITLE: Trading Punches
    AUTHOR: Mike Snyder, writing as Sidney Merk
    EMAIL: sidneymerk SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: October 2004
    PARSER: Hugo
    SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2004/hugo/trading/trading.hex
    VERSION: 1.6

    To begin with I was quite impressed with Trading Punches. The opening
    graphic gave it a very professional look that is rare in text adventures
    these days and it seemed like I might be onto a real winner here. It was
    also one of the first games I played in this year's Comp, which was also
    a positive thing: finding a game of professional quality so early. Then
    the game started and I became less and less impressed with it the more I
    played.

    Which isn't to say this is a poorly written game. It isn't. The location
    descriptions are lengthy and nice for the most part, even if a little
    overly excessive in their use of the language. This piece from the first
    location was a classic example of excessive:

       Colorful peacrows relinquish their places in the few nearby elmpine
       trees, flying then across the open expanse, beyond the cabin, over
       the hills and away to regions unknown. Others arrive from the west,
       stopping for a moment to rest in the same few elmpines before
       continuing on a similar migratory route across the estate.

    While interesting to read, it was too flowery for my tastes and I found
    myself wishing for a shorter and to the point description. But that's
    probably just me.

    The storyline itself seems like a well-thought-out one for the most
    part. A race known as the Sheeears seem to have taken over the world and
    the human race are living uneasily alongside them. Your father is some
    kind of ambassador of the humans with their dealings with the aliens and
    this is a role you seem to assume later in the game. It's hardly a new
    or original idea but it was nicely done and could have made for a very
    interesting game, instead of a very frustrating one.

    What quickly rid me of my initial feeling of being impressed with the
    game is the way it practically forces you along the path it wants you to
    take. Take, for example, the prologue to the game. You and your brother
    Thyras are on a river bank. Thyras is throwing stones across the river.
    On the bridge are your father and uncle deep in discussion about some
    topic or other. The whole point of the prologue is to reach the stage
    where a creature known as a dactyl attacks your father, but the way this
    is reached is so poorly done you'll probably be aching to attack your
    father just to hurry matters on a little. You have to find some rocks
    and skip them across the river with Thyras. Several times. Simply
    waiting around doesn't do the trick and neither are you able to talk to
    any of the characters (or not in a way that I discovered anyway). You
    just have to follow a series of set actions which doesn't make for a
    very interesting game. Strangely enough, throwing the stones across the
    river doesn't do the trick; you have to skip them. Apparently your
    father and uncle don't want to start speaking in front of someone who
    throws stones instead...

    This being forced along a set path seemed to bog down the rest of the
    game (or as far as I reached in the two hour time limit anyway) and
    while Trading Punches had started off looking as though it might be a
    modern classic, the feeling I had when I stopped playing was that the
    writer, unfortunately, had become more concerned with the minor details
    than the big picture. The second part of the game involves wandering
    around a lot of very similar locations and filling several different
    glasses from several different punch bowls then giving the drinks to
    several different people. As far as puzzles go, this was a desperately
    dull one and without the walkthrough to help me I'd have just quit at
    that stage. I quit before too much longer anyway, as my initial
    favourable impression of the game had become somewhat lost and I was
    seriously struggling to keep my enthusiasm. Sometimes, even an
    interesting storyline and a compelling writing style just can't compete
    with mind-numbingly tedious puzzles.

    Despite my misgivings, I think I'll probably return to Trading Punches
    again at some point in the future as there's an interesting game here.
    But it's one I suspect will require a considerable amount of patience to
    get through.

    .hex Hugo file (updated version) and readme

    Hugo source code

    Directory with .hex Hugo file (competition version), readmes, and resource files

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

    TITLE: Transfer
    AUTHOR: Tod Levi
    E-MAIL: jessical SP@G ix.netcom.com
    DATE: 2000
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/inform/transfer/transfer.z5
    VERSION: Release 9

    Tod Levi's Transfer is straight-up science fiction with few real
    surprises--the setting (research lab) and plot (experiment goes awry)
    are well-used, and the execution incorporates most of conventional
    science fiction's strong points and drawbacks. Still, it's entertaining
    enough, and there are a few creative twists among all the familiarity.

    You and the rest of your research team are trying to perfect transfer of
    consciousness between entities, including across species--but the head
    of the team seems to be dying. Mayhem ensues when the transferring
    technology gets used and it appears that someone on the premises,
    naturally, is up to no good. Most of the mayhem, actually, is your
    doing--the other characters in Transfer are largely bumps on logs. Not
    only is there minimal interaction with them, but they don't appear to
    notice much of the havoc you wreak; evading their notice could have been
    a puzzle in itself in several cases, but the game doesn't take that
    opportunity. (Which makes the one instance when you're told not to
    wander around in plain sight a little confusing--it's not necessarily
    apparent why the characters who were blind and deaf a moment before
    would be so alert now.) Worse still, the few things that they know about
    don't appear to change much, if at all, over the course of the
    game--they don't comment on the latest development, no matter how
    bizarre or noteworthy, or even take notice of something fairly obvious
    that' s going on right at that moment. To be sure, the characters are
    important in the plot, and the plot is quite complex--but interacting
    with them is rarely rewarding.

