Reviews by OtisTDog
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A game about Nothing, May 10, 2024Released in the early days of the Amateur Era, this work achieved some notoriety by taking a definitive if hesitant step away from puzzle-focused interactive fiction. As the author states in the >AMUSING response at the end: "This game was an attempt to see if a serious and interesting story could be merged with traditional IF 'puzzle' elements without one overshadowing the other."
The work consistently presents itself as a morality tale, and the majority of contemporary and subsequent reviews categorize it as such, which presumably reflects most players' experiences. However, the author denies this description of the work in the associated walkthrough (emphasis mine): "...TAPESTRY may seem to be centered on morality and 'proper' choices. This was not my intention. There is a grander scheme going on (which the opening quote alludes to, and which, I hope, the epilogue makes clear)..."
The opening quote of the piece is from a book by Neil Gaiman: "Those who believe they must atone inflict this place and its tortures upon themselves... Until they realize that THEY, and only they -- not gods or demons -- create their hell; and by this they are freed, and take their leave... This place is evil, Timothy, but perhaps a necessary evil." The obvious reading is that hell is solely in the mind of the beholder, a self-inflicted torture that is ultimately unnecessary, serving only as a waystation for those on the path to enlightenment (or at least some other destination).
The author's use of the term "the epilogue" is interesting, however. This is program-mediated text, and although the final words of the game exhibit a dry, detached tone that is in stark contrast with the melodrama of the rest of the text -- a tone which on first reading implies that this is the "real story" of the PC's life -- the final text does, in fact, change depending on the course taken by the PC. The single identity referenced by the noun "epilogue" is therefore all three versions of the text. In two versions, the objective facts are consistent but what changes is the subjective narrative weaving them together. In the third (the one in which the PC successfully changes his past), the objective facts themselves differ.
I think it is fair to take the author at his word that this is not a game about morality. The ostensible moral dilemmas presented are almost parody in their contrived framing, and the story is not very subtle in its feedback that doing the "right" thing by changing the past to accord with commonly-held standards is in fact wrong. The encouragement you get in this path is from an "angelic being" who is (as the work will confirm if prompted) not a good guy. It soon becomes clear that the PC's attempts to do the "right" thing are at root just attempts to escape guilty feelings. What is not clear is whether that the guilt is even genuine -- the more closely one inspects the PC's thoughts, feelings and actions, the more he comes off as immature, narcissistic, and even sociopathic.
The most "winning" path (as implied by the tone taken in the text) is the path of (Spoiler - click to show)Clotho. In this path, the facts of the PC's life don't change -- only his attitude about them does. Though the work describes the transformative change as the PC "facing" his pain and guilt, in practice the change comes about via the PC simply denying all agency in his decisions as well as their negative consequences. (Spoiler - click to show)Regarding his absence from his mother's deathbed: "...you tell the Wraith ... how you wished you could have been in two places at once... only to find out it was too late." It is made unambiguously clear during that vignette that the PC should have been doing this work much earlier, and that he chose to go to City Hall knowing that it would preclude making it to the hospital in time. Regarding his "mercy killing" of his wife: "You tell [the Wraith] of Sarah's sickness, of her suffering. You explain that you wished to free her from all of it, that she herself found living impossible. You tell the Spectre that your act was one of love." In the vignette, the player must decide to kill Sarah before finding her note, and, as another reviewer notes, there does not seem to have been any discussion between them about this drastic decision beforehand. Moreover, on the path in which the PC ensures that she is given a new experimental treatment, she is cured! No matter how the PC prefers to tell it, a jury privy to the same evidence we are would have grounds to convict. Regarding the fatal car crash that ends his life as well as an innocent bystander: The PC makes no attempt to put a spin on this matter, but driving around late at night for no reason in a sleep-deprived and emotionally-unstable state is in no way responsible behavior. One might also note that his sole concern seems to be that he killed a woman, since he exhibits no dissatisfaction if the outcome is revised such that his victim is male.
Additional support for the author's claim comes from the design of the player interaction. The player gets, in effect, only two choices: whether to attempt to change all three "crisis" points in the PC's life as a group and whether to contest the accusation that he has done wrong. The former requires active effort on the player's part to search out the combination of events that will result in a changed history, while the latter is forced upon even the passive player since the game will interpret inaction as a choice. Very strangely, this second choice can be imposed even before the player makes any move that looks or feels like an intentional selection. (Spoiler - click to show)It is possible to leave the first and second scenes without resolving either. After being railroaded through the third, the player will be taken to a fourth location, where the Wraith will accuse the PC with three simultaneous questions: "Will you face me? Have you hubris enough to commit the breaking of your Moira? Are you fool enough to face your crimes?" (Apparently, in the author's mind, all three of these questions should be served by the same answer.) Simply saying "no" at the first prompt (the essence of denial) results in a choice being recorded -- from that point onward the player is only allowed to follow the script. Crucially, when the Wraith accuses the PC of being "a fool and a coward," an attempt to agree is rejected by the game: "You are about to concede defeat, when you realize that you cannot. You MUST fight this creature ... to the bitter end." To the PC, admission of any responsibility for his actions is tantamount to defeat.
The best support for the author's claim that this is not a morality tale is the endgame. (Spoiler - click to show)No matter which path is taken, the final result is oblivion for the PC; the choice truly does not matter for him. In the end, it seems to be a game about Nothing.
