#
ISSUE #46 - October 17, 2006

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

                             ISSUE #46

            Edited by Jimmy Maher (maher SP@G grandecom.net)
                           October 17, 2006

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

    SPAG #46 is copyright (c) 2006 by Jimmy Maher.
    Authors of reviews and articles retain the rights to their contributions.

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

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

    Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies
    Dreadwine
    Eragon
    Escape from the Crazy Place
    Gilded
    The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
    Off the Trolley
    Provenance
    Snatches
    Son of a...
    A Spot of Bother
    Time to Shine

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

    Well, folks, the IF world's equivalent of the Venice, Cannes, and Sundance film
    festivals is on.  Yes, the 12th annual Interactive Fiction Competition is in
    full swing.  I awaited this year's competition with even more curiosity than
    usual, for a couple of reason.  First, I was curious whether the recent beta
    release of Inform 7 and the recent offical exit of TADS 3 from beta status
    would generate excitement which would in turn lead to more games being entered.
    I was happy to see that there was indeed an uptick in submissions this year,
    from the 30-something games of the last few Comps to 43 this year.  Secondly, I
    wanted to see what authors actually did with those systems.  I shouldn't talk
    about this latter too much quite yet, as judging is still going on, but I will
    say that I am quite impressed and excited to find that games created with the
    new systems truly do seem to show a higher overall quality in some ways.
    (Standard disclaimer: It is of course still possible to do wonderful work with
    Inform 6, TADS 2, Adrift, Hugo, ALAN, etc., as is proven in this Comp and
    elsewhere.)

    It's interesting to compare the two important new development systems.  Rather
    than being essentially different versions of the same philosophy, as they were
    in the days of TADS 2 and Inform 6, each has move in its own direction and now
    targets a slightly different author "market."

    By moving Inform 7 as far as possible from the notational style of conventional
    computer programming, Graham Nelson has attempted to create a more welcoming
    system for those who are better at or more interested in writing than
    programming.  (I am not going to get into a discussion of whether writing with
    Inform 7 is really programming.  Of course it is.  Nor of whether the language
    is as efficient as Inform 6.  Of course it isn't.  Those who argue over these
    things are kind of missing the point of the system in my opinion.)  I'm not
    sure there is anything one can do in Inform 7 that one cannot do in Inform 6 --
    indeed, I am virtually sure there is not, as the Inform 7 compiler is really
    just an Inform 6 preprocessor -- but the new language nevertheless serves a
    valuable purpose in making that power more accessible and, just as importantly,
    in making it much easier to flesh out one's gameworld with complete
    descriptions of objects and scenery, etc.  And then there is that wonderful
    IDE, which subtly and not so subtly encourages the writer to test and polish her
    game.

    TADS 3, on the other hand, is a very different beast.  I hadn't spent much time
    looking at the system prior to its recent official release, but already was
    deeply impressed with its conversation model, which I feel gets us as close as
    we have yet come to answering the "NPC question" when in the hands of experts
    like Eric Eve or Mike Roberts himself.  I downloaded the official release
    following its announcement, and was actually just as impressed with TADS 3 as I
    had been by my first exposure to Inform 7.  The TADS 3 approach is radically
    different.  While Inform 7 softens the programming blow through its natural
    language interface, TADS 3 embraces it wholeheartedly.  It looks and acts like
    not just a programming language, but a thoroughly modern development
    environment.  The TADS workbench included with the system is wonderful, and
    when I began to explore the language itself I began to realize that here we
    have an out of the box system with a far deeper simulation layer than anything
    we have seen in IF before.  It doesn't coddle its prospective user.  The
    language and even the IDE, with its watches and breakpoints and other technical
    debugging terms, is all business, and likely would be decidedly intimidating to
    the non-techie.  And you know what?  That's fine, because Inform 7 is there for
    them as perhaps the first ever really viable "IF creation without really (in
    the sense of semicolons and squiggly braces) programming" system.  I suspect we
    will continue to see markedly fewer TADS 3 than Inform 7 games, but that those
    games that are released will push the envelope of sophistication more than most
    written with Inform 7.

    And so we have a system for writers and a system for techies.  For someone like
    myself, like many of you caught somewhere in between, the choice comes down to
    personal preference and the needs of the project.  If and when I finally start
    my long delayed IF dream work, I am leaning toward TADS 3 at this point, simply
    because it will be a simulation heavy work that I think would be more suitable
    for that environment.  Both systems are wonderful, though, and another type of
    project would send me to Inform 7.  It really is great to be spoiled for
    choice.  IF development has come a heck of a long way in the past couple of
    years, and the community owes quite the debt of gratitude to Mike Roberts and
    Graham Nelson, as well as everyone who has helped them in big or small ways.
    It's good to be spoiled for choice.

    And I owe quite a thank you to the community as well.  A week ago I had only
    six reviews for this issue, and it looked like my recent lucky run of fairly
    substantial issues was at an end.  But you folks came through in response to my
    last minute plea, doubling my review count in just a few days.  So, thanks to
    everyone who contributed to this issue.  I think it's a pretty good one, and I
    hope you will agree.  And now, on with the show.

