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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: [comp00] buzzard reviews (very long)
Message-ID: <G4D2tz.EM1@world.std.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 06:17:59 GMT
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:58900

  +--------------------------------------------------------+
  | To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to      |
  | take intellectual possession, to establish in fine     |
  | a relation with the criticized thing and to make it    |
  | one's own. -- Henry James                              |
  +--------------------------------------------------------+

  +--------------------------------------------------------+
  | Nature fits all her children with something to do;     |
  | He who would write and can't write, can surely review. |
  |                -- James Russell Lowell                 |
  +--------------------------------------------------------+

>ABOUT

 I use the word "game" as shorthand for "work of interactive
 fiction", and "play" as shorthand for "interact with such
 a work".

 I use the word "review" to mean both review and critique;
 I write whatever I can think of writing, although I think I
 lean more to criticism than review.  But some of what I
 write may reveal something about a game to authors, some
 of what I write may reveal something about a game to
 players, and some of what I write may reveal more about me
 than about the game--I'm not always the best judge.

 Two of the more than 10,000 words in this article are profane.

 I only finished 13 of the 49 games I played.  Up to you
 whether you want to read such reviews.

 As much as possible, my reviews are spoiler-free.  I consider
 a broad variety of things spoilers; knowing that a game ends
 with a twist is a spoiler; sometimes a particular situation
 is such a neat experience that it needs to be experienced
 unexpected, so describing that situation would be a spoiler.
 In a couple places, I spoil a puzzle to reveal why I didn't
 like it.  Such rare cases will have an inline spoiler warning.

>EXAMINE COMPETITION

 Since my reviews aren't in chronological order, let me make
 a quick comment about that aspect of my experience.

 As I started it seemed like a GREAT comp: Ad Verbum first and
 Metamorphoses third.  The second, Best Man, seemed perfectly
 fine in between them.  However, this initial experience quickly
 tailed away as my next 4 games were 1-2-3, Infil-traitor,
 Threading the Labyrinth, and What-IF?

 I still haven't found time to play the games more, so all of
 my reviews are still based strictly on my original comp play
 experience.

>FULL SCORE

 In the end, after I tallied my original votes, my highest votes
 were 8.  So I bumped the 8s to 9 to allow me to spread some of
 my 6s and 7s out a bit more.

 Here's how I voted, roughly in my overall order of preference.

 1: Cracking the Code, Anonymous
 2: What-IF?, David Ledgard
 2: Asendent, Sourdoh Farenheit and Kelvin Flatbread
 2: Little Billy, Okey Ikeako
 3: Desert Heat, Papillon
 3: Marooned, Bruce Davis
 4: Comp00ter Game, Austin Thorvald
 4: Infil-traitor, Anonymous
 4: 1-2-3..., Chris Mudd
 4: Escape from Crulistan, Alan Smithee
 4: Enlisted, G.F. Berry
 4: The Masque of the Last Faeries, Ian Ball
 5: The Pickpocket, Alex Weldon
 5: Jarod's Journey, Tim Emmerich
 5: The Trip, Cameron Wilkin
 5: Wrecked, Campbell Wild
 5: Threading the Labyrinth, Kevin F. Doughty
 5: VOID: CORPORATION, Jonathan Lim
 5: Aftermath, Graham Somerville
 5: ON THE OTHER SIDE, Lumpi
 5: Stupid Kittens, Pollyanna Huffington
 5: The Clock, Cleopatra Kozlowski
 5: Withdrawal Symptoms, Niclas Carlsson
 5: Got ID?, Marc Valhara
 5: The Best Man, Rob Menke
 5: Planet of the Infinite Minds, Alfredo Garcia
 5: Rameses, Stephen Bond
 6: Prodly the Puffin, by some very long names
 6: The Big Mama, Brendan Barnwell
 6: Futz Mutz, Tim Simmons
 6: Castle Amnos, John Evans
 6: Shade, Ampe R. Sand
 6: Punk Points, Jim Munroe
 6: Guess The Verb!, Leonard Richardson
 6: Letters from Home, Roger Firth
 6: Nevermore, Nate Cull
 6: Ad Verbum, Nick Montfort
 6: My Angel, Jon Ingold
 6: The Djinni Chronicles, J.D. Berry
 7: A Crimson Spring, Robb Sherwin
 7: The End Means Escape, D.O.
 7: Transfer, Tod Levi
 7: At Wit's End, Mike J. Sousa
 7: Kaged, Ian Finley
 7: YAGWAD, Digby McWiggle
 8: Dinner with Andre, Liza Daly
 8: Masquerade, Kathleen M. Fischer
 9: Being Andrew Plotkin, Celie Paradis
 9: Metamorphoses, Emily Short

 Not played or rated or reviewed:
    And the Waves Choke the Wind
    Return to Zork: Another Story
    Unnkulia X
    Happy Ever After

>WRITE REVIEWS

 Last year, for each game I offered some things I liked about
 it, three things (small or large) that would improve it in my
 eyes, and how high I could see the score getting without a
 total rewrite of the game.  Not this year.

 It's hard to say something nice about every game.  For a while
 I thought about maybe trying to say an equal number of bad and
 good things total (not per game).  But I've decided to just
 abandon that and give in to being harsh.  For one thing, I
 think it's a bad idea that people think they should just throw
 anything into the comp, no matter how unpolished it is.  I'd
 love it if authors whose games finished in the bottom third
 or bottom half of the comp would have self-selected right out
 of the comp.  If harsh (but fair) reviews can help produce
 that, I'm game.  (And if and when I release a game to the IF
 community, I do indeed expect the same treatment in return.)


[press any key to continue]

 The reviews themselves come in pairs, except for the top and
 bottommost entries of my list.  Each pair has something in
 common, indicated by the review "title".  These pairs are
 sometimes meaningful and sometimes capricious, but at least
 they usually give me something new to say.  Where I have
 comments on games that seem to have been broadly widely in
 other reviews, I'll try to omit those comments.


>SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE

 1: "Cracking the Code" by Anonymous

 Make a zcode game out of the DeCSS code as a political
 protest.  Ok, sure, cute idea.  Put it up on GMD.
 Of course.  Post about it to Usenet so other people
 know how clever you are, sure.

 But submit it to the comp?  Why?

 That should be the end of my review.  That says what
 I really think.  But, ok should you insist on submitting
 it (which seems utterly foolish and unreasonable to me):

 A number of years ago, somebody submitted an entry
 to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC)
 which implemented a version of the Enigma cipher.
 Because of munitions export laws, the IOCCC people
 couldn't publish that program if it won, which
 violated an official rule of the competition requiring
 that entries be freely redistributable.  It won anyway,
 because that was a clever rule violation and they
 enjoy clever rule violations, *and* because the
 implementation *was* obfuscated C.