[A final note: This observation didn't fit well in the above review, but one item of interest about this game from an historical perspective is the surprising similarity between the climax of the third panel's vignette and that of Adam Cadre's Photopia (i.e. (Spoiler - click to show)being the driver in a fatal car accident that the player is powerless to stop despite being forwarned). This work predates Photopia by two years. As Paul O'Brien observes about the efficacy of the device: "[T]he feeling of not being able to (Spoiler - click to show)control the car despite what you order the character to do is an extremely chilling one, and it is an effect that would not pack the same potency were it attempted in static fiction." Cadre and other authors would experiment with limiting player agency more directly in later years, even to the point of replacing entered keystrokes with others to enforce pre-set commands in some cases, but the notability of the device in this work suggests that it may be the first time any author tried to limit player agency in a story-relevant way.]
Five in one, five as one, May 10, 2024Heroes is a delightful old-school fantasy-style work that took 3rd place in the 2001 IF Comp (following All Roads and Moments Out of Time) and received XYZZY nominations (but not wins) for Best Setting and Best Use of Medium. Much has been written in other reviews about what motivated these nominations: the game's novel mechanic (the ability to play through a scenario as five different PCs) and the quality of the writing, which captures the feel of an RPG like Dungeons & Dragons while structuring gameplay via tropes common to Infocom's works.
The prose and puzzle design are both of very good quality, working together to draw the player into the mindset of each PC and develop the story in a nonlinear fashion as the player moves through the sequence of roles. The framing story is more suggested than explained, and on careful review it doesn't seem to quite hang together as a unified whole; certain facts gathered through direct observation and hearsay are in contradiction with each other. It hardly matters, anyway, because the back story largely concerns two characters that are known by each PC but who share very little "screen time" between them. On the whole the framing story feels grafted on, but it can be ignored in order to focus on and enjoy the various vignettes.
The variety of play styles presented are in general well-supported by the mechanics of the implementation in addition to the writing. Of the five stories, I found the story of the enchanter to be the most well-designed in terms of puzzle structure. It feels the most "meaty" of all of the scenarios, too, and I wished that the other four had been developed to that level of depth. From a technical standpoint, the story of the thief was also quite interesting -- a strict but game-appropriate inventory limit is offset by the fact that the PC carries various items of equipment tucked away on his person so that they are always available for use. As another reviewer noted, the premise of the "royal" PC's scenario is quite funny; I actually laughed aloud as the gaggle of mostly useless sycophants began to accumulate. This does end up being among the weaker scenarios, however, presumably because developing proper puzzles for it would have involved a substantial subsystem around NPC interaction and knowledge.
Although Barrett's The Weapon (released the same year) is one of the most polished and bug-free games I've come across, Heroes is not crafted to that standard. I encountered several instances in which reasonable synonyms for commands were not implemented (e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)you can >GET X WITH Y but not >PICK UP X WITH Y), and a few bugs of the type that should have been caught with testing (e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)the stomachful of acid that can be dropped and picked up like any normal item). Twice I resorted to the walkthroughs; once was for a guess-the-verb/syntax scenario, and once was for a puzzle whose fairness is arguable. ((Spoiler - click to show)The barrel in the pawn shop is made of metal. Only one of the five PCs will notice this, and not the one for whom it is the most salient fact.)
Despite these rough spots, I found this game to be very entertaining. The effort of keeping the "same" scenario fresh through five different versions of the key events was not trivial, but the work paid off. After completing any two of the scenarios, you are likely to be compelled to play the rest. Perhaps the enchantment of the key McGuffin -- a gem which engenders a "compulsion beyond what its mere beauty should produce" -- works upon we players as well as the PCs.
(A technical note: A slight bug can cause the initial text after "[press any key]" prompts to be overwritten by the status line. This significantly impacts the epilogue text at the end of the game. The bug is negated by the Bocfel interpreter included with Gargoyle, so I recommend that interpreter be used to play this game.)
The only thing missing is an ad for breakfast cereal..., May 9, 2024[Full Disclosure: I know the author of this work personally, and I served as a beta tester for this game.]
"I don't want to play in a world where I can't kick a pirate using karate." So said Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, in a 1988 article about Plundered Hearts (MIT Technology Review, May/June 1988, p. 16). Well, Janet... it took almost 35 years, but your cri du coeur has been answered, and answered well!
A Matter of Heist Urgency is an unusual offering. Rooted in a series of silly short stories written for a grade schooler who enjoys horses and superheroes, it was developed into a short game as a fun way of introducing that grade schooler to interactive fiction. Having reached about 25,000 words in size and a level of playability that was very newbie-friendly, it was then further developed to be an entry in IF Comp 2022, doubling its word count in the process. The result is a fast-paced, smoothly-flowing, and very amusing short game that has been favorably compared to a Saturday morning kids' cartoon.
The game is "puzzleless" in the sense that there is nothing intended to impede the story's progression to its successful conclusion. By the same token, it is "merciful" on the Zarfian scale -- the player may be left with varying degrees of satisfaction at the outcome, but the player character cannot die or even really lose. That said, the game does reward engagement, and there is some light thinking to be done in order to achieve the highest rankings, which are issued at the end of the game even though there is no formal score. (To be less ambiguous, I should instead say that the game has no point rewards; it does indeed have a musical score.)
Critical reception in the context of the competition was mixed. The "marketing materials" (i.e. cover and blurb) developed for the game emphasize the word "heist" in the title, which may set genre expectations of a complex puzzling-solving exercise involving tight timing and intricate details. (This perception may also be reinforced by the blurb's claim of a "robust" hint system, though in hindsight that is clearly tongue-in-cheek.) In contrast, the cover illustration depicts cartoon horses and a pirate ship, and the blurb characterizes the game as "a delightfully short action-comedy" with "intense fights with kung-fu llamas," so arguably it delivers exactly what it says on the tin.