    The main strength of Transfer is the gadget itself, and the variety of
    ways you put it to use; the game could plausibly be considered an
    extended riff on the central idea of identity-switching, in that the
    idea gets used in unexpected (and occasionally hilarious) ways. The
    element of the story that revolves around the machine is sufficiently
    convoluted that one question in the hints late in the game is,
    essentially, "Huh?"--but the story is sufficiently well crafted that the
    complexity doesn't feel gratuitous. In this respect, Transfer is classic
    science fiction: the gadgetry is intricate and fun to play with and it
    leads the story in all sorts of unexpected places, often steamrolling
    right over the characters, who end up (naturally) pretty flat. The
    presumption, in other words, is that the player is more interested in
    playing with the gadget than in plausible character interactions.

    The puzzles are entertaining, if sometimes difficult--at various points,
    the game leaves you wandering around the research complex with no clear
    cues as to what you're supposed to be trying to do next. The most
    egregious such example involves one point when you're apparently
    supposed to intuit that because two separate documents mentioned the
    same date, you're supposed to find out more about that date, thereby to
    advance the plot. Fortunately, there's a comprehensive hint system that
    helps bridge the gaps, and on the whole the puzzles make sense once the
    necessary inferences are supplied. (Meaning that the inferences aren't
    illogical, they're just obscure.) Also, the game doesn't become
    unwinnable without warning, according to the author' s notes, and as far
    as I can tell it never becomes unwinnable at all (aside from death,
    which doesn't happen all that often)--there are virtually no meaningful
    time limits, and no resources that you can waste. At times this strains
    realism, of course--even when you're somewhere that you shouldn't be,
    you don't need to rush to get your business done because no one's going
    to interrupt you--and it takes the edge off any tension that might have
    been produced. But for fairness and ease of play, it certainly works.

    The writing, for its part, is competent, though it tends toward the
    laconic: not only are there no exclamation points, but the game never,
    as far as I remember, imputes any sort of emotion to you, even when the
    emotion (e.g., fear when you're apparently about to die) seems pretty
    obvious. The emphasis is more on conveying what's going on than dazzling
    you with picturesque or evocative settings, though, and from that
    perspective, things work fine, writing-wise--there are no errors that I
    noticed, and the relevant information is always there. Likewise, the
    technical aspect is strong: the various transfers are handled well, and
    your interactions with the world in your various incarnations all made
    sense, as far as I remember. The only real game design problem I
    encountered was that something could be done in one move that I assumed
    would take two, meaning that a puzzle solution was a total surprise to
    me when I gave up and looked at the hints. That's a product of my
    expectations more than a design flaw, though, and it certainly wasn't a
    glaring weakness.

    Transfer isn't particularly revolutionary, but it's one of the better
    examples of its genre (a very crowded genre)--it brings more creativity
    to the table than many of its fellows. While unabashed puzzlefests
    usually aren't my thing, I enjoyed this one enough to give it a 9.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file & walkthrough (competition version)

    Trapped In a One-Room Dilly
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

    NAME: Trapped in a One Room Dilly
    AUTHOR: Laura Knauth
    E-MAIL: Laura.Knauth SP@G asu.edu
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/dilly/dilly.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Laura Knauth's Trapped in a One Room Dilly is virtually the antithesis
    of her Travels in the Land of Erden from the 1997 competition--where
    that game was sprawling and filled with plot, Dilly is tight, focused,
    and almost devoid of plot. But while this is probably a better game
    than that one was, it has some deficiencies even as one-room games
    go.

    From the outset, Dilly more or less declares that it is forgoing plot:
    the initial room description states that "ou have no idea how you came
    to be in this room or what you were doing just before." You therefore
    commence solving puzzles that eventually allow you to get out of the
    room--the title adjective "trapped" rightly suggests that being in
    this room is a problem. What is missing, however, is a sense of
    direction--you fiddle with the objects at hand, which eventually lead
    you to a way out, but not in a way that could remotely have been
    foreseen when you started fiddling.  (Whereas at the beginning of
    Enlightenment, say, the entire concept is apparent from the beginning,
    and the challenge is using the materials at hand to solve the
    problem.) Dilly is therefore a fundamentally different sort of
    one-room game than Enlightenment, or In the Spotlight, or Persistence
    of Memory--and while that's not a bad thing, it's a little less
    plausible than more unified one-location games. As in, someone had to
    put together this bizarre room full of objects that, suitably
    manipulated, allow you to get out; why did they do that? To give Dilly
    credit, one of the wittiest parts of the game is a bookshelf full of
    made-up plots that could answer that question--alien abduction,
    government experiments, etc.--but making a joke of it only underlines
    the point: stories that could make sense of such a premise require a
    strange, contrived plot, with the situation engineered by some malign
    intelligent entity. Dilly works better, in short, when considered as a
    set of puzzles thrown into one room, rather than as a piece of a story
    that happens to fall within one location.

    The mechanics of Dilly are not quite as elegant as they might be. The
    room is evidently _crammed_ with stuff to play with--and though that
    isn't bad, as such, the relative sparseness of Enlightenment suggests
    that it needn't be that way. Very few objects in Dilly have multiple
    uses, or uses beyond the obvious; there just happen to be a lot of
    objects thrown into one room. Dilly could work as a two- or three-room
    game without losing its flavor, so to speak; other games, where the
    story or the atmosphere are tied into the one-room conceit, would
    not. (Such as, say, Enlightenment or Persistence of Memory.) Dilly
    might also be a little less confusing if it were more spread out;
    there are so many knobs to turn and buttons to push in that one room
    description that it is easy to lose something in the shuffle.