 For DeCSS, the author could easily have made it vaguely
 IF, say, including something explaining what the point of
 it was.  Or how about an interactive walkthrough of how
 it works or of the legal mess that is the set of laws
 that govern this piece of code?  So many opportunities
 wasted, leaving us with what, judged as IF, I can only
 call a boring piece of crap.

 This entry *could* have been the Jarod's Journey of
 MPAA resistance.  Oh well.


>WHAT IF THEY GAVE A COMPETITION AND NO IF WAS ENTERED?

 2: "What-IF?" by David Ledgard

 I'd have given this a 1 but I wanted to make absolutely
 clear just how wrong I think Cracking the Code was.

 Here's what I wrote in my notes at the time:

    If you're going to write a piece of "IF" which is
    entirely prose, don't pepper it with frequent grammatical
    errors.

    If you're going to write a piece of "IF" which is
    pretty blatantly not IF, don't cleverly work "IF" into
    the title.

 Shame to waste the title on this, rather than, say, a
 Jigsaw-inspired game that goes in an entirely different
 direction than Jigsaw did.


>ASK OFFICER IF HE IS DEAD

 4: "1-2-3..." by Chris Mudd
 5: "Aftermath" by Graham Somerville

 Both games feature officers.  Both games feature corpses.
 But the similarities don't end there!  Both games are
 marred by poor game design decisions and game
 implementation decisions.  (IMO of course, and take that
 as read through the rest of my reviews.)

 The starting moment of "Aftermath" is a pretty startling
 situation to be in, and for the first move or two I thought
 it was going to be cool.  [spoilers ahead]  But the
 implementation of the puzzles is very incomplete; after you
 push the blue man, a message is triggered mentioning legs;
 but I just "look"ed and tried examining the things I could
 see at that point, and legs were never mentioned again;
 instead there was still just a(nother) blue man--who
 himself could be pushed again.

 Later the game choices seemed to become arbitrary, and I
 didn't play for much longer.

 The beginning of "1-2-3" is rather disorienting; first
 comes a description of a hospital scene with an incapable
 intern as the protagonist, maybe; then a transition to
 a second-person adventure sequence (am I the intern?) in
 an area full of exits of which only one is valid, but
 you're not told which; and pretty quickly the gameplay
 degenerates into what seems to be a linear story in which
 the author hasn't implemented any commands off the
 walkthrough.  Others have addressed the silliness of
 the "ASK ABOUT" interface; I went to the walkthrough but
 quit when the game got stuck anyway, still during the first
 main sequence.  (I played 1-2-3 fifth chronologically in
 the comp; as I got further through the comp, I became
 less willing to play a game that forced reliance on
 the walkthrough.)


>DOWNLOAD GENERIC ADVENTURE. PLAY IT.

 3: "Marooned" by Bruce Davis
 5: "VOID: CORPORATION" by Jonathan Lim

 I'm not sure why I scored VOID as high as I did.  I guess
 I tend to give 5s to games that are "acceptably implemented
 and written".  Marooned offered a maze-like jungle,
 inventory limits, and hunger, and got marked off accordingly,
 because I'm just not interested or willing to play games
 with those things.


>IT'S INTERACTIVE, BUT IS IT IF?
>NO

 5: "Threading the Labyrinth" by Kevin F. Doughty
 5: "ON THE OTHER SIDE" by Lumpi

 Both of these "games" have a few things in common:
 TtL is more a work of hypertext non-fiction than
 a piece of what we normally consider IF, and OtOS
 is more of a toy than a game--there's no real goal
 or way to win, and it's entirely lacking in fiction.

 Now, somebody could submit a set of 100 interlinked
 HTML pages and manage to tell a little CYOA with it,
 so just because I perceive TtL as "hypertext" doesn't
 mean it's not IF.  But it definitely stands at the
 border for me.  Similarly, in OtOS you never really
 accomplish anything--the interaction is very minimal--
 although you can invent goals like "make a funny
 transcript" and attempt to turn it into a story.

 But the reason both entries received
 non-bottom-of-the-barrel votes from me were
 essentially the same: both are *about* IF (in
 some sense), and both are moderately clever.
 Both are also awfully short, and I am willing
 to judge short games by "value per minute"
 as opposed to overall value.  It's a short game
 comp.  Short games are rewarded.  Short games
 without bugs are rewarded even more highly.
 Short games without bugs that blow my mind are
 rewarded near-top-marks... but neither of these
 games were.

 I think somebody could have delivered a much higher
 quality experience than OToS delivers (obviously,
 solving AI is hard, but by actually having the
 sim keep track of state better, and of the things
 it has tried), but no, it's not worth somebody
 trying to improve on it now.  Once was enough.


>X BLACK CAT

 5: "Stupid Kittens" by Pollyanna Huffington
 6: "Nevermore" by Nate Cull

 Stupid Kittens is a silly, silly romp with the PC a cat
 that couldn't pass for "A Day for Soft Food"'s MacCatver,
 full of annoying writing and sophomorics, yet strangely
 original and inventive.  It never failed to surprise me.
 Sort of cool the way Monty Python is cool, without
 resembling Monty Python in particular.

 Nevermore is a gothic horror blending Poe's The Raven with
 perhaps a bit of classic Frankenstein.  I'm not sure what the
 source of the occultism is (Lovecraft came to mind, but I'm
 not well-read in this area)--it didn't feel Poe-like to me--but
 it all seemed to fit together into a coherent world.  The
 writing dripped and oozed atmosphere, but I was frustrated
 enough with the early gameplay and the disorganized hints
 that I never even made it to the main puzzle.  If I'd had
 nothing else to play I'd have kept going, but I doubt my
 opinion would have changed.

 There's really no connection between them except the title
 of this section.


>GET OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

 7: "At Wit's End" by Mike J. Sousa
 8: "Dinner with Andre" by Liza Daly

 Take the PC and put him or her in a situation where
 everything has gone JUST RIGHT.  The PC is on top of
 the world.

 And then something goes a little wrong.  Just a little
 wrong, not ludicrous or unrealistic.  But, hmm, a tad
 unfortunate.

 And then the player gets the PC out of the situation
 and things just go from bad to worse.

 AWE starts better: the PC is in a tough situation where
 things could go bad or things could go good.  (Heck, it
 may actually be possible to fail the first puzzle, or it
 may not, I don't know.)  Then by solving a really easy
 puzzle, *then* the PC is on top of the world.  It's a
 really nice, cheesily happy moment--and then trouble
 starts.  But the player got to participate in hitting
 that top of the world.  You were pretty sure it was
 going to happen (although it was possible you'd fail
 and it would instead be a redemption story), but even
 so, it was a good moment.  Oh, and then the accident.
 It doesn't rob the PC of being at the top of the
 world--the PC's achievement isn't called into question
 or offset in any way--the PC just starts having a
 (largely unrelated) misadventure.