The humor of the piece is its strong point, but it is also perhaps idiosyncratic. Players seem to decide whether or not the game appeals to them very quickly, beginning with their perception of the pun in the title. Much of the humor depends on juxtaposition: The illustration of Anastasia as a rainbow-maned equine invites a comparison to "My Little Pony," but the way the plot plays out is closer to "The A-Team."
The game's tone is unapologetically playful, and it works best when approached in a playful mood. The setting is essentially the Land of Make Believe, which you may recall spending time in as a child. Character archetypes are deployed without any consideration for historical accuracy; instead they are chosen to evoke a specific mood and expectations in the player. This creates a fluid version of in-game reality that can subject the player to surprises(Spoiler - click to show) (a pirate with a jetpack??) but still feels consistent in the sense of keeping the scenario and the interaction fun.
Personally, I have found the game to be very enjoyable, even through many replays, because there are countless details in the implementation that reward you for poking around by responding with small jokes. I am especially impressed by one of the new scenes added post-competition (in release 5): It is a very "cinematic" flashback sequence using a method of synchronized music and text that I hadn't encountered elsewhere, though a similar technique was later employed in Little Match Girl 4. (Note that this scene is shown only if you are victorious in the first fight; if you lose, you instead get to play a very funny interlude from the protagonist's early training.)
As you have no doubt gathered by now, this is not a "serious" piece. However, its development was taken seriously by the author, first with the intention of creating a memorable and enjoyable introduction to interactive fiction, then with the intention of crafting a light-hearted and diverting short experience for judges working through a field of entries that generally strive for more literary merit.
Given my involvement, it's not appropriate to let my star rating count toward the average, but I give it high marks due to its very good implementation quality, memorable and amusing characters, and judicious use of sound. I encourage everyone looking for a half hour of pure entertainment to give this piece a try. I also highly encourage use of a sound-capable interpreter, which is essential for appreciating the scene-enhancing music and the special flashback sequence mentioned above.
My Apartment... IN TIME!, May 1, 2024OK, technically it's a house, not an apartment, but Moments Out of Time is one of the most interesting "my apartment" games that I've encountered. You play an AFGNCAAP "StreamDiver," someone authorized to conduct research into the the past via time travel. As the game begins, you are preparing for your "dive," which will be to a typical suburban home in the not-too-distant future from our player perspective, in order to collect what data you can about the inhabitants and their lives. The opening does a very good job of selling the setting, orienting the player to the goal, and instilling some urgency in both the short and long terms.
The prose is above average. The PC's clinical, semi-academic perspective on objects in the house serves both as exposition about the world of the far future and as commentary on modern life. The clinical tone does an excellent job of making the player feel both somewhat alien and at home at the same time, and its punctuation by occasional restrained eagerness characterizes the PC in a way that promotes player identification with the role. The technique creates an excellent pacing for the exposition, moving naturally in tandem with the player's own curiosity.
The high-level design of the setting is very well-conceived, and it creates many fortuitous excuses for the constrained gameplay. Causal contamination is a paramount concern for StreamDivers, but since the study site is about to be destroyed in a war, worries about such minor issues as the location of objects in what will soon be a pile of scorched rubble are alleviated. The greater fear is contact with inhabitants of the local time, which justifies limiting your interaction with the past to the house itself -- even looking out windows is off-limits, on the off chance that you are seen. NPCs are almost nonexistent, and the one conversation featured in the game is a no-nonsense debriefing of your mission that lends itself well to the clipped, keyword-driven responses that will be required of the PC.
Although the environment is mostly static, there are some dynamic elements that add interest over the course of the 12-hour study period being allowed. There is a good chance that when (Spoiler - click to show)a nearby explosion seals off an area or (Spoiler - click to show)a looter shows up and makes off with various items you will find yourself unexpectedly locked out of a portion of the residence, inhibiting your exploration and sealing off some details needed to get a full picture of what's going on. Although we, as players, are of course able to restart the game whenever we like, in-universe this will be the only chance to visit the site for the protagonist, who is constantly aware of the dwindling time remaining -- a limit enforced both by the fictional technology and an impending nuclear attack.
The mid-level design is also excellent. The techno-gadgets that the PC is allowed to bring along are interesting and well-implemented. The fact that only some of these toys can be taken with you into the past is a very artificial constraint that, as other reviewers have noted, serves primarily to enforce the need to replay the game in order to get a complete understanding of the situation being studied. (My advice is to bring the (Spoiler - click to show)autokey and the scan chip along on a first attempt.) The fact that the "rule of thumb" scoring system applied by the PC as the game progresses only loosely correlates to the "official" score based on the PC's performance in the final interview is clever, and neither is particularly well-correlated to the subjective satisfaction level obtained by the player. It does not seem possible to score the implied maximum of any of these in a single playthrough.
The low-level design suffers from numerous flaws. Object implementation is not as rich as it could be, and certainly sparer than expected given the apparent level of craft put into higher levels of design. In certain places, objects in rooms are not mentioned in the description; I found out about them only through console functions or unexpected disambiguation prompts. In many cases, specific verbs are required for interaction in a manner that I frequently found non-intuitive. Although it's true that the story provides a justification for everything to be well-secured (the house having recently been evacuated), the number of locked doors still seemed excessive, and the "treasure hunt" aspect of finding keys was (to me) unrewarding. The number of encrypted messages encountered, while partially justified by the associated character's personality, also seems artificially large; most teenagers would simply not write down anything they were so worried about someone else knowing. There also seem to be lingering significant bugs -- for example, I found that I could not (Spoiler - click to show)get access to one of the computers without the interface chip, even though the game supposedly lets you discover the password.