    Still, let me be clear: Dilly is a well-done example of a one-room
    game.  There are some inventive puzzles, particularly involving the
    physical properties of common objects you run across and components
    you can take out of larger objects. One change-the-environment puzzle
    could be clued a little better, but it's a good puzzle
    nonetheless. There are several points where you destroy or damage
    objects rather than simply working with them, which I found somehow
    refreshing: it meant thinking outside the lines, never a bad
    thing. (Of course, it can break mimesis to require destructive actions
    in some contexts--homes, public places, etc.--but this is not a
    setting where such actions would be a problem.) Even the more
    artificial puzzles--a dartboard that requires a certain number of
    points scored, a "myriad" puzzle--are reasonably well-crafted; the
    latter has some unusual patterns, the former adeptly uses the
    "practice" dynamic also seen in Edifice. And there are nice
    extras--there is a slot machine, and you can play it using coins you
    find, though as far as I can tell it is impossible to win
    anything. There are plenty of nice touches that help to alleviate the
    sense that the author has grafted together a set of puzzles that
    didn't fit in other games.

    It's not clear what Dilly contributes to the genre of one-room
    games. The author ruminated about the possibility of a full-length
    one-room game, which may yet be possible--but, I would venture to say,
    not the way Dilly does it, not with a room full of stuff and no
    guidance given the player.  Much of the relevant material should be
    hidden at first to avoid discouraging the player; more importantly,
    objects should be involved in more than one puzzle each. Moreover,
    goals and motivations should change during the game, to break up the
    monotony of staying in one room the entire time. Nevertheless, this is
    an intriguing effort, and I gave it an 8 in this year's competition.

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

    OK, probably the first thing I should confess is that I'm not hip
    enough to know what a "dilly" is. My handy dictionary suggests that it
    means "something remarkable of its kind" -- their example is "a dilly
    of a movie." Somehow I don't think that's what's meant here. So,
    judging from context, I'm going to assume that "dilly" means
    "relatively enjoyable puzzle game with good coding and writing, but a
    few guess-the-verb problems and sometimes not enough synonyms
    implemented." If this is what dilly really means, then Trapped In A
    One-Room Dilly has the most accurate title of any game in the 1998
    competition. Like many others in this year's competition, Dilly is
    very puzzle-oriented. Perhaps what we're seeing this year is a bit of
    a backlash against the periodically swelling outcries for "puzzleless
    IF." If backlash it is, I don't think that's entirely a bad
    thing. Sometimes because literature has so much more cultural capital
    than puzzles, we can get into a mindset which tries to shun puzzles in
    favor of an elusive brand of literary merit. Don't get me wrong -- I
    myself am much more interested in IF for its literary qualities than
    its puzzles, but I also think it's important to remember that (for
    some of us, anyway) there is also a pleasure in puzzle-solving, the
    "crossword" part of IF as opposed to the "narrative" part. I believe
    that interactive fiction can cover a very wide spectrum indeed, but
    that there will always be a place for puzzle-oriented IF on that
    spectrum, and I'll probably always enjoy a really well-done puzzle
    game.

    Dilly is the closest I've seen yet in this competition to that lofty
    standard, but before I talk about the things it does right, I have to
    take one step back and talk about a game from last year. The author of
    Dilly entered a game in last year's competition called Travels in the
    Land of Erden. Ironically, these two games could not be more
    different. Erden was a sprawling, gigantic game with an enormous map,
    any number of subplots, and a generally broad scope. When reviewing
    that game, I wrote about the benefits of focus, and suggested that "if
    the author had concentrated her energies on a game perhaps a quarter
    of the size of this one, she would have had time for much more
    extensive proofing and beta-testing, and the result might have been a
    tight, polished gem rather than the rough and gangly work she
    submitted." Well, when I'm right, I'm right. Dilly benefits enormously
    from having a much tighter focus than Erden. The game narrows its
    scope to (as you might have guessed from the title) one room, and the
    room is a really *interesting* room, full of enough gadgets and
    gewgaws to keep me busy for two hours. At no time in Dilly did I lack
    for something to figure out, look at, or do. The game crams about 10
    puzzles into this one room, but it didn't feel particularly strained
    to me. In fact, Dilly makes a sly gibe about its lack of plot by
    including a bookshelf full of books whose plots are plausible
    explanations for your situation (Intelligence testing, alien
    abduction, the bomb shelter of a wealthy wacko, etc.). The puzzles are
    generally creative and fun, and all of the coding and writing is
    technically proficient.

    Well, almost all. The only times I ran into trouble with Dilly were
    when I was close enough to the solution of a puzzle that I should have
    received some slight confirmation, but the game didn't provide it. For
    example, at one point in the game something is ticking and
    vibrating. If you listen closely to this object, you can hear it
    ticking. However, if you touch it "you feel nothing unusual." This is
    one of those instances where after I found out what was happening, I
    felt cheated. If I'm that close, I want at least a little nudge. In
    another instance, I had more of a guess-the-verb problem -- the game
    wants you to tie two things together with a rope, as in "TIE FROG TO
    LOG." (That's not really what you're tying, but I'm trying to avoid
    the spoiler here.) However, if you first "TIE ROPE TO LOG" you get a
    message along the lines of "That's useless." If I had tried "TIE ROPE
    TO FROG" first, the game would have picked up on what I meant to do,
    but I didn't make that lucky guess. I don't like to be put in the
    position of making lucky guesses. Nonetheless, these are relatively
    minor problems, easy to fix. They didn't stop me from enjoying my time
    in the one-room...  whatever it was.