    IF NEWS -------------------------------------------------------------------

    THE ESCAPIST ON INFOCOM
    The excellent online gaming magazine The Escapist published an article on
    Infocom's company history a couple of months ago.  For us fanatics in this
    community, it's pretty much the same old story, but it is interesting to see
    our favorite defunct computer game company getting such exposure in the
    (relatively) gaming mainstream press.  The same magazine also recently
    published an article on the lost art of computer game feelies, with Infocom
    again mentioned prominently.
    http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/55/20
    http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/62/12

    INTROCOMP 2006
    Jacqueline A. Lott's Introcomp 2006 is complete.  Now here's hoping the winning
    authors manage to finish their epics and claim their prizes for once.  Said
    winning authors were:
    2nd Runner Up: Greg Boettcher with Nothing but Mazes
    1st Runner Up: Stephan Granade with Child's Play
    1st Place:     Mordechai Shinefield with Southern Gothic
    http://www.xyzzynews.com/introcomp

    WEB-BASED IF FORUM
    A new forum for IF discussion was recently opened as an alternative to the
    Usenet groups.  Whether it will survive I would say is very much an open
    question, but it does seem to still be seeing at least a little activity.  If
    you want to see it not only survive but prosper, you know what to do.  And if
    you are in the "Usenet or death!" crowd, you know what to do as well.  And if
    you are like me, and just want to see IF being discussed SOMEWHERE, maybe you
    will want to just sit this particular battle out.
    http://www.intfiction.org/forum

    IF DREAMS
    David Cornelson has an ongoing request for IF based upon dreams.  Submit your
    games to him, and he will post them on the IF Wiki page he has set up for the
    purpose.  Three titles are available there already.
    http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/IF_Dreams

    TADS 3
    After literally years in beta, the latest and greatest iteration of Mike
    Roberts' TADS development system has seen its first stable release at last.
    This is exciting stuff, folks, a powerful new system with lots of new ideas and
    never before seen capabilities.  Also wonderful to see is the documentation
    suite, which finally gives TADS an equivalent to the wonderful manuals Graham
    Nelson has always provided for Inform.  Huge kudos for this are due to Eric Eve
    and many others.
    http://www.tads.org/tads3.htm

    FROBTADS 0.6
    In honor of TADS 3's official exit from beta, Nikos Chantziaras has released
    the latest version of FrobTADS, his TADS 2 and 3 console mode interpreter and
    development environment for a variety of systems, including Unix, Linux, OS X,
    and Windows.
    http://www.tads.org/frobtads.htm

    BRIAN MORIARTY INTERVIEW
    The author of Infocom's Wishbringer, Trinity, and Beyond Zork as well as
    Lucasarts' Loom was recently interviewed by the website Adventure Classic
    Gaming.  I was interested to see that Brian still likes to dabble in IF
    development, but doesn't feel his work is worthy of public release.  Gee, I
    wonder how many members of the modern community might be interested in helping
    him out?
    http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/212

    CARDINAL POINTS
    Karl Parakenings has begun a new column for the eToychest website that will
    feature regular coverage of IF happenings.  The very first edition features an
    interview with IF Comp organizer and Brass Lantern webmaster Stephan Granade.
    http://etoychest.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5180&Itemid=43

    NON-COMP REVIEW PROJECT
    Peter Mattsson has this year taken over this very worthy endeavor from Greg
    Boettcher.  It is an attempt to secure reviews of every game released outside
    of a competition during 2006.  Non-competition games too often go under-
    covered, but their authors deserve feedback as well.  Peter doesn't appear to
    have set up a website for the project yet, but you can reach him via email with
    inquires or reviews at peter.mattsson SP@G lineone.net.  And while you're at
    it, send those reviews to SPAG too, and help both me and Peter out for the cost
    of just one bit of writing.

    SPRING THING 2007
    Greg Boettcher will be running the annual Spring Thing competition again next
    year.  Its rules are considerably different from those of the fall competition,
    and are designed both to encourage longer games and to discourage buggy,
    unpolished games.  It's a great idea that deserves more attention and
    participation than it has gotten in years past, so please check it out and help
    to make it the ying to the IF Comp's yang that it could be.
    http://www.springthing.net/2007

    GLULX GETS UNICODE
    Andrew Plotkin has updated his Glulx virtual machine specification to fully
    support unicode characters, at last making it the equal of the Z-Machine for
    developers working in languages other than English.  The interpreters have
    already been updated.  Go to the IF Archive to download your favorite.
    http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/glulx/interpreters

    IF COMP 2006
    And of course, the most urgent news of all is that the biggest event on the
    community's annual calendar is now in full swing.  43 hopeful contestents await
    your playing and judging this year.  You only have until November 15, so get
    cracking.  And see next quarter's SPAG for full coverage of the Comp, including
    interviews with the winning authors and as many reviews as I can get you folks
    to send me.
    http://www.ifcomp.org

    SPAG NEEDS YOU!
    So many deserving games are still waiting for reviews.  If you have played or
    plan to play any of these, please think about setting aside an hour or two of
    your time to write up your impressions.  You'll feel good afterward, I promise.

    SPAG 10 MOST WANTED LIST
    ========================
    1.  IF Comp 2006 Games (any or some)
    2.  No Famous
    3.  1893: A World's Fair Mystery
    4.  Final Selection
    5.  The Retreat
    6.  When in Rome, parts 1 and/or 2
    7.  Bronze
    8.  IntroComp 2006 Games (any, some, or all)
    9.  The Reliques of Tolti-Aph
    10. An Escape to Remember

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

    Consider the following review header:

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

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

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

    From: Emily Short (emshort SP@G mindspring.com)

    NAME: Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies
    AUTHOR: Oyvind Thorsby
    EMAIL: jthorsby SP@G broadpark.no
    DATE: August 27, 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/AOTYRZ.z5

    It would be hard to write a very long review of Attack of the Yeti  Robot
    Zombies. This is a short game, and one that deliberately avoids  depth of
    implementation: there aren't many objects in any given room;  moreover, EXAMINE
    is disabled. What you see in the initial room  description is all the
    information you get.