As another reviewer notes, the level of drama exhibited by the family under study is surprisingly high, with a convincing "reality TV" feel to the glimpses given. Willing suspension of disbelief is strained in places by the over-exuberant deployment of certain tropes (e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)boy genius inventor). My interest sharply peaked after encountering (Spoiler - click to show)evidence of another time traveler who potentially originates in an alternate future than yours, but (Spoiler - click to show)this seems to have been only a red herring (or possibly setup for the sequel, which I have not played). The rest of the story (Spoiler - click to show)ultimately doesn't amount to very much other than titillating teen drama.
Jeremy Douglass wrote in "Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media": "[T]he preemptive understanding of interactive works imparted by criticism is almost unavoidably destructive, both in the aesthetic sense and in the way it excises the experiences of ambiguity, exploration, and frustration. Where works are constituted by what the player does not yet know, as with mystery and suspense, this prevents the work." I have used extra spoiler tags in this review for just that reason; the whole point of this work is the experience of exploration. This game is one of the best I have seen at shaping the "ambiguity, exploration and frustration" that will constitute the player experience in an intuitive but subconscious way, via selection of mutually-exclusive tools to be taken along on the dive. By trusting your gut in choosing the loadout the first time, you automatically customize the play experience to minimize the kinds of interactions you don't like while leaving a level of challenge that you will find acceptable. This is the most brilliant part of the design, and my hat is off to author L. Ross Raszewski here.
The work makes use of limited multimedia in the form of sound and music. For the most part, the sound effects detract more than they enhance, and the only instance of music (played at the start of the game) seems to be a cover of the theme from (Spoiler - click to show)Terminator 2; hearing it is not essential.
While this work earned a very close second place in the 2001 IF Comp (removal of the single lowest-scoring vote would have changed history) and received more 10s from players than any other score for the first time in comp history (per the research of Greg Boettcher in "IF-Review" -- see above), it was completely ignored during the 2001 XYZZY Awards. How can this be reconciled? Personally, I would say that it's because, while many aspects of this game are very good, none of them are the best. (For example, it becomes clear at some point that in the future, humanity (Spoiler - click to show)is part of an interstellar civilization along with many races of aliens. If this were the case, one would expect the cultural impact to be of a magnitude that would manifest as more than footnotes and encyclopedia entries; the better writing choice would have been to excise this extraneous distraction.)
This work is highly recommendable as a player experience, and worth studying for its strengths and weaknesses by would-be authors. The three star rating means "good, not great" in my book, but it had the potential to score much higher. As a special note to anyone preparing to play: This game uses the Z6 format, which is the least well-supported of the Infocom formats. For the complete author-intended experience, you will need a sound-capable interpreter. At the time of this writing, Frotz is the best choice (though you may have to build the sfrotz executable yourself), but it is still playable using Gargoyle, and the experience using that interpreter should be improved in post-2023 releases based on a recent bug fix. Although I did not test it under WinFrotz, I would expect that interpreter to do a fine job, based on past experience with its excellent standards compliance. Use of one of the zblorb files available for download will avoid the need to put z6 and blb files in the same location in order to get sound.
Fun and engaging short puzzler suitable for children and adults, April 29, 2024Mother Loose is one of those games that was developed as a labor of love and then subsequently released to the world. Its public debut was via IF Comp 1998, only the fourth such competition at the time, where it placed 6th of 27. This first effort by author Irene Callaci is now largely forgotten -- its more subtle charms lost in the glare of the multiple novae (Anchorhead, Spider and Web and Photopia) that dominated the public's attention in that year.
Ms. Callaci seems to have been something of a natural in producing interactive fiction. For a first effort, especially one that the author claims was produced while learning not just Inform 6 but object-oriented programming in general, Mother Loose is a remarkably high-quality result. It has a rich level of object implementation that encourages exploration and delivers plenty of vividly descriptive prose but which nonetheless does an excellent job of focusing the player's attention on those few things that are important. It makes use of a compass display in the status bar and has a built-in menu supplying author credits, an introduction to playing IF and in-game hints. There were essentially no bugs at the coding level, and I don't recall any misspellings or typos in the text.
This work includes several NPCs reflecting various levels of programming effort. Taken together, they are practically a guided tour of the major implementation styles, ranging from the practically inert and lifeless (a lamb) to the mute and command-ignoring flavor element (a kitten) to the comic relief chatterbox (a wolf) to the well-crafted exposition vending machine (an egg) to something occasionally engaging in life-like social interactions (a little girl). Ms. Callaci's successful efforts here were recognized; this work was nominated for both Best Individual NPC and Best NPCs in the 1998 XYZZY Awards.
Puzzle implementation is by contrast much sparer. There are only handful of obstacles in the game's dozen or so rooms. However, these have multiple solutions, and the greater difficulty in solving them comes from minor guess-the-verb issues rather than from deducing what must be done. (Of particular note here is one solution to a puzzle involving the well: (Spoiler - click to show)If you try to communicate with the stuck cat, be aware that it does not understand generic commands; one can only speak to it like a real cat. Commands that specifically work include (Spoiler - click to show)>SAY HERE KITTY or >CAT, COME OUT.)
The game's greatest innovation is the way that it gently mocks standard IF tropes by categorizing all significant PC actions as either naughty or nice. It's quite funny how certain actions yield both points and disapproving remarks. In addition to the running commentary provided by the narrator, the player's choices become significant at the end of the game. It's clear that the author intended the game to be enjoyable either way, and it definitely adds some richness to the limited scenario -- I couldn't resist replaying it to try out both paths.