    Rating: 8.5

    Inform file (.z5)

    Travels in the Land of Erden
    From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #14 -- May 17, 1998

    NAME: Travels in the Land of Erden
    AUTHOR: Laura Knauth
    E-MAIL: Laura.Knauth SP@G asu.edu
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/erden/erden.z8
    VERSION: Release 1

    Travels in the Land of Erden is situated firmly within the tradition
    of expansive heroic fantasy quests--and, to give it credit, it
    inhabits that genre much more consistently than any other game in this
    year's competition. (Yes, I do consider that a compliment. I like
    heroic expansive fantasy quests. Done well, they have a certain
    charm.) Though the gameplay has some problems, Erden is an enjoyable
    old-style fantasy quest, too long for the competition but enjoyable in
    its own right.

    The plot is notable because it changes abruptly midstream--you start
    out pursuing a dragon, but are told that the dragon has taken a coffee
    break or some such thing and that your new brief is to track down a
    lost jewel.  You don't seem to mind this--dragons are irritating
    things anyway--and, truth to tell, it doesn't exactly affect the way
    you go about the game, since you were only nominally pursuing the
    dragon and you only nominally pursue the jewel. (I should note,
    though, that there are several sources of information scattered
    around, some in the form of characters and one an Encyclopedia
    Frobozzica-type book, which do help make sense of things.)  What
    _does_ happen is that you confront a whole bunch of puzzles, which
    eventually lead to the goal, and whether it's a dragon or a jewel
    makes little difference. Truth to tell, having a plot that is actually
    sustained over the course of the game here would be difficult, because
    this is a fairly long game, far longer than the average competition
    entry. The game design is somewhat wide: much of the territory is
    available at the outset, and figuring out exactly where to start is
    something of a challenge, since there's lots of area to explore and
    lots of objects to pick up. Even so, the exploration is well-done and
    feels convincing, particularly a series of caves in the endgame;
    disparage fantasy quests if you like, but this author put plenty of
    thought and effort into making the scenery come alive. (At some key
    moments, the author rewards solved puzzles with more territory to
    explore; I wanted that to happen more often, but when it does happen,
    it works.) With a clearer hook, something to push the player into the
    plot, this would be a very effective story.

    There are some clunky moments, gameplay-wise, though many have been
    cleaned up since the first release. Most of the problems are
    mechanical, though--the game is well-designed and avoids closing off
    in unguessable ways, for the most part. In fact, it's virtually
    impossible, unless you do something very stupid indeed, to render the
    game unwinnable--most resources can be replaced, and there are no time
    limits. There is one notable exception, a problem that still needs to
    be cleaned up--one alternate solution to a puzzle that the walkthrough
    suggests does not work (at least, not as far as I can tell), and if
    you make that solution necessary, as it stands, you're in
    trouble. That aside, though (and I'm sure it'll get fixed), Erden is a
    reasonably player-friendly game.  (Moreover, there are some nice code
    tricks--the author seems to have added a "windy" attribute for rooms,
    for one thing, and a landscape transformation is thoroughly done.)

    There are many nice things about Erden--the gypsy who looks into a
    crystal ball to determine whether you've attacked or hurt anyone is a
    hackneyed but nice touch. The writing is quite skillful, and there's
    plenty of it--most rooms are thoroughly described, there are very few
    grammar problems, and there's even a modicum of atmosphere,
    particularly in the pirate-ship sequence. (Erden is proof positive
    that well-written fantasy can still be absorbing.) I enjoyed the
    setting on the island, and locations I might ordinarily consider
    gratuitous were well-written enough that I didn't, in fact, think
    that. And even though it gave rise to one of the more frustratingly
    coded puzzles, the spell you cast is genuinely breathtaking, and the
    author should get due credit for the idea. (And for the subtle effect
    after the spell has worn off. Very few games follow logical effects
    that way.) I enjoyed the puzzle in the dragon's cave--though figuring
    out the proper syntax was, as usual, a challenge, and the required
    action for getting there was a bit obscure. Finally, the on-screen
    mapping works _very_ well indeed, and often helps considerably.

    Given the level of antipathy to fantasy quests of this nature in the
    IF community, I suppose Erden isn't for everyone; though there is much
    to enjoy about it, it doesn't push the fantasy-game envelope
    appreciably. But nor does it simply invoke fantasy cliches, and
    there's nothing lazy about the setting (whereas laziness characterizes
    the bulk of inferior fantasy games)--and while the plot could stand to
    be better integrated into the story, there are enough clever puzzles
    to keep this entertaining. Those that skip Erden because of its genre
    might be missing something--and, if nothing else, the author shows
    some promise.

    Inform file and solution (.zip) (updated version)

    Directory with Inform .z8 file and solution (competition version)

    Treasure
    From: Audrey DeLisle <rad SP@G crl.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME: Treasure
    AUTHOR: James L. Dean
    EMAIL: jdean SP@G lsuhsc.edu
    PARSER: none really
    SUPPORTS: IBM PC
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: http://colbleep.ocs.lsuhsc.edu/Treasure.html (Java version)

    HISTORY: This game was written in 1980 and revised in 1987.  It is
    based on an article in BYTE 7/79 by Roger Chaffee.  The game has
    been compiled to play, but the BASIC file is in the zip.  The BASIC
    file explains the algorithm used and has instructions to change the
    treasures and guardians.