    This spareness is in service of an unusual goal: getting the player  to play a
    timed game without restoring any saved files or undoing any  moves. The
    announcement for AotYRZ explained that this was an  "attempt to win on the
    first play" game, an unusual effect for IF.  Since there's nothing to force the
    player to obey these restrictions,  AotYRZ has to rely on player goodwill.

    Fortunately, the design of AotYRZ does support that kind of play.  There are no
    puzzles you need to solve by repeated tinkering. The  absence of EXAMINE
    actually helps here, since in any given situation  you know you've seen
    everything you need to see; there's no chance  that you've failed to look at an
    object that carries a critical clue.  Even the puzzles I missed were, in
    retrospect, completely fair.

    AotYRZ is also a bit more forgiving than the description might imply.  The
    puzzles all revolve around killing or avoiding bad guys (mostly  the monsters
    of the title); the player character has a limited supply  of ammunition, which
    he can use to circumvent puzzles when it looks  like he's not going to be able
    to solve them in time. So it's not  necessary to get everything right to
    survive the game. Solving a  majority of the puzzles is enough.

    When played as intended, AotYRZ achieves a level of tension missing  from most
    IF games. The structure works particularly well in action  scenes: because my
    player character wasn't given the time to dawdle  or the opportunity to examine
    things thoughtfully, the moments when I  had to do something dangerous and
    flashy felt more cinematic than in  other works.

    In other respects, this is pretty light-weight stuff. Right from the  title we
    know the game doesn't take itself very seriously. The  premise never gets any
    deeper than that; the setting is cartoonish;  there's not much to the story,
    either. So while I was engaged with  the technical challenge of getting through
    in a single play, I never  felt that the stakes were very high if I failed.

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

    From: David Jones (drj SP@G pobox.com)

    Title: Dreadwine
    Author: Eric Eve
    E-mail: eric.eve SP@G hmc.ox.ac.uk
    Date: July 23, 2006
    Parser: Inform 7
    Supports: Z-code
    Availability: if-archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-
    comps/mcdream/Dreadwine.zblorb
    Version: Release 1 / Serial number 060723 / Inform 7 build 3T38 (I6/v6.31 lib
    6/10N)

    Dreadwine was the only entry in the first MC Dream mini-comp.  David Cornelson,
    who organised the mini-comp, says "the premise of this mini-competition is to
    write a game that represents one of your most vivid dreams. The intent is to
    convey the emotion you felt that made the dream so remarkable.".  Should
    Dreadwine be judged as a game or as a conveyor of the author's emotions?  As a
    game it provides little of interest, few interesting interactions and a
    solution that is arbitrary and unsatisfying.  As a vector for emotion it fares
    rather better.

    The central premise is that you have to escape the town in order to escape the
    rather unpleasant fate that appears to inevitably befall the town's occupants.
    Naturally your PC won't let you escape without also rescuing a key NPC.

    The dream, which is context that the player is aware of but not the PC, and the
    principal NPC, who is familiar to the PC (apparently) but not the player, are
    both used as devices to restrict movements, actions, and descriptions.  That
    the dream provides an explanation for the abstraction and the surreal
    juxtapositions is nice, but more than that it's very nice that the author
    manages to turn this round and use the abstraction and the situations to
    reinforce the fact that one is playing in a dream.  In a way the dream provides
    a solution to the problem of how to restrict what the PC can do.  You're
    playing a dream, why should you be able to do everything that you can do in the
    real world?  Many objects that would demand a more detailed description in
    another game have abbreviated descriptions appropriate to the dream setting:
    "There are other buildings round about, of course, but you are only vaguely
    aware of them".

    The restrictions imposed by the key NPC interfere with the gameplay more, but
    they reinforce the characters of both the PC and the key NPC and are therefore
    crucial in supporting the game's emotional content.  An example that draws on
    both the dream and the key NPC: "No, you don’t want to go west, for you sense
    that it leads only to darkness and despair. [KEY NPC's NAME] tugs at your
    sleeve, urging you to turn round and go some other way.".  Now, in terms of
    gameplay this is the just the "you can't do that because I haven't implemented
    the entire universe" response, but the immersive spell remains unbroken by the
    way the author has married the reponse to the situation.

    The town has a drab sullen atmosphere suffused with a sense of forboding.  The
    author writes very well and manages to create his dream with economical English
    that is interesting and evocative.  I feel like I shouldn't have to say this is
    a review, but the author's writing is error free.  The author, in ABOUT,
    mentions "one literary influence that will be immediately apparent to a great
    many players", well, it wasn't apparent to me, maybe I'm just less well read
    than most game players.

    In what to me was a bit of flashback to playing City of Secrets, the town is
    "populated" with randomly generated NPCs that pop up in the various street
    location from time to time.  Here, as in CoS, it does a good job of providing a
    bit of background colour.

    This isn't a very big game (half an hour of play would typically be enough),
    and there doesn't appear to be much to do.  I found it a bit of a frustrating
    experience struggling to find what little there is to do, because it's never
    entirely clear when you exhausted a line of investigation.  What is implemented
    is implemented well.  I reached two endings, one is obviously unsatisfying, but
    the other doesn't leave me very satisified either.  Whilst wondering if there
    are more endings I rediscover the ABOUT text which proclaims that there are two
    endings. With the hindsight of having found them both it's now clear that the
    ABOUT text also more or less tells you how to finish the game.  You seem to get
    an extra 10 minutes in bed in one of the endings, so that must be a good thing.

    Given that there appears to be little to do it would be nice if more verbs were
    implemented.  If only because frustrated players, like me, are likely to try
    lots of things.

