The Water Bird

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

From the update on the comp web site, I already knew that The Water Bird had a game-killing bug in it, so I wasn't surprised when I found it. What I was surprised by (though maybe I shouldn't have been) was the number of other, extremely basic, bugs I found in it. This is unusual for me -- usually once I see or hear of one bug in a competition game I expect them to come in droves, but the opening text to The Water Bird is so good that I allowed myself the belief that the critical bug was just a really bad-luck oversight, one of those things that makes you just about swallow your own tongue as an author the second a player finds it and it's TOO LATE to change a thing. But no, actually, there are bugs throughout the game. In fact, in only the game's second location, attempts to walk in an unavailable direction are met with "[TADS-1023: invalid type for built-in function]". This extremely fundamental omission is emblematic of the unfinished feel that the entire game has.