    PARSER: The reason I say there is not really a parser is that the
    commands are limited to one letter:
    C = carry (get); L = leave (drop); P = points (score); R = repeat;
    I = Inventory; Q = Quit and the directions are N,S,E,W,U,D in the
    simple game, adding F (Forward), B (backward) in the expanded game.
    If you try to type something else, a help screen appears.

    This would be a good game for a child who can read a little or to be
    played with an adult to read the brief room descriptions and let the
    child input commands.  The object is to find and return all the 15
    treasures and pass through every room (100) in the fewest number of
    moves, but there is no comparison.  You are asked for a game number,
    so perhaps you can get the same game again.  This allows the game to
    be played over and over with different locations and it might generate
    a comparison for future games.  Those who abhor treasure hunts or
    expect to 'save' and 'restore' should avoid it.

    Each treasure is guarded by a monster and the weapons must be found to
    vanquish each.  The guardians do nothing.  You are safe.  You cannot
    die.  Well, if you do, the game will resurrect you with no loss.  You
    do nothing.  If you have the correct weapon, C will work.

    There are two hazards: a pirate will steal your treasure if you don't
    return it to the Entrance soon enough and an ill wind will blow you to
    a random location.  Neither is a serious problem.  The treasure will
    be found somewhere and you can get oriented quickly.

    It is not possible to write a solution since each game is different.
    You can choose variations--limit to 3d, accept another dimension, etc.
    In the simplest version, the directions are N,S,E,W,U,D and there are
    few surprises.  This is the one I played.  I think the more advanced
    versions might be more fun, but might take longer.  I finished the one
    game I played in about four hours.  I decided a chart of directions
    was more useful than a typical map.  I scored 100 points.

    Trinity
    From: Matthew Amster <mamster SP@G u.washington.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #1 -- May 15, 1994

    NAME:  Trinity                  PARSER:  Later Infocom
    AUTHOR: Brian Moriarty          PLOT: Excellent
    EMAIL:  ???                     ATMOSPHERE: Engrossing
    AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2            WRITING: Excellent
    PUZZLES: Logical & Satisfying   SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
    CHARACTERS: Somewhat Weak       DIFFICULTY: Medium

         Trinity is among the most popular of the classic Infocom
    games.  After hearing friends and netters discussing their
    uniformly wonderful experiences with Trinity, I finally decided to
    give it a try myself.
         The game opens at London's Kensington Gardens, and quickly
    takes off from there into a fantasy world of nuclear mushrooms,
    giant children, and intelligent magpies.  The anti-nuclear message
    of the game is clear but never overbearing.
         The parser is as brilliant as one would expect from Infocom;
    it is nearly impossible to produce an unexpected response.  Most
    nouns have plenty of synonyms, and the player is never stumped by
    how to phrase a command.
         Trinity's map is similarly user-friendly, with no tricky
    surprises and few "can't-get-there-from-heres." But the game's
    strongest suit is its puzzles, which outdo what I've seen in any
    other game.  All are logical and satisfying (except one...but you
    figure it out).
         The endgame is somewhat difficult, but not overly so, and it
    ties up loose ends very well.  Trinity has something for everyone:
    it's not too hard for novices, but is well-suited for experienced
    adventurers as well.  It is exciting, engrossing, well-written,
    and, unlike too many other works of interactive fiction, lives up
    to the hype.

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

    And now, the cream of the crop, my ALL-TIME-NUMBER-ONE IF game...

    Trinity is, without a doubt, the best IF game I've ever played.  I've
    been through it again and again just to read the text, which is something
    I cannot say about any other game except for AMFV and Curses.  (Which
    right away lets you know that this game is in elite company!)

    I can't really describe the plot without writing a vast essay, but suffice
    to say that you're an American on vacation in London when World War III
    interrupts the daily routine -- specifically, the city gets nuked.  You,
    however, survive the devastation, with the help of a magical portal and
    a strange voice inside your head.  Through the portal you will discover a
    world of wonder unlike anything you've ever seen in interactive fiction.

    The plot revolves around the stages of development and construction of the
    atomic weapons used to destroy you in the game's opening.  Eventually, if
    you are clever and utilize all of your brain cells to their utmost, you
    might get the chance to go back in time and change history for the better.
    The ending of this game is in my opinion truly spectacular, a fitting reward
    for the amount of work you'll have to put in.  I was truly satisfied with
    myself after completing this game.  There is one non-intuitive puzzle,
    which I solved by pure luck, but by and large the puzzles are very well
    constructed and quite logical.  They are also not so difficult as to
    seriously impede your progress through the story, which is the real
    emphasis of the game, but not so easy as to make you feel as though you
    are wasting your time.  A perfectly balanced challenge.

    If you can at all get this game in the original packaging, do so.  There
    are no game-critical items to be found therein, but the sundial is one of
    the neatest props Infocom ever put out.  (Mine still adorns my windowsill.)
    In short, if you play one IF game in your life, you would not go wrong if you
    make it this one.  Highest recommendation.

    Solution (text)

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

    TITLE: Triune
    AUTHOR: Papillon
    E-MAIL: papillon_hentai SP@G bigfoot.com
    DATE: 2001
    PARSER: TADS standard
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.geocities.com/amethystphoenix/triune.html
    VERSION: Release 2

    Triune, by Papillon, begins arrestingly:

       This time, something snapped.