    I think Dreadwine is well worth dipping into just for the emotional content.  I
    was left wanting more, partly because the endings have no real resolution and
    partly because Dreadwine make it clear that the author could do it so well.  In
    many ways I think Dreadwine could quite plausibly form the introductory chapter
    of a much larger game, in that sense I was reminded of the opening of Trinity.

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

    From: Stephen Bond (stephenbond SP@G ireland.com)

    Title: Eragon
    Author: Anonymous
    E-mail: ???
    Date: July 2005
    Parser: Inform 6
    Supports: Zcode Interpreters
    Availability: Free, available on official Eragon site
    URL: http://www.alagaesia.com/game/
    Version: 1

    One kind of r*if post I hate (one of many) is the "IF reference at
    dingbats.com!" variety, where I'm meant to be grateful because some badly-drawn
    comic strip has mentioned a grue on panel 3, or some blog has posted an
    "amusing" "satirical" IF transcript, which has all your favourite commands,
    from >XYZZY to >FROTZ LANTERN, but never my favourite command, which is >QUIT.
    As you might gather, I'm never excited by this kind of exposure; it invariably
    tends to reinforce old stereotypes about the form, playing to a gallery that
    associates IF with dungeon crawls, treasure hunts, mazes and magic words. In
    the unlikely event that anyone's interest is piqued by such stuff, they'll come
    to r*if expecting more of the same.

    A recent example of mainstream IF exposure is Eragon, a zcode dungeon crawl
    apparently based on a book of the same name by Christopher Paolini (and because
    it's hosted on his official site with no other attribution, he'll have to take
    the blame for the game as well). Eragon takes its game design cues from the
    homebrewed BASIC Zork knock-offs that padded out coverdisks in the 80s, and so,
    true to form, we have a maze, we have parser problems, we have guess-the-verb
    for every puzzle, we have laughably static NPCs, and we have bad, bad writing.

    "A bundle lays wrapped at his feet", we are told early on, and further
    occurrences of the same error reveal that the writer really does think "to lay"
    means "to lie". He splices pleonasms together with commas, writing "to the east
    stands a crude tent, the source of the singing comes from within it" instead of
    "the singing comes from a crude tent to the east." In fact, the prose is
    littered with so many grammatical, spelling and formatting errors that I can
    begin to appreciate why the novel took a year in the writing, and two years in
    the editing. That said, I hope the game was written by some deluded fanboy and
    not by Paolini himself. If this is anything like the published novel, then I'm
    amazed it ever got out of the slushpile.

    Eragon's setting and story are the miserable third pressings of Tolkien, with
    the ancient dwarf stronghold Khazad-Dûm -- sorry, "Farthen Dûr" -- coming under
    attack by orcs -- sorry, "Urgals". It's the kind of place where all the proper
    names suffer from Klingonitis, being peppered with glottal stops and random
    diacriticals. The exception is the incongruous "Angela", an unmoving herbalist
    who is clearly supposed to be a bit of a character, but just repeats the same
    screen-long infodump every time I talk to her. The PC is entirely without
    character and the dungeon is entirely without atmosphere, a state not helped by
    the presence of rooms called "Maze M3" and "Hallway H19". "The northern wall
    appears to be a mycologist's dream!" we are told at one stage, which is an odd
    coincidence, because the rest of the game is a proctologist's dream.

    As a game, Eragon is less than worthless, but I suppose the real issue is
    whether it's likely to encourage new people to check out the IF community. On
    balance, I don't think I'd like r*if to be overrun with consumers of EFP, but
    Eragon offers little danger of that. There are no links to the IF community on
    the site, and no credit is given to the development system, only to some
    mysterious and unnamed "open source technology". The Inform banner has been
    hacked away from the start, but the undocumented >SCRIPT ON reveals the game to
    have been written in Inform 6.3. (This also reveals the game to have been
    released in debug mode, so that I can solve one puzzle with >PURLOIN -- my
    other favourite command.) Given the number of default responses left in, a
    chunk of the game's text is actually by Graham Nelson; but rather than
    acknowledge a debt, the game prefers to hide the competition. A dishonest
    strategy, but no doubt the only profitable one when you've got such a duff
    product!

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

    From: Mike Harris (M.Harris SP@G spi-bpo.com)

    TITLE: Escape From the Crazy Place
    AUTHOR: JJ Guest
    EMAIL: jason.guest SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: August 14, 2006
    PARSER: HTML TADS 2
    AVAILABILITY:  Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Escape.zip

    JJ Guest writes, “I began writing Escape from the Crazy Place when I was
    thirteen years old, and have now finally finished it, aged thirty-six. In spite
    of this I still haven't the slightest idea of what it's about.”  And how.

    I can only imagine that the vast stretch of time was spent on the technical
    details of adapting the game to the parser, as the admittedly bug-free play
    reads like something written by a 13 year old.  The game opens with an NPC
    hamburger vending clown named Donald McRonald who eventually “takes two fingers
    and stuffs them up your nostrils for a joke,” and it deteriorates from there.
    The play, the “puzzles” (such as they are) and the illustrations are simple,
    sophomoric and pointless.

    If this sort of humor is your cup of tea, have at it; it’s the only thing
    Escape From the Crazy Place has going for it.  If on the other hand you find it
    as irritating and unfunny as I do, you’d be well advised to give it a pass.

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

    From: DJ Hastings (dj.hastings SP@G centurytel.net)

    TITLE: Gilded
    AUTHOR: "A. Hazard"
    EMAIL: gilded SP@G darkluna.com
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-
    archive/games/competition2005/tads2/gilded/gilded.gam
    VERSION: 0.9

    Gilded has an interesting idea for a PC: you play a fey with the ability to
    shapeshift and create things. The game opens as you listen to the plans of
    several locals to go on a treasure hunt, and you end up joining them. I thought
    the game did a good job of guiding me through the introduction while giving me
    reasonable freedom of action. But once I got outside with the party and ready
    to set out, the game seemed to give up and say, "OK, it's your turn to guide
    things along for a while."