 DwA does not start quite as strongly--your character is
 already (almost) at the top of the mountain, and you
 don't share in the experience of having gotten to the
 top.  As well, DwA turns out to be a farce, but holds
 off on revealing this until things start going wrong--
 which makes it all the more crazy, but can get a player
 invested in the game the wrong way.  Still, the waiter
 comes over, and if the player makes the obvious choice
 of answer, there's a nice moment of feeling "yes,
 everything is perfect" that is triggered by player
 action.  Oh, but then things start going wrong.  And
 where none of the problems of AWE relate to the
 achievement directly (the PC has already climbed back
 down the mountain he'd climbed), in DwA its the mountain
 itself being put at risk.  A tremor, a threat of a
 landslide, and then wooosh...

 I think of these sorts of games as "out of the frying
 pan and into the fire" games because at every moment,
 once you resolve the situation, a new peril threatens.
 (The movie "After Hours" pops into mind as well.)
 The last half of Kaged was more explicit that way;
 in some ways it was more effective, since the peril
 threatened in Kaged was your life; the peril threatened
 in AWE is, well, your ability to return home; and the
 peril threatened in DwA is public humiliation.

 One of the reasons "out of the frying pan and into
 the fire games" tickle my fancy is because they make
 the character's motivation explicit.  At any moment,
 I know what I'm supposedly to be accomplishing in
 the short term (crucial to being able to play the
 game) and I also know why that action fits in with
 my end goal (not getting humiliated, or returning
 home).  Far too many games put you in a situation
 where all you can do is poke around at suspicious-seeming
 objects and solve the puzzles related to them.

 To me, this is what storytelling in IF should be about;
 giving the player a high-level goal (a story to achieve)
 and then giving the player enough information (e.g. a
 low-level goal) to be able to carry out tasks *for the
 purpose of achieving that goal*.  Why is this storytelling?
 When the player of DwA confronts the challenge of the four
 waiters at once, I can imagine the zany british TV sitcom
 where this exact sequence of events plays out.  Whereas many
 games, say, The Pickpocket or The Planet of the Infinite
 Minds or even Transfer, I can't imagine comprehending this go
 by on a screen; the motivations of the protagonist would be
 incomprehensible.  Or maybe you could imagine it as a
 mystery where the audience is left in the dark; but when,
 in IF, the audience is controlling the protagonist, that
 way of looking at it makes little sense.

 "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" isn't the only
 way to achieve such "storytelling"; when I change the color
 of an object in Kaged it's for a pretty obvious reason, to
 achieve a pretty obvious goal that has to do with the overall
 situation; but when I create a library in Planet of the
 Infinite Minds I'm just doing it 'cause it's there.  In
 fact, "out of the frying pan and into the fire" may not
 be the most effective way of giving the player lower-level
 goals; letting the user set her own pace is probably a
 better experience most of the time.

 In fact, an "out of the frying pan and into the fire"
 sequence can end up just feeling like a series of set
 pieces--the mouse sequence in Transfer is a fairly good
 example of a set piece, although it does rely on one
 piece of game-specific knowledge--so a game that
 integrates its puzzles, rather than leaving them a
 series of disconnected events, may turn out to be a
 stronger work.  In the case of DwA, though, I thought
 the pieces meshed together really well; they all tie
 into the initial scenario, and the pacing is superb: a
 series of linear puzzles, then the game "goes wide" with
 a tough multi-element puzzle, then tightens down and is
 at peace briefly, easy, relaxed, everything is going
 right... and then BAM, ouch, followed by an easy end
 game.  Perfect.  As an added plus, the elements of DwA
 end up serving as a bit of a parody of some romantic
 genre cliches, indeed with the ending almost coming off
 as (unintentionally) mocking Masquerade, which uses
 those cliches to create its archetypical romance genre
 story.

 AWE gets off to a rollicking start with simple, tight,
 timed puzzles, but then goes much too broad and much too
 hard, at least for my tastes.  While all the puzzles
 seemed reasonably logical, but the breadth meant a lot
 of time pursuing irrelevant alternatives, and the
 difficulty would have required an awful lot of player
 time to solve without excessively relying on
 hints/walkthroughs, which I was unwilling to do.
 Therefore I can't comment on how successful the
 pacing is beyond that point.  But up until it goes
 broad, it is an amusing alternation of "oh shit"
 and "ho hum, what now?" which I quite enjoyed, since
 at each moment (say, walking up to the house), I was
 tensing up waiting for what would go wrong next.  (And
 the title helped--it was GOOD that I knew I was doomed
 to be going into the fire.)

 I'll go out on a limb and make a specific design suggestion
 of the sort I think is pretty pretentious of me to make,
 but what the hell: the spine of the story was trying to
 return (which generally meant escaping each situation);
 as far as I played, *everything* that happened was on the spine
 of the story, except having to eat.  Having to eat jarred
 me horrendously because of that.  Realistic?  Sure.
 Related to the story?  Not at all.  I'd cut it.
 (You can argue that it's on the spine if the central peril
 of the story is dying, but that was how it felt to me
 anyway--tangential.)


>Z

 4: "Enlisted" by G.F. Berry
 6: "Shade" by Ampe R. Sand

 These are the two games I played so little as to
 be unable to offer any meaningful review comments.
 Enlisted was played briefly for reasons I have posted
 about enough elsewhere; Shade I only played briefly
 before I got stuck.  ("about enough elsewhere"? ugh.)


>PUT "AND THE TEXT CHOKES THE GAME" IN BIN

 4: "The Masque of the Last Faeries" by Ian Ball
 5: "Rameses" by Stephen Bond

 IF has its origin in text adventures: an (interactive)
 adventure presented in the form of text, i.e. the written
 word.  The grown-up term Interactive Fiction stresses that
 the experience need not be adventurous, only interactive;
 but at the same time it gives up the use of a term that
 is unambiguously about the written word, settling for one
 that CAN mean the written word in the form of books, but
 has other meanings in other contexts.  Since IF isn't books,
 sometimes I think our new term isn't much better, and I
 long for something which calls attention to the fact that
 they should involve text.  (Or is a CYOA told entirely though
 pictures IF?)

 TMotLF and Rameses are both very serious about text, as
 I understand them.  I'm not the best critic of the quality
 of writing, but with TMotLF there are so many failures of
 spacing, punctuation, and grammar that it's hard for me to
 judge the writing itself anyway.  And I see a flaw I'm not
 sure I've ever noticed before; much like an accidental
 "You" in a first-person game, TMotLF mysteriously shifts
 to a narrative mode for some speech (and I don't mean the
 tense error in the first line below):

   "I'm sorry that I'm late. There was a commotion in
   the village which slowed us up," she said.

   The butler smiles and assures her than she is not
   late and that the masque has not properly begun.