       You've seen the danger signs before: the stains on his shirt, the
       slur of his voice, the smell of his breath, the blood on his fists.
       He needs to hit something, hit it again and again until it breaks.
       When he's like this, he destroys the possessions that cost him the
       most to obtain. Whatever's left that still holds value, still holds
       meaning, still holds his place in this world.

       You are almost all he has left.

       You remember fleeing up the stairs, scrambling awkardly on teenage
       hands and knees in your haste, the thin fabric of your skirt not
       enough to shield you from the incipient carpet burns.

       You ran on bare feet down the hall to the bathroom, locking the door
       behind you, trusting in the spirit of propriety to keep your father
       from following you here, your last refuge.

       Because if he finds you, he's going to kill you.

    Okay, wow. We have here a hell of a premise -- not a cheery one, no, but
    it's pretty damn compelling. Almost instantly, I cared about the
    character and about getting her out of this particular tight spot.
    Unfortunately, this particular tight spot wasn't really the focus of the
    game; the PC promptly jumps into a fantasy world with lots of stock
    stuff like unicorns and castles and princes and stuff, which, initially,
    I found disappointing -- if I have a real-life conflict, I want to do
    something about it, not just think about something else.

    To be fair, however, the fantasy world is more interesting than it
    initially appears, and it's also related on many levels to the real
    world. Specifically, the violence that appeared to be imminent in the
    real world is present, in equally disturbing forms, in the fantasy
    world, and some of the responses to the violence parallel (in the long
    term, anyway) what the character might do back in the real world. It's
    also worth noting that some of the responses are more than a little
    violent in their own right -- there's a fight-fire-with-fire aspect to
    the puzzle-solving. Still, the abrupt transition at the beginning of the
    game sacrificed the game's hook, which is a shame because it was a
    fairly good hook.

    The gameplay isn't as smooth as it might be. The author entered a
    CYOA-style game in the 2000 competition, and while Triune has a fully
    equipped parser, I was occasionally reminded of the previous game. The
    action has a way of happening in big chunks -- you do something that,
    sometimes foreseeably and sometimes not, leads to an important scene,
    but the scene flows by without any further chance for interaction,
    almost as if I'd chosen menu option 1 and now had no further opportunity
    to affect the scene. There's something to be said, of course, for not
    giving an illusion of interactivity if you're not going to provide any
    freedom; if what's going to happen is going to happen, there's a case to
    be made for not taunting the player with the mistaken impression that he
    or she can do anything about it. But that just raises the question --
    why, in those scenes, are those results so inevitable from an early
    point? Can't the point of no return be pushed back? There's also the
    larger logical difficulty that the suboptimal endings address only the
    endpoints in the fantasy world and make no attempt to resolve the more
    immediate crisis in the real world. (Arguably, that's why they're
    suboptimal, but the suggestions in the ending texts about why those
    aren't the best endings don't cite that as a specific problem.)

    Beyond that, the game's logic takes some twists and turns -- you're
    likely to figure out before long that fantasy logic doesn't really
    apply, but it's not exactly clear what logic does apply. This is partly
    the product of the genre-jump; the player knows very well what his or
    her motivation in the real world is, but has no idea what he or she is
    supposed to be doing in this fantasy world, and to the extent that it's
    not "do the usual fantasy things," things are a little bewildering. In
    fact, this appears to be deliberate -- twice, you get sent on quests by
    folks you meet, and each time completing the quest leads to an ending
    which the game clearly considers suboptimal; the clues that you should
    deviate from the quest in the precise way called for by the game, while
    present, are a little subtle. On a third occasion, a character makes you
    an offer, but accepting it leads to another suboptimal ending, so you're
    supposed to reject it and solve a puzzle that's hinted at in one room
    description (but which, natch, you have no independent reason to solve).
    The story that ultimately emerges from all this is thoughtful and at
    times powerful, but for me, it emerged mostly because the walkthrough
    said to do this or that at certain times, not because of my
    understanding of where things were supposed to go.

    There are some more gameplay problems. At one point, you're imprisoned,
    and you effectively get out of your imprisonment before your captors'
    eyes without much of a protest. Lots of characters don't know much about
    things that they should know about (or, at least, there's no obvious
    reason for their ignorance). One puzzle solution doesn't initially work
    but does later, and while there's a reason for the change, it's easy to
    miss. Perhaps most importantly, it's largely impossible to put the game
    in an unwinnable state, except by wasting a certain resource too soon --
    and while resource-wasting is something that most IFers know to avoid,
    it's not quite as obviously stupid as throwing possessions over a cliff,
    and warnings might have been appropriate.