A minor but still interesting novelty was the way that certain NPCs seem to "take over" some of the parser's responses when they are around. Where a command like >ASCEND TREE will normally result in a message about an unrecognized verb, when the wolf is present, the game instead responds "'Huh?' The wolf raises an eyebrow." This type of interaction does not seem to have much function and may be only a side-effect of the implementation of one particular puzzle, but it has a subtle though definite effect, reorienting the player's attention to the NPCs' presence in response to fruitless experimentation.
If there is a notable weakness to this game, it's that it takes some poking around to figure out what kind of game this will be and what kinds of goals are suitable. If one lacks the old school sensibility of wanting to solve puzzles just because they're there, it would be easy to walk around for a while and then give up in frustration. (This is especially true in light of the inclusion of several prominent objects without much apparent function. Some of these may be simple flavor elements, but others suggest the leftovers of abandoned lines of development.)
With a little guidance, this work is a very good introduction to IF for children. Even without guidance, the built-in hints will probably be enough, if they are necessary at all. Modern kids may need to be introduced to the very idea of nursery rhymes before any of it starts to make sense, but, as others have noted, nothing about the gameplay requires any deep knowledge of them in order to make progress. The more kids introduced to interactive fiction early, the more players there will be in the future, and games like this are essential to creating a positive impression of the art form in young readers.
The IrkMaster 2000(tm), a top of the line model, April 29, 2024Deep Space Drifter is another historically-significant game that has aged very poorly. Its place in history seems to be roughly akin to Curses, in that it was produced by the author (Michael J. Roberts) of its development system (TADS), presumably motivated by the twin goals of producing a game of the type the author liked while also serving to exercise said system.
The first time I played this, the PC died from explosive decompression after opening the hatch that apparently connects the cockpit directly to the outside. (It was not clear from the skimpy description that yours is a single-room spaceship.) The second time I played it, the PC died of sudden asphyxiation after the ship runs out of air in 20 turns. OK, then.
There are only two meaningful actions to take in the opening vignette -- pressing two buttons. In doing so, your ship will be automatically docked to a space station that serves as the first half of the setting. Since there's nothing of interest to do on your ship, it seems that, as a matter of design, one might as well have started the story with the docking sequence already accomplished.
Within the first few turns, hunger and sleep "puzzles" announce themselves. The problems to be solved consist only of locating food items and a place to sleep. You cannot sleep in your pilot's chair pre-docking because you're too worried about your survival, but you can take a nice refreshing nap on the couch in the "main room" of the exploding space station. The primary purpose of requiring sleep seems to be to deliver a dream that will serve as a clue later on. There is no purpose to requiring food.
I guess I should have trusted my gut feeling and just abandoned this game, but I wanted to see it through, so I started to consult the walkthrough. Most everything that counts as gameplay involves overcoming simplistic "tab A in slot B" obstacles, in a setting whose realism is limited solely to creating challenge-less difficulty (such as an inventory limit, and the need to lug around a single heavy power source). As Rovarsson's review notes, even keeping hold of your inventory is an annoyance in itself. Most old school games in this vein interject plenty of humor as a consolation for the frustration created by the arbitrary roadblocks, but the humor here is restricted to a long series of "___Master 2000(tm)" jokes. (Ironically, one line that I thought was an amusing throwaway joke about a fuse being "conveniently" located on the roof of a space vehicle turned out to be an accurate description of the situation. It stopped being funny.)
I'm generally OK with the old school style, which is often exclusively composed of this type of interaction. However, the network of interlocking tasks and obstacles that present themselves are usually intertwined with a narrative progression, such that advancing through even simplistic puzzles rewards the players with a steady progression through the story. That's not what happens here. Quite often, there isn't even a non-standard response to indicate that a significant action was special in some way.
The few puzzles that require thinking seem very much under-clued. (Spoiler - click to show)Can you guess that the red square is the one that controls the landing shuttle, or that it's the one you need to modify with the mysterious computer? Can you guess that you need to provide the security robot with the vacuum cleaner (hope you brought it along!) in order for your program switcheroo with the cleaning robot's tape to have a useful effect? Do you care to decode the black box of a reactor control system whose buttons are unlabeled but apparently execute nonsensical functions?
This game's writing style seems close to that of a Scott Adams game. (I've never played those, so I'm making this comparison based on second- and third-hand knowledge.) Room descriptions are so brief and unevocative that they don't even count as thumbnail sketches -- they barely meet the minimum functionality of listing the location's general type, exits and key objects (if any). Object descriptions mostly serve to confirm that the object exists as something interactable.
Lest you think my treatment above unduly harsh, allow me to quote a passage from the TADS 2 Author's Manual that describes the development of the game:
"After formulating the basic plot of the game, and mapping out the portion that takes place on the space station (roughly the first half of the game), we started implementation. We had a basic idea of the second half of the game, but it wasn’t even mapped.
Implementation went well for a while, but as we got further along, we started to run into details in the first half of the game that were dependent upon details from the undesigned second half. We improvised some details, and left others for later. As we did this, a strange thing happened: we started to realize that there were holes in the plot, and weird little inconsistencies that hadn’t occurred to us until we needed to think about details. As a result, we started to change our basic ideas about the second half, which led to even more inconsistencies and plot holes. It was like digging in sand, and before long we decided to throw out the entire original plan for the second half and start over.