 This variation (and I suspect it wasn't a conscious choice
 to try something new in IF) robs me of feeling like I'm
 there, immersed--surely the PC knows what words were said,
 but I only know the content.  (There are cases where people
 do things like "The priest drones on and on about something
 you don't care about"--e.g. Punk Points--but normally it
 gives the impression that the PC is ignoring the speech,
 so it's consistent that you don't know the words.  Learning
 the content of the speech and not the words... well, I guess
 people do it with a book you can "READ" sometimes.  But here
 the *shift* seems as sloppy as the tense error.)

 Rameses, on the other hand, gave me no reason to complain
 about its writing.  "Ferdia is the kind of guy who uses
 semicolons in his speech" is perhaps a little over-the-top
 to be in the protagonist's thoughts, but it's a nice line.

 It did give me reason to complain about its text, though.
 I'd call it subtext but it's plain as day.  The story is
 about a character who is incapable of acting, or perhaps
 incapable about doing what he thinks he wants to do.  The
 author, apparently, attempts to deliver this text on another
 level, through the interaction of the player and the PC,
 initially by making the PC simply refuse to do anything the
 player attempts, and later, by allowing the player to
 choose actions but those actions making no actual difference.
 The message that the PC is ineffective is hammered home by
 making the player just as ineffective.

 Where the written text of TMotLF jarred me, the text
 message of Rameses left me cold: at the beginning, the
 PC is incapable of accomplishing anything and living,
 perhaps, in a fantasy world; at the end... the PC is
 incapable of accomplishing anything and living in a
 fantasy world.  Not to mention the same the whole time
 in between.  I'm reminded of my experience watching the movie
 "Nil By Mouth" (I think?) which charted the course of a
 down-on-their-luck druggie family as they, well, they
 didn't really get any further down on their luck, they
 just stayed there.  At least for the first half of the
 movie, at which point I gave up on it.  I did sit
 through Rameses to the end, at least, but it was all
 just sort of... so what?

 Then again, maybe I'm too close to the protagonist (my
 inability to control him makes it hard for me to really
 call him a PC); I personally suffer from an inability
 to act in certain circumstances (and ones not so different
 from those described), and experientially that inability
 seems nothing at all like two parts of me suggesting and
 refusing it.  Perhaps it's a legitimate analysis of some
 state of mind; or perhaps it's merely a good metaphor for
 communicating such an inability to those who can't imagine
 it.  Either way, it's a viewpoint that I can't identify
 with (while being able to identify with the inability
 itself), which leaves me both unsatisfied with the
 accuracy of the portrayal as well as unwilling to buy
 into the communication breakdown between player and
 protagonist.

 TMotLF had some pretty significant implementation problems.
 Why is the front door an object in the room contents?
 "get all from table" gets the costume without triggering
 what "get costume" does (although to be honest, I hate to
 blame authors for bugs like this, because the Inform libraries
 and docs just don't do a good enough job of helping you to
 not make these mistakes), plus there are many problems with
 believing that the NPCs are really there--that the world is
 solid. It also had what seemed to be an unnecessarily confusing
 plot. Rameses left nothing to be desired from a technical
 standpoint so far as I saw.


>GET OUT

 4: "Escape from Crulistan" by Alan Smithee
 6: "Futz Mutz" by Tim Simmons

 EfC's premise: escape!
 FM's premise: escape!

 It's a classic adventure game premise, even if in FM
 you start out in a cage instead of a cell.  While some
 might call it a cliche, I hesitate to do so, since at
 least it provides the player with motivation, with a
 goal.  Then again, we have EfC, FM, Unnkulian X all
 starting in a cell; Kaged has two prominent cell puzzles;
 and last year there were Bliss and Stone Cell (if not
 more).  Are cell escapes the dragons of new IF?

 Starting in a cage, FM chooses to cast you not as an
 animal, but as a little kid mysteriously transformed
 into an animal.  I'm not sure if this is to dodge the
 "animals aren't smart enough to do X" or not, but if it
 is, I'm not sure it matters, because I don't think
 humans are smart enough to solve some of FM's puzzles either.

 FM starts well, with a nice visual look and what I
 thought was pretty cool music, setting a bright and
 cheerful tone.  It looked pretty polished, I thought
 it was going to be solid... and then I got immediately
 stuck.

 Good games make an effort to communicate to you if
 you need to use unexpected commands, for example by
 force-feeding you a command early on that you'll need
 to use later.  So when FM gave me an itch I felt like
 scratching, I said, "Ah-ha! I bet I'll *need* to scratch
 something at some point."  Looking for a way out of my cage,
 I eventually tried scratching the papers lining the
 bottom of it, but doing so told me it revealed nothing.
 Eventually giving up, I discovered I was right after all--but
 I needed to DIG.  Oops.  It then turned out that FM turned
 on a classic bit of illogic; to get out of the cage,
 I needed to dig and do something else, not because any
 of that would get me out of the cage, but because I
 needed to do those things for later, and the game
 wasn't going to trigger the solution to getting out
 of the cage until I'd done it.  Which is nice for
 preventing me from getting stuck, but made absolutely
 no sense in terms of cause and effect.  When the next
 sequence was timed, and the latter half timed so a perfect
 play from the moment you realize you're under time pressure
 (as opposed to the turn before, when you don't know)
 is not good enough to save you, I punted.  I still gave
 it decent marks, relatively speaking, because it mostly
 oozed quality.  I never saw the personal attacks which
 other people have commented on; my opinion of the game
 is much lower having heard about them.

 EfC wants to be wacky--there were moments when I
 smiled--but it's severely underimplemented--lack of
 detail everywhere--and without clues, it was just too
 hard for my tastes.


>LOOK UNDER WILCAM MAT

 5: "Wrecked" by Campbell Wild
 5: "The Trip" by Cameron Wilkin

 Two games from people named Cam---- Wil--!  Who'd-'a
 thunk it!  But nothing else really in common except
 my votes.

 Wrecked was far too generic.  The train puzzle--when
 I played it from the walkthrough--was a cool idea even
 if not clued in any way, but the credit card was
 nonsensical regarding the passage of time.  In fact,
 the credit card application puzzle was done previously
 in one of the Enchanter games, and they had some sort
 of magic-time-travel postal service rationale for the
 quick return.

 The Trip was quite different.  The title, I presume,
 turns out to be a pun, but the introductory text
 tells you that you're going on a trip, so at the
 end of the introductory text I was thinking, "ok,
 it's going to be a game about travelling to meet
 my friends".  Then I found myself in a motel room,
 and realizes the trip must already be under way;
 here's what I wrote in my notes while sitting at
 that very first prompt:

      What's my motivation?  To go to sleep and wake
      up the next morning and continue driving?