    The party got outside, and we were all ready to set off and find the treasure.
    So I tried to set off- and the game told me that I was "not quite finished
    playing" with my companions. I tried out my special powers (more on them
    below), but my companions seemed to pretty much ignore them. I tried talking to
    my companions, which didn't seem to get anywhere, and I tried thinking about
    stuff, which revealed that I was as empty-headed as they were.

    So I went to the walkthrough, found out what I was supposed to do next, and
    scratched my head and wondered how I was supposed to think of that. It looks
    like the author intended me to find it by accident while playing around, but
    that didn't happen with me.

    For pretty much the rest of the game, I didn't see any indication of what I was
    supposed to be doing. I couldn't see any motivation for my character to stick
    around at that point, let alone do the things he has to do to advance the game.
    And often it was unclear what those things were. Because of this, I ended up
    using the walkthrough for nearly the whole thing.

    Even after I finished, I wasn't sure exactly what was going on. I got the basic
    idea of the plot (I think), but most of it still confused me when I got done. I
    had the feeling that there was a story going on, but that the author had
    forgotten to tell me about it.

    Although the story was unclear to me, the writing itself was clear enough. I
    didn't notice any spelling or grammar errors, and the various places in the
    game were well described. I particularly enjoyed the dialog between characters,
    which takes place mostly in the beginning of the game. Some of it was quite
    funny, and it sounded "real" to me, helping give a bit of character to the
    NPCs.

    Another area where the author did well is in the amount of stuff he
    implemented. You can pick flowers, climb trees, drink from fountains, and catch
    falling petals. I spent most of the game just following the walkthrough, but
    during the time I was poking around I found a lot of stuff to do. Of course,
    that made it even harder to figure out what needed to be done, but the problem
    was with the lack of direction, not the deep implementation.

    Well, I said I'd get to discussing the player's powers eventually, so I'll take
    them each in turn:

    The creation ability:

    Although your character is supposedly able to create anything out of nothing,
    the help text said that I should stick to things appropriate to a fairy tale
    setting. So I started by trying "create sword", and got a blank line as a
    response. A little later on, an NPC mentioned that we needed provisions, so I
    tried "crate food", and was given a generic failure response. I tried creating
    various weapons, armor, treasures, clothes, and equipment, and all I got for my
    trouble was a single gold coin. Altogether, I counted five different ways to
    fail to create something, including "I don't know that word" and a bug ("do you
    mean the , the , or the ?").

    Now, I understand that the author couldn't add responses for everything I could
    think of creating, and I don't expect him to. But when the game tells me that I
    can create anything, it's setting expectations that it can't possibly fulfill.
    In my opinion, it would have been far better to limit the PC's ability rather
    than pretending that he could do things he really couldn't. For example, if the
    game had said "you can create weather effects," then the author could have
    focused on weather and implemented it much better.

    Speaking of weather, you are able to create various weather effects- rain,
    lightning, etc. This is probably your most useful ability in the game, but I
    didn't figure out that I could do it until I went to the walkthrough. A more
    thorough description of what one can do with the creation ability would help
    the game a lot.

    As it was, using the creation ability felt like a poorly done ask/tell
    conversation: keep typing in guesses until something works.

    The shapeshifting ability:

    The PC's other ability is the power to shapeshift into three forms: a dragon, a
    bird, and a human. However, the dragon form is too taxing to use until the
    Right Moment, which doesn't come until the endgame, so for most of the game you
    really only have two forms to change between. The problem is, your bird form
    seems to be completely unnecessary.

    That's not to say that you can't do things as a bird that you couldn't as a
    man- you can fly and peck NPCs, for example. But these actions did not seem to
    be particularly helpful for solving any problems that I ran across. As far as I
    could tell, the bird form was just there to play with if I felt like it, and
    was more or less irrelevant to the game.

    Now, when I play a game that gives me superpowers of some kind, I expect that
    I'll be using them to advance the game. I want to use my abilities in various
    clever (or even clumsy) ways to get around obstacles that I face. And if I
    don't get to, I feel somewhat cheated by the author- and often a little sorry
    for him, because he went to all the work of implementing the special power for
    nothing.

    Unfortunately, Gilded made me feel that way. When I first read about the
    shapeshifting ability I eagerly anticipated challenges that would require me to
    use my various forms together in order to prevail. But there weren't any.
    Although the shapeshifting had a lot of potential, it was, from my perspective,
    completely wasted.

    Conclusion:

    The lack of motivation or direction makes it very difficult to figure out what
    to do in this game, and the PC's special powers only add to the problem. I
    really like the premise, and the author has good writing skills, but it will
    take a lot more to make this a good game.

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

    From: Jimmy Maher (maher SP@G grandecom.net)

    TITLE: The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
    AUTHOR: Jefferson Rabb
    EMAIL: jr SP@G inch.com
    DATE: 2006
    PARSER: Inform 6
    SUPPORTS: Z-Code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Free; playable online
    URL: http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/glassbooks/gamesite/index.html

    Here we have another example of what seems to be a growing trend: the use of IF
    to promote a traditional novel.  In this case the book in question is The Glass
    Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist, which appears to be a fairly
    typical Victorian steampunk fantasy, a genre that is hot on the heels of
    Tolkienesque fantasy for the award of most overused of the past decade.  We
    actually get two separate games, one chronicling the adventures of a jilted
    young ingenue named Celeste Temple as she investigates the activities of her
    erhwhile fiancee, and the other following a killer for hire named Cardinal
    Chang.  Both stories dovetail together at the end in a way that could have been
    clever in the hands of someone with a bit more of a clue.  I am afraid, though,
    that most of what Stephen Bond discussed in his review of Eragon in this very
    issue applies here as well.