However, we had so much time and effort invested in the space station that we didn’t want to throw it away. Instead, we tried to design a new second half that fit in with the existing first half. From this point on, the battle was lost. We went through a series of essentially unrelated plots for the game, trying to fit each new plot to an even larger set of existing implementation. We’d plan a little, implement it, then discover that the plan wasn’t working and would have to go - but the programming work we did would have to stay. The swamp, the cave maze, and the shuttle represented so much work that we couldn’t contemplate throwing them away, so whatever we came up with had to include them somehow; for a brief time, we were actually going to make the swamp a 'Swamp Simulator' because it was the only way we could make it fit.
In the end, we were totally sick of writing Deep Space Drifter, but refused to let the project die before it was complete for psychological reasons. To me, this attitude shows through in the last half of the game; I think there’s a room on the planet whose description is something like this: 'This room is very boring; you can leave to the north.' In fact, I think the entire game reflects its history: the space station is full of things to do, it has some nice running jokes, and it’s stylistically consistent. The planet, on the other hand, has an empty, barren feel; it’s spread out and there’s not much to do. The only parts that are interesting are essentially unrelated to each other and to the story in general, a reflection of having been forced into the game whether they belonged or not.
I’m not saying that Deep Space Drifter is a bad game - I like the space station a lot, and the puzzles on the planet are very elaborate and elegant. But the game has some serious flaws, most of which I attribute to the long, chaotic process of design and implementation."
Having gotten to the end via the walkthrough, I can't even begin to imagine having fought my way through this piece without "cheating." Can you guess your reward for having worked out a ridiculous "puzzle maze" that takes over a hundred moves to complete in the walkthrough? (Spoiler - click to show)The villain is chased away by a space beaver. You get to learn through dying just when is the best time to launch from the planet in an escape ship. Then you are picked up by the space highway patrol and thrown in the brig for operating an "unspaceworthy" vessel. Nice.
The amateur historian in me feels compelled to give this work at least two stars for recognition of its landmark status in 1990; in the aftermath of Infocom's demise and amid the general collapse of the commercial market, this game surely demonstrated that it was possible to produce large-scale, programmatically-complex works comparable to those that had set players' expectations in the preceding decade. However, there is nothing to recommend this work in terms of entertainment value, and the bulk of the educational value that can be gleaned from it is more easily obtained from the quote above than from the work itself.
Quite a bit like "Fallout" as IF, April 28, 2024Scavenger is the only game listed on IFDB from author Quintin Stone. Over 20 years old now, it made a notable splash when first released, placing third in the 2003 IF Comp (after both Slouching Toward Bedlam and Risorgimento Represso) and garnering nominations (but not wins) for Best Game, Best Puzzles and Best NPC in that year's XYZZY Awards.
Although the author cites Planetfall as an inspiration, the more obvious influence would seem to be that of Fallout. The setting is strongly remniscent of that franchise's early installments, minus the more fantastical elements. I could practically hear the soundtrack of that game as I played this one. Per commentary from the author, it is officially based on a setting called "Night's Edge" that was the basis for a total conversion mod for Unreal.
I had tried Scavenger a couple of times before, but each time I gave up after getting stuck. Since the style of this game's puzzles are clearly rooted in "real-world" logic, I was loath to resort to hints. This time, however, I decided to use them if necessary -- and I soon found out that the reason I was getting stuck was less to do with me and more to do with some lurking significant problems in the implementation. (Note that there don't seem to be very many of these at all; it was just my luck to encounter some of them.) To get the resulting gripes out of the way, I will list them:
1. This is the kind of game where looking under and looking behind things is important. OK, fine -- it's justifiable in this setting -- but it's not great to add a guess-the-verb layer to that sort of interaction. For one crucial bit of progress, it is necessary to >MOVE an item that can't be >PUSHed or >PULLed. Although many puzzles have multiple solutions, I don't think the one depending on this command does.
2. There is a computer interface requiring a login (with last name and password) to obtain another piece of critical-path information. Should you enter the incorrect name, there is no way to back out of the infinite password prompt that results. Even though the terminal explicitly says you can type "CANCEL" to restart the login process, this does not actually work.
3. This is not necessarily a game-breaking bug, but it's still a small issue potentially affecting the end: If you (Spoiler - click to show)decide to rescue the little girl on the way out of the military complex, it's easy enough to get her to follow you. However, if you subsequently talk to her while (Spoiler - click to show)wearing the raider jacket (which you probably are because you need to do this to escape), she will "dash out of the shack" -- apparently becoming afraid on a much-delayed basis.
I agree with Lipa's review that this game delivers solid entertainment, and on the whole it seems to be very well constructed. The issues listed above wouldn't loom so large in my mind if the rest of the interaction wasn't so smooth and polished. The NPCs are well-done, seeming sufficiently life-like without doing anything too fancy by way of implementation. Forewarned is forearmed, so don't let these quibbles deter you from trying out this work, which is one of the better sci-fi scenarios I've played.
An historically significant work, the crown jewel of AGT, but..., April 27, 2024Anyone interested in the history of interactive fiction will sooner or later come across references to this relatively famous piece from the "dark ages" of the genre, i.e. the period after the collapse of the commercial market and before the "renaissance" triggered by Graham Nelson's release of Inform 6 and the publication of the Inform Designer's Manual, 4th edition. In this period, the most prominent tools available to would-be authors were TADS 2, a C-like language of considerable power, and AGT, a less flexible and capable system designed to be easier to use for non-programmers.