 After a couple of turns, the phone rings, and you
 finally find out that you're already at your
 destination.  (At a motel?  Isn't my character
 the kind of guy who'd crash with his friends? Huh.)
 This sort of thing--not paying attention to what
 the player knows--strikes me as really sloppy
 writing, and did not put me in a good mood.  But
 the phone call ends with: "Finally, something to
 do!" and I was like, yay!  Maybe now I get to play.
 I have to figure out how to go meet those guys.
 Except, no, the moment I left, I'm whisked to meet
 them automatically, at which point I sit around
 watching the NPCs and the PC smoking pot.  Since,
 while playing it, I wasn't smoking pot, I didn't
 really feel like a participant, and I have to admit,
 the experience was a very realistic rendition of
 sitting around with a bunch of people smoking pot
 while you stay sober, something I used to do a lot
 when I hung out with a pot-smoking group.  Unfortunately,
 that means it's a realistic rendition of boredom.
 And when the characters started seeing lights and the
 game did this:

    They all begin examining the surrounding landscape, transfixed.
    >X LANDSCAPE
    I don't know the word "landscape".

 (and the room description even has "landscape" set off
 in its own paragraph to call attention to it)

 --when the game did that, I decided to stop playing.
 Attention to detail is worth points, and nowhere is
 that more important than in a boring intro with nothing
 else to do.


>SEARCH FOR OTHER ENDINGS

 6: "The Big Mama" by Brendan Barnwell
 7: "Kaged" by Ian Finley

 A number of games in this comp had alternative endings.

 I find I can best express my opinion of alternate endings
 as represented by these two games not by writing a review
 comment but by writing a work of IF, so go to
    http://world.std.com/~buzzard/ill.zip
 (which contains a zip of a z5 game written in Inform;
 my apologies for the lack of betatesting, but it's
 not exactly a serious game).

 That pretty much covers Big Mama.

 I guess Kaged was a perfectly reasonable game, and maybe I
 shouldn't complain that the dystopian setting was cliche.
 Looking at my notes, I see that in fact the reason it didn't
 do better (well, I did rank it sixth anyway) was because
 of my dissatisfaction with the premises and implementations
 of several of the puzzles: it is a rare game when events
 in one room affect events in another room, so one puzzle
 I would never have solved, having no expectation the world
 would work that way--it made perfect sense in hindsight, it's
 just not a direction my mind would have ever jumped, because
 of that normal isolation; the followup to that puzzle, I tried
 7 different commands I tried to do before finding an eighth
 that worked (actually I think I went to the walkthrough
 instead of just the hints for that).  And finally, upon
 reading the solution to one puzzle, [spoiler coming up], I
 got up from my computer, picked up a bottle of vodka, got a
 bowl, and attempted to set vodka on fire. Neither a thin layer
 nor a thick pool could I light with a match. Maybe it depends
 on the brand?


>FOLLOW YELLOW BRICK ROAD

 5: "Jarod's Journey" by Tim Emmerich
 5: "The Best Man" by Rob Menke

 Two road stories, one with a sunday school lesson and
 the other a high school chemistry lesson.  The writing
 of JJ was off-putting, the game-world not very interesting,
 and I couldn't even figure out what I was supposed to be
 accomplishing in the first major area, and didn't much
 feel like continuing.

 TBM, on the other hand, I played quite far through, but
 it became obvious it was walkthrough-playthrough material,
 so I quit without having gotten too far.  The puzzles
 seemed a bit arbitrary--they made sense in hindsight,
 but weren't clued or even motivated in advance.  The
 whole introduction was way too confusing, as it skipped
 back and forth in time too much until finally dumping
 you on a train.  Apparently the PC knew more about the
 train than I did, because at some point "one of the
 reporters" came walking down the train, which was the
 first I had heard of any reporters.  I.e., game engines
 go to a lot of effort to pick either "a" or "the" in
 response to different commands to try to make things
 sound reasonably natural; authors should try to live
 up to those standards.  Obviously "a" vs. "the" is
 a tiny error, but, "one of the reporters" is pretty
 far removed from, say, "a man with what appears to be
 a press badge".  Plus I was already a bit disoriented
 by the intro, so it didn't help--I think I actually
 restarted at that point thinking I must have missed
 something.


>ANSWER "FOXY CLEOPATRA KOZLOWSKI VANQUISHED GAME JOB"

 5: "The Clock" by Cleopatra Kozlowski
 6: "Letters from Home" by Roger Firth

 Two games which leave you trapped in a house, wandering
 around trying to solve puzzles for no good reason.
 LfH invites comparison to Ad Verbum, but hey, who
 wants to be obvious with these things?

 TC, so far as I can remember, was perhaps boring
 but mostly sloppy. I guess there might have been
 some potential in the overall setting and idea--
 although really it's best to avoid the locked in a
 house cliche--but the implementation was just sloppy
 sloppy sloppy.

 LfH was a fun bit of wordplay for a while, but the
 attempts at including other puzzles (e.g. finding the
 attic key) seemed totally tangential and not up to the
 same level of quality.  And even the main puzzles were a
 bit too arbitrary in places; e.g. why the G string and not
 the other three?  Then again, some of the difficulty was
 my own; I should make a big note that says "remember to
 try pushing objects from place to place" for next comp--
 it was something that I forgot with at least one other
 game as well.

 Is it just me, or is hearing only the *other* half
 of a phone conversation the PC is participating in
 a disorienting introduction?  I kinda think Ad Verbum
 was wiser with its decision to just tell you "it's a
 wacky treasure hunt", compared to LfH trying to wrap it in
 a serious story even though the game universe was still
 going to be a wacky treasure hunt with a surrealistic
 reality (for lack of a better phrase); indeed, the intro
 story didn't bring much to the table except the chance
 to work in a nod to Inform's creator, and to establish
 the entirely unnecessary time constraint for the game.
 I guess what I'm saying is that the author shouldn't
 have bothered recruiting for the narrative army--should've
 just let the crossword win the war.


>CHOOSE YOUR OWN DAMN BRUNCHNG SHUTTLECOCK

 2: "Little Billy" by Okey Ikeako
 3: "Desert Heat" by Papillon

 LB: a supposedly-CYOA with a meaningless branch at the
 beginning, a meaningless branch to multiple endings at
 the end, and no branches the rest of the way through.  I
 didn't even read most of the text, having determined it
 wasn't (IMO) IF.

 DH: a CYOA with some meaningless freedom of movement.
 I tried a few variations, but there seemed no choice but
 to enter the brothel.  Once there, I found two ways to
 a situation where I would attempt to run away, given
 three choices.  All three of those choices led to the
 same scene.  I quit playing, having determined it wasn't
 (IMO) IF.  Of course, that may have changed later.  But
 then the subject matter didn't interest me either.  (Still,
 the vote was for lack of interactivity; the subject matter
 of Jarod's Journey didn't interest me either.)


>WHAT IS STUPID?

 2: "Asendent" by Sourdoh Farenheit and Kelvin Flatbread
 4: "Comp00ter Game" by Austin Thorvald

 I don't like JeffK.

 I don't know what stupid is, but I know it when I see it.
 I also know that stupid isn't funny.