    About that story: it's been called feminist-liberationist and such
    things, and while that's not entirely inaccurate, I'm not sure it
    captures the spirit. One of the suboptimal endings (and arguably another
    as well), after all, is pretty close to a feminist utopia, and yet your
    character doesn't seem wholly content. The game does label each of the
    suboptimal endings with a female role generally seen as limiting by
    feminism, but that just made things all the more puzzling for me, as the
    labels didn't seem to fit what had actually happened in two of the three
    cases. To be precise, the labels described what your character has
    become, but not in an all-encompassing way -- your life as described in
    the ending text was far from completely subsumed with/described by the
    label, so it didn't seem quite fair to give those paths the conventional
    feminist spin: "you live that role to the hilt and feel you're missing
    something." That the other suboptimal ending is entirely consistent with
    that same conventional feminist spin also suggests that the author
    didn't set out to comment on feminism either (i.e., the game didn't seem
    to be saying that there's more to these roles than canonical feminism
    lets on). To add to the confusion, a few important characters who take
    steps that track archetypical feminist liberation have thereby caused a
    good deal of damage in the game's world -- is that unfortunate but
    necessary, or does it mean that pursuing those goals is destructive, or
    something in between (e.g., they pursued legitimate goals in foolish and
    destructive ways)? Multiple interpretations are possible; my main
    impression was that the game needed to get its theoretical house in
    order. I should add, however, that a game with lots of ideas but which
    doesn't manage to keep all its ideas straight beats a game with no ideas
    every time, in my book, and I did enjoy trying to follow the conceptual
    bouncing ball (even if I had to do it through the walkthrough a few
    times).

    The ending in the comp version elicited some protests; there was a
    parser trick of sorts which closely resembled a similar trick from the
    1996 competition, but which worked much better the first time. (Mostly
    because the nature of the 1996 game in question was sort of silly and
    gonzo, and the trick in question, I think, lends itself better to such a
    game.) At any rate, the post-comp release changes the ending
    significantly, but while it's certainly an improvement, I was still
    rather unsatisfied -- not only does the new ending strain credulity a
    bit (and assume away a lot of things), but it seems unrelated to
    everything that's come before (one flaw that the original ending, if
    nothing else, managed to avoid). The point is that, despite my initial
    reservations, what went on in the fantasy world ended up being
    sufficiently interesting that an ending that seemed divorced from the
    rest of game felt anticlimactic, tacked on.

    Oddly, this is largely a negative review of a game which I mostly
    enjoyed -- it's well written, has some vividly rendered scenes, and some
    compelling characters. As often happens, however, its strengths lay in
    the ideas below the surface and in the questions it posed, and the game
    itself (particularly the implementation) didn't quite live up to those
    ideas. Triune could have been better than it was; as it stood, I enjoyed
    it enough that I gave it a 7.

    Directory with TADS .gam file, solution, and .jpg "feelies"

    Tryst of Fate
    From: Tony Baechler <baechler SP@G primenet.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME: Tryst of Fate
    AUTHOR: G. M. Zagurski
    AVAILABILITY: freeware IF Archive
    EMAIL: gmzagur SP@G qnet.com
    DATE: April 1997
    PARSER: Inform
    PLATFORMS: Infocom
    VERSION: 104 970331
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/infocom/tryst104.z5

    For the most part, I really enjoyed this game.  I thought that the
    writing was quite well done and at some points I was really drawn into
    the story.  It would have rated higher but it had no online help, no
    hints, no walkthrough, and all I would get with help is the author's
    email address.  Also, there were some rough edges, one being that I
    had to type single words when mentioning the word to open the door and
    talking to the horse.  But, when answering the riddles, I had to use
    the say command.  It would have been better if the author would have
    stayed consistent.

    But, I would not have guessed that the author spent so long creating
    the game based on the fine writing and the fact that the game worked
    as I would expect.  It did feel a little odd in an old west setting
    since I would not expect a text adventure game to have anything to do
    with horses and ghost towns and mines.  But, even so, it was still
    presented very well and I liked it.  Also, a definite plus was that it
    was not that difficult, but there are many things that I would not
    have been able to guess because of the inconsistencies mentioned
    previously.

    I thought that the idea of gum ball transformation was neat and I kept
    hoping to find some more gum to take me to other places.  An amazing
    amount of things could have been put into the game if one actually
    would have enough time and willingness to program them.  The only real
    major disappointment I had was at the very end.  It did not abruptly
    come to a stop but more text (and more of an end game in general)
    would have been nice.  It is like I had come all that way and done so
    much and all I got was a gold watch and a thanks for helping out.  I
    was also hoping to find more information about the woman that George
    seemed to like so much that helped to open doors, among other things.
    Too bad there were no new gum balls in his factory and I had to make
    my own.  I could see a little bit of Zork, a small part of Trinity and
    some Colossal Cave in this game.

    Inform file (.z5)

    Stepwise Solution (Text)

    Solution (Text)

    Tube Trouble
    From: Gareth Rees <Gareth.Rees SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

      NAME: Tube Trouble                      PARSER: Inform's usual
      AUTHOR: Richard Tucker                  PLOT: Linear, short
      EMAIL: rit10 SP@G cl.cam.ac.uk               ATMOSPHERE: Claustrophobic
      AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive             WRITING: Good
      PUZZLES: Good, very complex             SUPPORTS: Inform ports
      CHARACTERS: Not interactive enough      DIFFICULTY: Hard

    I played this game on a BBC micro several years ago, and I was impressed
    by the neatness and complexity of the puzzle: I had a feeling of going
    round and round on a complex Heath-Robinson mechanism that I had to
    nudge a little bit each time it went round until finally I could step
    off where I wanted.  I did my to best to capture this feeling in the
    opening sequence of "Christminster".

    From: Palmer Davis <palmer SP@G ansoft.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996

    Not as sketchy as _Toyshop_, and not as pedestrian as _Library_,
    this entry still falls prey to the major shortcomings of both games,
    to lesser degrees.  You are stuck inside the London Underground,
    and must find a way to extract food from a run-down old vending
    machine in a tube station.