Critically, the author of AGT sponsored contests (with at least the first prize paying money) for the best game written in the system, which surely served to spur the completion of many works and began the tradition later continued by the annual IFComp. Shades of Gray is among the works submitted to these AGT contests, and it won in the year that it was submitted. It was constructed by a group of seven disparate authors, one of whom was Judith Pintar, author of the well-regarded CosmoServe. Notably, the seven contributors cooperated exclusively through contact via the CompuServe platform, to which they all subscribed.
Based on the final result, it's not clear that there was much in the way of overarching design concept. As others have noted, the game's separately-developed segments vary in quality, but overall they are well-implemented by the standards of the time, and I must say that this was the highest level of command parsing quality that I have ever encountered in an AGT game. (AGT parsing is quite limited compared to TADS or Inform, based on word-for-word pattern matching instead of attempts to identify parts of speech. This creates a much higher burden on the author to ensure smooth interaction, and it also reduces the transferability of learning about what counts as proper interaction. For example, when trying to use a shovel -- of which there are a surprising number in this game -- the player will find that the correct syntax changes across different segments, reflecting each contributing author's own preferences.) In general, the quality of the interaction seems to go up as one progresses through the game, with its disjointed (and somewhat irritating) opening giving way to large portions of relatively smooth sailing.
What the work lacks is any sense of true coherence. While individual aspects can be picked out as high points for quality of implementation (e.g. the (Spoiler - click to show)tarot reading scene that is the structural backbone of the first half of the middle game) or writing (e.g. the various interactions with (Spoiler - click to show)spirits from voodoo mythology that are the backbone of the second half), the narrative is something of a mess -- layers of unmotivated and unedifying twists abruptly transform the story from gothic horror to lazy psychological drama to magical realism to Civil War survival story to medieval adventure tale to cheap political thriller. It's a ride that keeps the player guessing, which keeps up interest, but looking back from the end of it the question becomes: Why?
The title suggests that the theme is intended to be the difficulty of achieving strong moral clarity in the messy real world, but the gameplay does little to support this. The most direct treatment is in the climax scene, in which the protagonist must choose between (Spoiler - click to show)delivering some incriminating documents to either those incriminated by them and (Spoiler - click to show) delivering those documents to members of a law enforcement agency. This is... insufficient. As a clever person to whom I described the plot quipped: "Nothing says 'shades of gray' like a binary choice!" To the extent that this choice presents any kind of quandary to the player requiring thoughtful reflection, the game subsequently undermines itself by assigning one more point to (Spoiler - click to show)turning the evidence over to the CIA assassins threatened by it than (Spoiler - click to show)handing it over to the FBI, whose interest in it may be more about inter-bureaucratic infighting than bringing the conspirators to justice, which implicitly makes the former the "right" choice after all. (To be fair, the denouement section that describes the long-term effects of various events does not seem to put its thumb on the scales this way, and the various interludes of history supernaturally revealed to the protagonist present multiple perspectives... but in the long run that just makes the score's coded commentary less excusable.)
Other aspects of the game relate only weakly to the supposed theme. Robin Hood is a good guy fighting against abuse of power! No wait, he's a forest-dwelling thief and thug who must be punished for breaking the law! (I didn't bother to use spoiler tags for those because the two segments involved seem ultimately irrelevant to the main plot.) The protagonist shouldn't feel bad about (Spoiler - click to show)his father's death; he was just a kid, and it was an accident! (That's ultimately irrelevant, too.) It's probably OK that the protagonist (Spoiler - click to show)has a dalliance with a voodoo love goddess; it was a rare honor, and she'll (Spoiler - click to show)grant protection to him and his (alleged) true love forever after. I get the distinct impression that there were some last-minute adjustments made after the title was selected, in an attempt to better justify it.
Although there are frequent guess-the-verb and guess-the-syntax issues (as is typical for the era and the development system), these are offset by the very good integrated hint system, to which I found myself resorting frequently when my patience wore thin. Hints are graduated, so it's not necessary to completely spoil the puzzles in order to get help, but I recommend that the modern player make liberal use of them -- for the most part, the obstacles that I used them to bypass were not the type likely to be considered as rewarding to overcome unaided. I also strongly recommend that any player reaching the voodoo-themed jungle section reach for David Welbourn's excellent map of the area (available in the download links) -- this whole zone is a nasty and pointless old-school maze, and the game doesn't even have the good graces to provide sufficient objects to use as markers. On top of that, two rooms that are different enough from the others to not seem to need markers both have identical descriptions but are, in fact, different -- a design choice that comes across as pure spite. The hour that I spent trying to navigate the maze "properly" was completely wasted time. (The author of this section most definitely anticipated the difficulty being created; there are three tone-breaking "comic" cameos of other people wandering through that zone that are encountered if one spends enough time there.)
On the whole, I didn't find much to recommend about this piece. It does remain historically significant, and it clearly stands out from the pack when gauged against its contemporaries, but these qualities do more to justify its place as an exhibit in the museum of the history of interactive fiction than they do to earn it a place in the library of classic works worth playing today. One can point to it as an early example of collaboration-at-scale such as would later produce Cragne Manor or note surprising similarities between one of its segments and Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, but if one is not interested in deliberately evaluating it within its historical context, there is little reason to spend the time playing it.
Sophomoric (High School Level) Take on Religion, April 26, 2024The original Pascal's Wager is a "proof" that following the Christian faith is a rational thing to do. It is a fundamentally flawed and reductionist approach to a major philosophical question, which tries to make an arithmetic problem out of concepts that do not translate well into quantitative terms. Put simply, it is: "If there's any chance at all that God is real, then worshipping him is the smart thing to do, since going to heaven is infinitely rewarding."