 I get it already.  Misspelling something to parody people
 who can't spell.  Yeah, I get it.  It's funny for about
 one sentence.  After that it's just kinda repetitive.

 CG at least made me snicker here and there, like the
 code "accidentally" leaking into the game, and the
 authorial voice operating under the assumption it couldn't
 go back and fix things that had already been displayed,
 despite the fact that the author would in truth have
 written it all in advance of the playing; a very
 sophisticated breaking of the fourth wall, in some sense.

 Wasn't Rybr**d's last comp game correctly spelled, at
 least for the most part, and instead mostly full of
 black-and-blue-bruised prose?  As such Asendent's
 short, misspelled descriptions felt closer to JeffK
 than Rybr**d.


>SAY "PARODLY IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY"

 6: "Prodly the Puffin" by some very long names
 9: "Being Andrew Plotkin" by Celie Paradis

 I don't like Pokey the Penguin.

 In fact, Pokey the Penguin ranks right up with jerkcity in
 terms of massively annoying me, simply because *several*
 different people have recommended it to me, and each time
 I go check it out, look at it, and say "I still don't get
 it".  Am I annoyed at other people for thinking it's funny?
 Am I annoyed at myself for not getting it?  I don't know.
 I'm just annoyed.

 Like I said in the last review.  Misspelling?  Funny once,
 maybe.  For Prodly (PtP), non sequitur?  Funny once.

 Ok, PtP is better than Pokey in this regards.  I
 dutifully avoided asking myself about anything because
 that led to the stupidity that I fail to see any humor
 in. The rest of it was mildly amusing and surreal, along
 the lines of "Stupid Kittens", with a few great touches:
 the mysterious hovering beak, and the one bit that made
 me laugh out loud, the "bug in the menu system" bit.

 PtP is, then, a game which is sort of a parody and sort
 of an homage to an existing property which is itself
 (supposedly) humorous, and it managed to make me laugh
 out loud once.

 BAP is an homage to an existing property which is itself
 humorous, and it managed to make me laugh out loud twice.
 (And no other comp games made me laugh out loud.)

 Starting off, I was very worried about BAP (although
 perhaps not as much as I was PtP after seeing its opening
 quote), fearful that it would slavishly imitate "Being John
 Malkovich".  And, in fact, it did at first.  Worse yet, the
 initial scene's trivial puzzle is underwritten in an
 implementational sense: not only do you have no particular
 reason to push the button (indeed, the game will advance at
 that point simply because it triggers an unrelated event),
 but you can open the lid of the copier, and there's nothing
 in it to copy; and you're not carrying anything to copy, either.

 The game stayed pretty close to the movie for quite a
 bit longer, which continued to worry me, along with the
 questionable decision to make "open drawer" and
 "pull drawer" distinct commands--is there some other
 way to open a drawer?  Still, it was managing to amuse
 me, and I stuck with it, and it turned out that the
 author very carefully both stuck to and deviated from
 the movie, in exactly the right way so that he could
 work economical fragments of humor by referencing the
 movie, and yet deliver jokes all his own.  For example,
 Melvin, the character who maps onto the old lecherly
 guy with a secret in "Malkovich", is both wimpy and
 lecherly, but he not only has a different secret, but
 this secret explains those two behavior patterns in a
 totally different way--and indeed his POV was the first
 laugh-out-loud moment for me.

 "Malkovich" is about a puppeteer who gets the once-in-
 a-lifetime chance to control another human being.  Of
 any funny movie one might choose to adapt into IF, this
 one gets the obvious thumbs up for the thematic relevence;
 indeed, I believe in the very old days some people would
 explain text adventures to newcomers by describing the
 PC as a 'puppet' under the player's control.  (In fact,
 the first thing I tried to do after my tunnel ride was type
 something like "ZARF, DRINK"--and I was disappointed
 when this was misdirected at an object I was carrying.)

 In the end, I had so much fun with BAP I couldn't
 deny it second place of all the games I played (and no,
 I've never been on ifMUD).  Of course it was horribly
 on rails.  Why didn't this bother me?  I don't know.

 Scenes I would have like to have seen:
    a puzzle that required typing "x yz zy" instead of "x zy"
    the player controlling Peter controlling Andrew Plotkin
        controlling Zarf, if you know what I mean


>ANALYZE THE ZIFMIA SCROLL

 6: "The Djinni Chronicles" by J.D. Berry
 7: "A Crimson Spring" by Robb Sherwin

 The first games Infocom released were set in a sort of
 wacky swords-and-sorcery fantasy universe, with the player
 playing, perhaps, some kind of cross between a fighter
 and a thief.

 When Infocom explored other genres, they realized that
 not only did setting, characters, the flavor and tone
 of the writing, and the scope and layout of the spaces
 they created should be different, but they also realized
 that they could amplify the feeling that the protagonist
 was different by changing the capabilities of the protagonist.

 Thus, in the Enchanter series, another swords-and-sorcery
 set of games, the PC was given the inherent ability to
 cast spells, and the player given a new set of commands
 to carry out that ability.

 In Deadline, as a police investigator, the PC was given
 the not-quite-inherent ability to send objects to the lab
 for analysis, and to arrest other characters; and the player
 given a corresponding set of commands.

 In Suspended... well, let's not even go there.

 I think this idea is something that modern IF hasn't
 made as much effort to explore.  These two games do.

 One truth about superheroes in every comic book universe:
 they get in fights. Putting some kind of game mechanic
 for superheroes in your superhero game is a smart move,
 even if that's only combat. Beyond that, I didn't play
 ACS enough to comment more.

 In retrospect, I should have reversed the scores for
 both of these games; TDC has grown on me a bit more
 since I started thinking about this issue of "changing
 the PC".  TDC has a very unique PC--well, several--
 and introduces several game mechanics to make the
 PC feel different: "grant wish" and the "Purpose" system.
 In fact, none of the other PCs lived up to the quality of
 the first, and I think this is part of why--because they
 didn't have their own special commands, only special powers
 that were exercised through normal commands, and therefore
 felt less magical.

 The shift to first-person past-tense helps create a
 foreign feel as well; it also, I think, helps make
 the ending seem more appropriate.


>I'M OUT OF CLEVER IDEAS

 4: "Infil-traitor" by Anonymous
 5: "Withdrawal Symptoms" by Niclas Carlsson

 Ho hum.  In a sense, the game-development-background of
 Infil is a clever tweak on feelies; but in another sense
 I feel taken advantage of--indeed this bothers me more than
 Jarod's Journey, which is at least explicit about its
 subversion.  Like some people, I am willing to judge
 a work in the context of its creation; just as I don't
 blame the early Beatles' music for its lack of studio
 polish (or, indeed, the fact that even Sgt. Pepper's
 sound is still far less polished than can be created with
 modern recording techniques), I was willing to give
 Infil the benefit of the doubt for having been such
 an old game.  I would not have given it anywhere as much
 had I known that was a joke; but neither did it, in the
 end, affect my vote.  But I never appreciate comp games
 which I feel knowingly waste my time (e.g. Cracking the
 Code, What-IF?).  If you're going to play a practical
 joke on the IF community involving a playable game...
 try to make a good one.