    I hardly know where to begin describing all the problems with these games, so
    I'll walk you through the first part of Celeste Temple's adventure to give you
    an idea of the sort of experience you are in for should you try these out:

    To begin with, the Inform banner text has been removed, just as it was for
    Eragon.  It's interesting that both authors can't seem to manage to code the
    most straightforward interactions, yet both become experts when it is time to
    file the virtual serial numbers off their creations.  Nowhere on the Glass
    Books website or in the games themselves is credit given to Graham Nelson,
    Matthew Russotto (whose ZPlet Java interpreter is used), or anyone else who
    made the games possible.  This is not illegal, of course, but it is decidedly
    rude and unethical in my book.  Then again, given the quality of the games,
    perhaps Mr. Nelson and everyone else would just as soon not be associated.

    The comically sparse description of the opening room (which is of course my
    bedroom, as it must be in all really bad games) describes the shades being
    drawn.  A quick check reveals them to be unimplemented, but that's kind of an
    esoteric example, right?  Let's try another room.  One room over is my Aunt
    Agathe's sleeping room, in which the game informs me there is a night table
    with a newspaper upon it.  Let's examine the table. "You can't see any such
    thing."  Oh, no.  It looks like this game is not worth receiving the benefit of
    any doubts.  At least the newspaper works.

    Going back to my starting location, I realize that the game states, "In your
    hands, you hold a letter," seemingly within the room description.  I decide to
    experiment.  I return to Aunt Agathe's room and drop said letter, then return
    to my starting location again.  Sure enough: "In your hands, you hold a
    letter."  Sigh.  Next room over, more of the same.  In the room description:
    "On the table next to the mirror is a pocketbook.  You open the bag and find 5
    gold coins and a hairpin tucked in the change pocket."  I'll let you guess what
    happens if I repeat the previous experiment.

    This just continues.  The author doesn't seem to have a clue how to describe
    much of anything in Inform outside of his room descriptions.  Major plot
    events, transient actions, entrances and exits, it's all right. there. in. the.
    damn. room. descriptions.

    Exploring a bit further, I encounter Marie the maid.  Examining her tells me,
    "Marie is a country girl, aged 25 like Miss Temple, but without her education
    or sophistication."  Remember, I am Miss Temple.  These bizarre lapses into
    third person will continue throughout the game.

    Soon enough the really big problems set in.  The Inform parser has been
    tortured in horrible ways, leading to constant guess the verb issues.  These
    games are the first I have seen with random, instant death rooms in literally
    years, a situation made all the more frustruting by the fact that they are only
    playable online and thus cannot be saved.  (Well, the clever can of course
    extract the Z-Code by looking at the website's source, but I assume that isn't
    an offically encouraged thing to do.)  And then there's the writing.  The
    website credits one Jefferson Rabb with programming the games.  I really,
    really hope this means he also wrote the text based on Mr. Dahlquist's book,
    and not that he only did the programming (such as it is) and Mr. Dahlquist did
    the writing.  If a published author really wrote some of this... oh, my.
    Perish the thought.

    I played Celeste Temple's adventure first, then trudged gamely on to Cardinal
    Chang's game.  I was amazed to find that this one is even worse.  There is a
    fairly detailed plot meant to unfold here, but the problem is that it only
    makes sense if one explores in exactly the order the author intended.  If not,
    everything is scrambled until one finishes the game and can analyze it all to
    figure out which way it was supposed to go.  The fundamental problem is again
    that Mr. Rabb doesn't seem to know how to code anything but room descriptions,
    which kind of limits one's storytelling options.  Also odd and disconcerting
    about this one is its obsession with violence.  You know how IF is sometimes
    praised for emphasizing non-violent problem-solving?  Well, you can throw that
    out when you play Cardinal Chang's adventure.  When considering whether to use
    cleverness or mayhem, know that violence is the answer to this one in almost
    every case.

    I am currently playing and reviewing the games from IF Comp 2006.  Everyone
    complains about the number of unfinished, buggy games in the Comp, but I have
    made it almost halfway through the games so far and have found only a few as
    bad as these.  That is not a commendation of the Comp, my friends, but a
    condemnation of these games.

    Still, every game deserves at least one positive comment, so here goes: The
    debugging verbs have been left turned on.  This means that when one runs
    headlong into a guess the verb puzzle, or experiences one too many sudden,
    pointless deaths, one can happily "purloin" and "tree" one's way to victory.
    And the website surrounding the games is quite pretty and probably took way
    more time to create than the Z-Code files embedded within did.  Oh, and at one
    time you could win a free copy of Dahlquist's book if you finished either or
    both adventures, but the contest period has unfortunately expired.  Of course,
    whether you would want the book if it features writing and plotting anything
    like these games is very much an open question.

    One of the reasons these games frustrate me so much is because what they are
    trying to do could theoretically be such a winner for everyone.  I feel like
    readers of genre literature, searching for immersion as they are, are a great
    untapped market for IF.  A promotion like this one, done well and with just a
    link somewhere to "more games like this," could, affiliated as it is with a big
    novel published by Random House, bring many new people into the IF fold.  If
    the website creators' IF coding chops aren't up to snuff, many in the community
    would likely be willing to help just for the opportunity of promoting IF.  As
    it is, though, readers who try these abominations out are only likely to run
    screaming from any further suggestion of IF.  And really, why can't the
    creators give a little bit of credit to those whose tools they use?