    Unlike _Toyshop_, _Tube_'s rather laconic style succeeds in much
    the same fashion as _Enchanter_ at making the setting seem real.
    Much of the tube station is left to the player's imagination to
    fill in, but the setting is familiar enough, and the handful of
    words carefully enough chosen to evoke the appropriate image from
    the player.  Likewise, the vending machine looks and works just
    like you'd expect.  Of course, relying on a shared experiential
    context to fill in atmosphere is hazardous; players in rural areas
    who do not normally encounter urban mass transit stations may not
    have enough background to provide the needed imagery.

    Unfortunately, the limited vocabulary and amount of interaction with
    the NPCs (one of whom enters and then promptly vanishes before you
    can interact with her at all!) turns a good portion of the puzzle
    into a guessing game.  This entry may have been an attempt at the
    "sudden" IF concept described in Whizzard's Supplement #1, but the
    reduced set of possibilities that the author implemented jars the
    player out of the tenuous sense of immersion that the writing creates.
    Keeping words, locations, and objects to a minimum works if done
    correctly; restricting the player's actions without providing a
    reason why (beyond "I don't understand ____ as a verb") doesn't.

    No help at all was provided, and the author didn't include a
    walkthrough, so I still haven't seen a fairly sizeable portion of
    the game.  Combined with the rather circumscribed nature of reality
    and the generally unexciting goal, that fact has kept me from wanting
    to return to finish the game.  Authors of future entries that don't
    implement help systems might want to keep that in mind and at least
    provide a walkthrough.

    BOTTOM LINE: Tightly written, but misses the train.

    Inform file (.z5) (updated version)

    Inform file (.z5) (competition version)

    Stepwise solution (Text)

    2112
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G CompuServe.COM>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME:          2112
    AUTHOR:        Anonymous
    EMAIL:         ?
    DATE:          Some time after Rush released the song of the same name
    PARSER:        Extremely poor
    SUPPORTS:      IBM
    AVAILABILITY:  Freeware
    URL:           ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/2112.zip

    I should have been warned by Chris Forman's review of Zanfar in Spag #8,
    in which he points out that one author's trick to draw attention
    to a game is to give it a name that places it last in the alphabet, so
    that a person will always see it when doing a dir command.  I
    downloaded 2112 for similar reasons; it is the first one listed in the
    games/pc library at ftp.ifarchive.org.  I kept seeing it every time I went
    there, had never heard a word about it from anyone, and thought I
    would check it out.  Silly me.

    2112 is based on a song by the rock group Rush.  It takes place in the
    typical Orwellian anti-utopian future.  Since criticizing big
    government is not as fashionable now as in Orwell's day, this
    government is run by Priests.  The game begins with you finding a
    guitar by the riverside, and taking this ancient relic of a forgotten
    time to the Priests, who confiscate it since music is outlawed.  To
    retaliate and let off a little steam, you go on a minor killing spree,
    shooting the Priests, blowing up their computer (a la Captain Kirk!),
    and making your getaway before the government is overthrown by space
    aliens who destroy the city (possibly blowing away a few cops along
    the way, although this is not required).  As a rock song, this is the
    sort of thing that could inspire parental protests at the record
    company.  The I-F player however would be better advised to protest
    the quality of the game.

    The parser is almost worthless; two words only, and no synonyms.  The
    puzzles are strictly "guess the word" and "struggle with the parser".
    Actions are intended to be taken in a specific order.  Altering the
    order can make the game very confusing.  One example: after you have
    surrended the guitar, you are supposed to go to your home where you
    will have a dream in which you see an old friend at the prison who
    aids you in finding materials you need to win the game.  You will have
    this regardless of whether or not you have already seen him and gotten
    the aid.  People can talk to you (and even kill you) after they are
    already dead, unless you have done everything in the right order.  In
    some areas, you can still hear humming from the computer after you
    have destroyed it; in others you can't.  There is a serious error at
    the end.  Destroying the computer is also supposed to destroy the
    electric fence, opening up a way of escape.  However if you arrive at
    the fence on the turn that it is shorted out, the new passageway you
    need will not be opened up at all, even though you can see the fence
    shorting out.  Only if you are elsewhere on that turn will you be able
    to get through the fence.  At least they can say that no playtesters
    were harmed during the making of this game.

    The atmosphere is heavily cliched, with lines like: "...policemen of
    the state lurk in the shadows.  I hope you are conforming!"  I
    personally think that the best treatments of the anti-utopian future
    since Orwell were done by Patrick McGoohan in "The Prisoner" and Terry
    Gilliam in "Brazil."  This one comes across as more laughable than
    sinister, and presumably exists only so that we can shoot up the town
    (the real point of the game) without feeling guilty about it.

    There are some things to like about the game, however.  At key points
    the game gives you a few bars of music from the PC speaker which help
    to set the mood.  The game was not written with TADS, AGT, or one of
    the other kits, but programmed from scratch, which is of course much
    harder to do.  I confess that I'm not a Rush fan, and if I were I
    might enjoy the game more.  At a couple of points in the game, stanzas
    from the 2112 song are used in conversations by the characters, making
    the game look like a little like a Musical (which is something I've
    never seen in a text game before).

    Still, the negatives far outweighed the positives.  Rush fans might
    want to play the game anyway, but others are advised to give it a
    miss.

    PC executable

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