This is not an argument that should be taken very seriously. Even granting its conceptual framework, the god in question is hypothesized to be omniscient and not particularly well-disposed toward hypocrites. It's also questionable whether "infinity" is a valid term to use in an expected reward calculation, or that the probability of a god's existence can be meaningfully established.
Pascal's Wager, the game, presents itself as an extension and criticism of Pascal's Wager, the thought experiment; specifically, it challenges Pascal's implicit assertion that the Christian God's existence (P) or non-existence (not-P) together cover the full range of relevant possibilities. This is a pretty good concept, and a pretty good hook -- the premise creates (as Emily Short's review puts it) "an invitation to explore or express one's own personal morality through the player character, by choosing and acting out an alignment." However, this work makes no attempt to grapple with the deep metaphysical questions inherent in its premise and instead seems to target the very concepts of religion and morality themselves.
Pascal's Wager treats each of its six chosen religions equally negatively in that every one of them is conveyed as shallow and simplistic farce. Want to be a good little worshipper of Hanuman, the "Hindi god of strength and fitness?" (Spoiler - click to show)Disobey your parents and hit a baseball! Join a sports team instead of doing homework! Escape from prison on a rowboat to prove you are strong! How about a worshipper of Bacchus, the "Roman god of intoxication?" (Spoiler - click to show)Pop a Valium instead of caring for your infant sibling! Smoke a joint plucked from a urinal instead of doing homework! Inject yourself with an overdose of morphine instead of bothering to escape from prison! These are laughable misrepresentations of what are (or were) serious beliefs for many people, and the treatment of other religions is no better.
The ludicrous and over-the-top portrayal of these faiths may be intended to be humor. It does not strike me as funny. It seems mean-spirited ("mean" in the senses of both "cruel" and "petty") and anti-human. Perhaps the worst part is that its mockery is so lazy -- I learned more about several of the religions portrayed in a half-hour's reading on Wikipedia than the author seems to have ever researched in the course of writing this piece. (For example, in some traditions the infant Hanuman mistook the sun for a fruit and tried to eat it -- a metaphor that seems apt to mention in this context.)
Emily Short's very evenhanded review suggests that this game has only minor flaws. In my opinion, it has major flaws. It verges right on the cusp of 1-star territory for me, but I am forced to recognize that programming it was not a trivial effort, and -- again -- as a concept, the premise is solid. To the extent that I would recommend this game, it would be as a warning to would-be authors about the amount of work required to even begin to fulfill the expectations set by such an ambitious premise, and the disastrous outcome certain to result from massively underestimating the scale of one's chosen subject.
Campy, goofy pseudo-horror comedy skit, April 25, 2024OK, so you're a police officer. A cross-dressing police officer who likes the styles of the 60s. (And a werewolf, but that's not important.) And you have a sidekick: the creepy, giggling pyromaniac Donald McRonald, who is technically not a trademark violation. And you have a gun, which: "Sometimes you shoot folks with it, other times you just point it at folks." And a boa -- the constrictor sort, but that's really more of a deadly prank played by your fellow police officers than anything you can use.
And you are investigating a disturbance at the cemetery. A cemetery where the locals buried all the members of an "evil circus" that once terrorized the town, an incursion handily repelled by the trigger-happy constabulary to which you belong. And there are jelly doughnuts.
So... this is the kind of situation that, as a player, one has to embrace wholeheartedly in order to get any enjoyment out of the game. If the wacky, goofy, random and bizarre doesn't amuse you, then you may find yourself blinking in incomprehension at this enthusiastically off-beat work by J. J. Guest, noted author of To Hell in a Hamper. Personally, I found it to be about 90% amusing. There were some wrong notes that didn't jibe with my own sense of humor, but it was generally an entertaining and engaging short play experience. (Note that I played the expanded Inform 7 version, not the original ADRIFT version.)
However, I got really, really stuck. A lot. So much was going on in terms of joke delivery that it was almost hard to pay attention to what serves as the plot on a mechanical basis. Implementation is very spare with respect to NPC interactions, many of which are required to advance the game. With so many generic negative responses to various attempts, the modern player is quickly trained to stop trying -- it takes a concerted old-school style brute force approach to discover certain possibilities(Spoiler - click to show). I'm thinking specifically here of the gorilla, which must be threatened for no good reason to obtain the cigar, and the fact that escaping the first encounter with the main villain can only happen at a certain point. This results in guess-the-verb situations that are always offputting in such an otherwise polished work, and the very constrained implementation of interactions leaves little to do by way of experimentation when one doesn't have a clear idea of what to do next. (Although there is a hint system, it's very vague and, as MathBrush notes, occasionally non-functional.)
The thing that impressed me the most about this game was the soundtrack. Guest assembled an interesting ambient score from various bits of free-to-use music and sound effects, and the game cycles through them over time. (It's actually one giant 17 1/2 minute track; the length keeps the repetition below the threshold of obvious notice.) The soundtrack plays extremely smoothly, and unlike many attempts at background music which I've encountered, this one does not begin to grate in short order. In fact, rather than searching for a way to turn it off, I found myself turning it back on whenever it was automatically stopped by an >UNDO command.
This work gets high marks as a concept, but the execution falls a little short of what it needs in order to be truly recommendable to the general public or the novice. For those who like "weird" humor, there is plenty to like about it as is, and for those who don't, well... Guest provides occasional laughworthy quips that don't rely on weirdness at all. (Example: "For the record: Alligator breath smells like people who wondered what alligator breath smells like.") I'm putting it in the "good, not great" category, which means I think it's worth taking the time to play and study, and I would gladly revisit an updated version.
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