 I'm not even sure why I grouped these two games anymore.
 And I can't think of anything to say about WS that hasn't
 been said elsewhere.


>SLEEP FURIOUSLY

 5: "Planet of the Infinite Minds" by Alfredo Garcia
 7: "The End Means Escape" by D.O.

 These two games are weird for the sake of being weird.
 PotIM did nothing for me, seemingly largely to be strange
 for no apparent reason.  I explored a bit, things seemed
 incoherent, I played from the walkthrough for a bit,
 things still seemed incoherent, and I quit.

 TEME really grabbed me, although I never made it out
 of the first room, having gotten stuck (along with the
 hint system).  I was one of the rare people who loved
 Pass the Banana last year, and one of the things I loved
 about it was its attention to detail; among other things,
 you could ask each of the three NPCs about the other
 NPCs.

 The first scene of TEME takes this premise to its logical
 extreme; about all there is to do is ask the NPCs about
 the other NPCs, which serves as your "exploration".  In
 addition, TEME calls attention to the normally invisible
 environment--the floor, walls, and ceiling--making the
 room seem like a real, physical space in a very conscious
 way.  The "poetic" writing was fine--it didn't make me think
 "how incredibly cool" the way For a Change did, but neither
 did it seem pretentious or precious to me.  Indeed, given
 the strangeness of the universe, it seemed to lend an entirely
 appropriate Alice-in-Wonderland-esque tone to the proceedings.

 On the other hand, it seems from what I've read that none of
 the rest of TEME lives up to that first scene.


>GUESS THE VERB

 6: "Guess The Verb!" by Leonard Richardson
 8: "Masquerade" by Kathleen M. Fischer

 Both of these games embrace, dive into, and explore a
 cliche; and both are well-known for containing
 guess-the-verb puzzles, although it seems to have only
 been intentional for one of them.

 GtV starts wacky--playing on the IF game-design cliche
 by literally inviting you to guess a verb--and gets
 wackier; or at least the one scenario I played did.  After
 a bit of a misstart due to bad luck with a character's random
 speech, I eventually got underway at guessing a verb, and was
 led to a scenario, about which I wrote the following
 in my notes at the time, in which you can see the clue
 light going on over my head as I wrote it.

    Umm, I'm in UNDO, the warlock scenario, and there seem to
    be hundreds of possible actions and only one turn to try
    them in, plus it takes multiple keypresses to get through
    the "lose" message.  It basically seems to amount to "guess
    the verb", which, I guess is the point.

 This was a pretty painful puzzle for me to get through--it
 didn't take that long, but it sure was irritating, especially
 since it took multiple keypresses to get the chance to type
 "UNDO"--so I gave up on the game despite the quality of the
 writing and the implementation, simply because I'm that averse
 to guess-the-verb (well, action) puzzles, even if they are
 intentional.

 Rather than playing on IF game design cliches, Masquerade
 introduces a rarely-seen genre of story, a genre that is
 known for central female characters and a reliance on
 formula and cliche.  I'm talking, of course, about the
 genre of exploitative B-movies.  Upon encountering the
 scene in which the PC, through no fault of her own, loses
 control of her property, but before finding out what price
 she'd have to pay to recover, I wrote this in my notes:

    Sigh, is this a period piece or a "bikini car wash" story?
    "Female gains ownership of car wash/drive-in movie theater/real
    estate agency but ownership is in question and she and her friends
    are forced to come up with the money in two weeks/5 days/24 hours,
    ANY WAY THEY CAN".

 I was a bit surprised when the game's plot actually included
 in the sense of those final 4 words in the next few turns.

 In seriousness, Masquerade deviates a bit from the romantic genre
 cliches as far as I know them (from reading only two such, umm,
 novels) by making the antagonist not seem quite so dreadful
 until an eventual reveal. Whether this is because it suits
 the particular story, makes for better *interactive* fiction,
 or is simply an alternative strand of romance genre writing
 than I've encountered, I don't know.

 But I shouldn't pick on the plot so much; after all, Masquerade
 ranked 3rd-best on my list.  Despite the cliches, the author
 was in control of her story and pulled me along, with very
 simple, limited interactivity.  Was it great?  Not most of
 the time.  On the other hand, the opening scene and "puzzle"
 was beautifully constructed--if not perfect, than nearly so;
 and none of the rest of the game managed to ruin that impression.
 None of it really quite lived up to it, either.  I was
 disoriented trying to keep track of which of the two male
 characters was which (having their names end similarly didn't
 help).  The characters' reactions to each other might have
 been more believeable had the exact same action and gameplay
 been spread over a week in the fiction; as such, despite them
 not quite seeming real, I played along with it in my head
 as just being part of the genre, much as I was happy to let
 the silly character behaviors in Dinner with Andre be
 justified by its genre.

 I'm not sure where all the branch points are in Masquerade,
 but the use of yes/no questions in at least some cases
 appeals to me in a way that makes me wonder if we shouldn't make
 this conventional; or at least those authors who are
 comfortable with encouraging the audience to know about
 branch points and to help them go look for alternatives might
 consider using this convention: that in most activities,
 solving puzzles, the player is trying to overcome the barriers
 the author has embedded in a linear plot, and that the
 only non-merging branch points are at questions from other
 characters. Perhaps this latter only really makes sense in
 such a heavily character-driven game, but I actually had
 the same reaction to "Dinner with Andre"--I wished at the
 time that my answers weren't so irrelevant, that what I
 said could make a difference, and yet still lead be
 guaranteed to lead to an ending.


>TRANSFER KNOWLEDGE

 6: "My Angel" by Jon Ingold
 7: "Transfer" by Tod Levi

 This review is going to spoiler the premises of both
 My Angel and Transfer, for differing reasons.  In
 fact, it's going to spoiler a pretty major fact from
 Transfer that you don't know for a while in-game.

 Novel mode in My Angel.  Wow wow wow.  This is great,
 and I'm glad the author went to the effort to realize
 it, rather than just printing normal text adventure
 text in this format.  (From reading his description
 of the making-of, it in fact went in the other order--
 first the narrative style, and *then* novel mode, which
 makes sense.)  It's in first person--but it didn't bother
 me for a moment, unlike other attempts at it.