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

    From: DJ Hastings (dj.hastings SP@G centurytel.net)

    TITLE: Off The Trolley
    AUTHOR: Krisztian Kaldi
    EMAIL: krisztian.kaldi SP@G tie.hu
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-
    archive/games/competition2005/tads2/offthetrolley/offthetrolley.gam
    VERSION: Release 1

    Huh?

    That was my first comment upon reading the opening text of Off the Trolley,and
    not coincidentally it was also my final comment after the game was finished.
    The game gave me an overall goal to accomplish early on, but even after
    finishing I can't figure out why I would want to accomplish it. (Or, for that
    matter, why the character I was playing would want to do so.) I considered
    insanity, but there didn't seem to be any indications that my character was
    insane. And *I* feel perfectly normal. So I'm guessing that there was some
    reason the PC wanted to do what he did, and the author just forgot to tell me
    about it.

    Basically, you play the part of an old trolley driver on his last day of work,
    who decides to crash the trolley into one of the buildings along his route.
    When I first started the game and saw that I got to be a trolley driver, I was
    expecting it to be pretty dull. But to my surprise, I actually enjoyed
    operating the trolley. The author gave me a variety of things to do without
    letting anything get over-complicated. On the whole, the trolley was a nicely
    designed toy, and I had fun playing with it.

    The puzzles were all related to operating the trolley, and none of them felt
    like they were "tacked on". They also had reasonable solutions that stayed
    pretty close to real life. I like this design, where the author gives me an
    interesting toy and spends the entire game having me play with it. Of course,
    this depends on the toy being an interesting one, but since the trolley was,
    the game worked for me.

    The PC was also well done. The game really got me to feel like a quiet old
    trolley driver going through the same scenery I'd seen for decades. I actually
    think I identified with the PC in this game more than any other in the
    competition. That was part of what made the conclusion so confusing; I felt
    like I knew the character (at least a little), and couldn't figure out why on
    earth he would want to crash his trolley or destroy the building.

    There were a number of minor problems- a few grammar errors, an awkward
    phrasing or two, a couple of bad words (which dropped my score for the game by
    a point), and a couple of very mild "guess-the-verb" and "guess-the-noun"
    problems. But the only major problem I saw was the lack of motivation for the
    PC, and all of these problems should be fairly easy to fix. In spite of needing
    some polish and a few bug fixes, Off the Trolley is a well done game.

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

    From: Jim Aikin (midiguru23 SP@G sbcglobal.net)

    TITLE: Provenance
    AUTHOR: Corey W. Arnett
    EMAIL: coreywarnett SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: July 4, 2006
    PARSER: Adrift Generator 4.00
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www3.telus.net/coreyarnett/
    VERSION: 1.12.16 (10 Feb. 2006)

    I take it as axiomatic that interactive fiction is an entirely new art form.
    It bears, perhaps, the same relation to conventional fiction that film bears
    to theatre. Or possibly that's too grandiose a comparison.

    One difficulty we face in nurturing this new medium is that, because the
    community of enthusiasts is tiny and the forums through which new works can
    be discussed are few and unknown to the public at large, every new work
    that's released gets tossed into the common pool with all of the existing
    works, to sink or swim as best it can.

    The lack of stratification or hierarchy in the marketplace (using the term
    in a broad sense) puts a burden on novice authors. Where is the interested
    novice to get feedback and tutelage from more experienced authors, without
    being discouraged by scathing criticism? How are we to be fair and helpful
    when discussing the weaknesses of what can only be called student works?

    I started thinking about this after I spent a couple of hours wandering
    around in Provenance. Cory Arnett's first game is precisely a student work.
    The author shows promise, and I hope he'll work hard to hone his skills and
    release a more polished, thoughtful game, or several of them. Provenance
    itself, however, is unlikely to attract many players, or hold their
    attention for very long.

    The strength of the game lies in the touches of creepy, ominous atmosphere
    and in the grandeur of the scenery at certain locations. Its shortcomings
    are just as easily listed: The model world is thin, the story is incoherent,
    and the code is buggy.

    As the story opens you're in your carriage, riding through a forest. Night
    is falling and winter closing in. Shortly you reach a Victorian manor house,
    and a sinister-looking trail of blood droplets on the front walk leads you
    up to the door. As you explore the house and grounds, various momentary
    incidents hint that All Is Not Well. In the end, sad to say, these glimpses
    turn out to be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

    The effect of the brooding atmosphere is undercut by bits of florid
    over-writing. Consider this, from the intro: "The sun has breached the
    horizon and its fervent intensity warms the land.... Only the sound of your
    horse's hooves break up the monotonous silence that permeates through the
    solitude." Note the grammatical error: "sound" is singular, so the verb
    should be "breaks up." Also, in this passage the sun is rising. A few
    sentences later, it's setting.

    The game fails to follow through consistently with the gloomy spell cast by
    winter: When you enter the garden of the manor house, you'll find roses and
    wisteria in bloom, as well as ripe tomatoes and strawberries. Curiously, you
    can pick eight varieties of vegetable in the garden (counting strawberries
    as a vegetable), but they have nothing to do with solving the game.

    The player character's goal is not initially clear, but the game turns out
    to be a treasure hunt. Most players will probably find, before long, a handy
    list of the things we're supposed to collect. Finding the key that will get
    you into the house is more challenging, however. I feel this puzzle is
    borderline unfair, because it requires that you examine scenery objects
    three deep. Without giving spoilers, you have to 'x abc', then when you
    notice a mention of def in the description of abc, 'x def', and finally 'x
    ghi' based on an object mentioned in the description of def. This is
    borderline unfair because many of the scenery objects mentioned in the room
    descriptions can't be examined at all. By the time the location of the key
    is reached, the average player may have wearied of examining things and
    gotten lazy.

    But if you're not lazy -- if you meticulously examine everything in sight,
    as you need to in order to get on -- you'll most likely get annoyed by how
    thin the model world is. I certainly did.

    Once you're inside the house, the scenery is a bit more varied. I found one
    way to get killed (without notice), and there's one extremely boring
    character I could attempt to talk to. This character wanders from room to
    room under the control of a random number generator, but does not respond in
    any way when you ask him questions to which he might be supposed to know the
    answers. I did find two topics he'd give brief, uninformative replies to.

    The author's enthusiasm for Victorian furniture quickly begins to seem
    obsessive. Various pieces are described in ways that include their precise
    measurements and the methods used to produce those beautiful wood finishes.
    Consider, for example, this description of the bathtub: "An amazing display
    of Victorian decorating taken to the ultimate limit, the cast iron bath tub
    has been painted a sea foam green on the outside with a scene of four sea
    fairies riding sailfish on large rolling waves. The inside of the tub has
    been painted white. Four gold plated claw feet support the tub." You can't
    sit in the tub, and you can't examine the sea fairies, the sailfish, or the
    claw feet. Ah, well -- it's certainly pretty.

    The writing of room descriptions appears to have been done at different
    times, or at least with insufficient thought as to how various descriptions
    relate to one another. In the upstairs hall we're told that the master
    bedroom, to the south, "dominates most of the upstairs." But when we enter
    the master bedroom we're told this: "Although called the master bedroom this
    room is no larger than the other small bedrooms. It is cramped, yet cozy."
    So much for dominating the upstairs. In a similar gaffe, a character (who
    never appears onstage and has nothing to do with the process of winning the
    game) is referred to in one document as Jacob, and in a different document
    as Jonathan.

    There are numerous minor bugs in the printouts. At one spot a sentence
    breaks off in the middle. At another a room exit is not mentioned in the
    "can't go" message, which usually lists all of the available exits. At a
    third spot, the NPC (okay, he's the butler) entered and said something that
    seemed urgent, but when I tried to ask him about it, the game reported, "The
    butler is not here." Things that don't exist if you try to examine them can
    occasionally be used, for example by putting other things inside them.

    The most significant bugs seem to be caused by the author's assumption that
    the player would perform certain actions in a given order. For instance,
    there's a locked box, to which you'll sooner or later find the key, in a
    certain location. When I unlocked it while going through the game on my own,
    it was empty. Or at least, no contents appeared; the verb 'search' is not
    implemented, so I couldn't search the box, only examine it. When I reached
    the same box using the walkthrough, I had just performed an action that
    caused a brief cut-scene -- and NOW the box had some objects in it.

    Even the walkthrough is buggy. The first time a certain map is mentioned is
    when you're told to drop it. Apparently the butler is supposed to give it to
    you ... but there's a bug in the software that somehow prevented him from
    doing so. And without the map, you can't win the game.

    The dramatic setup for the treasure hunt is contained in a Last Will &
    Testament, which you'll probably find before too long. This document
    contradicts itself with respect to the structure of the family that lives
    (or lived) in the house, and it contains, as far as I could see, no
    information that you actually need in order to win the game, until you reach
    the final codicil. All that legal boilerplate is numbingly irrelevant. Later
    there's a long and fairly sensible description of alchemy -- but again, it
    seems to be irrelevant to winning the game.

    At a couple of spots, the author seems to have been unable to figure out how
    to move the player back to the house from a remote location, so he simply
    puts the player character to sleep and has him or her wake up again in the
    master bedroom. No explanation of these transitions is ever offered.

    The final phase of the game involves negotiating a very large maze.
    Fortunately, the automatic map generator in Adrift makes short work of what
    would otherwise be an extremely tedious process. When you reach the center
    of the maze and perform the actions you've been instructed (in a certain
    document) to perform, the final result is simply, "You win!!!" That's it --
    no marching band, no sun bursting through the clouds, no hearty
    congratulatory handshake from the Vice President of Adventure Gaming
    Virtuosity. It's a letdown, but rather in keeping with the game as a whole,
    I'd have to say.

    Arnett is capable of moments of startling vision, and he clearly wants to
    engage readers by using evocative materials. (Those drops of blood are far
    from the only glimpses of savagery in Provenance.) In his next game I hope
    he'll trim the number of rooms in half, implement more verbs and scenery,
    invent more puzzles that aren't simply keys and locked doors, integrate the
    story elements a lot more firmly into the game scenario, give us a few NPCs
    with meat on their bones, and arm-twist a few beta-testers to put the screws
    to his code.

    That's all it would take, really.

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

    From: DJ Hastings (dj.hastings SP@G centurytel.net)

    TITLE: Snatches
    AUTHOR: Gregory Weir
    EMAIL: Gregory.Weir SP@G gmail.com
    DATE: October 1, 2005
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware; IF Archive
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-
    archive/games/competition2005/zcode/snatches/snatches.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: DJ Hastings (dj.hastings SP@G centurytel.net)

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

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

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

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

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

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

    From: Valentine Kopteltsev (uux SP@G mail.ru)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Foothills

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

      > SOUTH

      You can't pass there afoot.

      > GET ON PONY

      You can't get on the pony.

      > CLIMB PONY

      You can't climb the pony.

      > CLIMB ON PONY

      You can't climb the pony.

      > RIDE PONY

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

      > EMPLOY PONY

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

      > CLAMBER ON PONY

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

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

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

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

    SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

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

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

    From: David Jones (drj SP@G pobox.com)

    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.

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

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

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

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

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

               Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!

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