 My criticisms of it: hard to keep track of where new
 text is added.  I think "alternate" mode is supposed
 to address this (but you couldn't change in midstream
 so I didn't try it), although it sounds ugly compared to what
 is there now.  Not possible with the z-machine, I'm sure,
 but some kind of cursor that indicates the start of the
 response to the last command (but does not remain visible for
 previous ones) would be my preferred solution.  Another
 issue was I found the lack of transitions jarring,
 breaking for me the convincingness that I was watching
 a novel unfolding.  The author's making-of comments indicate
 the player can avoid this by keeping commands more "in
 context", but it never dawned on me to try this.  I
 did do it some without realizing it (as a player, I tend
 to stay on the obvious path intended by the author), but
 never noticed a pattern in the failures.

 Finally, I notice from other reviews that some people
 were seriously disarmed by it.  Imagine how disarmed
 you would be the first time sitting down trying to play
 IF if you'd never seen it, never played it, and never
 seen anybody play it?  Infocom imagined it, and included
 sample transcripts in their game to show how it was
 supposed to go.  (In fact, TSR did it with the Dungeon
 Master's Guide for pen&paper RPGs way back when.)  So
 I suspect some sort of transcript might have helped people
 overcome the barrier of novel mode.  (It would have to be
 a rather different kind of transcript, since the whole
 point of the difference in mode is the way the two sides
 of the participation *don't* interleave.)

 Thar be spoilers ahead, matey.  Last warnin'.

 Transfer is a game about things going wrong at an
 underground research center, which turns out, eventually,
 to be a sort of mystery/thriller.  My Angel, at least as
 far as I got, is the story of a journey by two closely
 bonded characters; both a physical one and a journey
 to understand themselves (with a journey of the player
 learning about the both of them tossed in, of course).

 The two protagonists of My Angel are different from
 the rest of the world, and bonded if for no other
 reason than that difference: they are able to communicate
 telepathically, to share their minds in some sense;
 to share their thoughts and feelings literally.  In
 Transfer the player quickly discovers the centerpiece
 of the scenario: a mind-transfer device which doesn't
 work, and the mysterious illness of the device's
 creator.  Ok, that's a tenuous connection for me to
 group the two, but I also grouped them because I'm
 spoilering them both more than others.  Speaking of
 which, here comes the big spoiler for Transfer I
 warned you about.

 A problem I have with Transfer is nothing that you need
 to know as a player is communicated to you very well,
 at least not as I played it through--I could certainly
 have missed something.  For a long time I wasn't
 actually sure that it was supposed to be a mind-transfer
 device; I wasn't sure what else a transfer device
 could transfer, but it was never said outright, and
 when it didn't work I still didn't find out.  Another
 failure to communicate: at this point, the game doesn't
 give the character any goal.  Eventually it dawns on
 you that despite you being a scientist, and despite
 there being a broken machine, the game is a mystery
 and your goal is to solve those mysteries; even so, for
 a while I was poking at puzzles having no clue what my
 goal was.  After the device fails, things get more
 mysterious, with characters acting a little strangely,
 and the player totally unsure which of those strangely
 acting characters is up to something bad.  But the
 failure of the device leads us to a real stumper and
 honestly here comes the big spoiler--I'm ruining the game
 here for you, ok, so don't say I didn't warn you: pretty soon
 in the game, you have to use the mind-transfer device to
 solve a puzzle, even though, as far as I had figured out
 at the time, the mind-transfer device didn't work; and you
 can do this because it turns out the mind-transfer device
 *did* work after all, and the PC was being tricked into
 thinking it didn't work.  It's not clear to me that there's
 any reason you should think to use the mind-transfer device
 at that point; you're still haven't had a chance to interact
 with the subject of the "failed" experiment to determine that
 it hadn't failed; in fact, the payoff for solving this puzzle
 is the revelation that the device really did work.  So it
 makes it a puzzle you'd only solve because you either decided
 to test out the device just in case, or because you read the
 hints/walkthrough.  If this were a movie, we could say
 "oh well, it was a plot hole", but since this is central
 to the player managing to make any progress... ugh.

 I also agree with many of the other complaints about the
 NPC interactions; indeed, I'm not sure why I voted
 Transfer as high as I did.  I guess I'm pretty tolerant
 of stories with intricate plots even if the characters
 aren't that great (e.g. Asimov), and the underlying story
 here was nicely constructed so that the mystery makes
 perfect sense in hindsight, even if the PC's actions are
 entirely unmotivated.  (Hmm, I guess I can see an analogy
 here with some people's complaints about 'A Day for Soft Food'
 after all.)

 I'm also not sure why I voted My Angel as low as I did.
 I guess I felt like the interactivity was low--far too
 often it seemed like I typed something and the game just
 decided to move on without me.  I was never sure whether it
 was possible I could get through many portions of the
 game by just typing WAIT or not--I never tested it, I
 was always trying to participate.  The flashbacks were
 noticingly strong that way--my character kept wanting
 to carry out the flashback the way it had really happened,
 which of course makes perfect sense, but sometimes made
 me feel as impotent as Rameses did.  Still, the telepathic
 lead characters are a powerful device: the author
 leverages it for some very visual writing, for a
 believable sense of bonding which I found very immersive,
 and to allow a single command to either reminisce or
 communicate--depending on the author's whim.  Neat stuff,
 and in hindsight I'd vote it higher to reward the effort
 and to encourage others to try stuff like this.


>GET ID

 5: "Got ID?" by Marc Valhara
 6: "Punk Points" by Jim Munroe

 GI is a quest for some fake ID (well, no, but humor me),
 while PP is a quest for identity.  They also both show a
 sense of attitude and involve a main character who's a
 wannabe of some kind.  While GI had lots of wacky
 responses, the gameplay just didn't work for me, and I quit
 on finding I was supposed to explore a maze with a severely
 limited light source, all of which had nothing visibly to do
 with acquiring more beer.  PP I just got stuck on in the
 second act when the game finally opened up wide.  (Boy do
 I see a trend here.)


>LOCK GRID

 5: "The Pickpocket" by Alex Weldon
 6: "Ad Verbum" by Nick Montfort

 Variety good.  Repetition bad.  The starting area of
 TP was a 3x3 grid of locations.  This was boring to
 explore and lacked in landmarks.  Worse yet, the text of
 all nine rooms contained some identical sentences, which
 made it all the more boring to read.  (And note, the
 player *has* to read it anyway, because the player can't
 know for sure that it's identical until reading all the
 way through, and can't afford to miss some crucial clue
 or an extra exit by not reading it.)

 To pick on an otherwise largely good game, AV's use of
 a cluster of rooms around a stairway landing on every
 floor seemed unnecessarily repetitive to me.  Yeah, it's
 just a silly treasure hunt, so the other trappings aren't
 that important, but blah.  It also suffered from its
 puzzles seeming a bit repetitive.

 I played AV first in the competition, and it was the
 kind of game that was right up my alley.  So why did it
 only get a 6?  It's my thirteenth-ranked game--just about
 at my boundary of "worth playing"--so it's not *that*
 low-ranked, but yeah.  Partly because I've worked on a
 game that forces the player to obey the constraints of
 the game, and I wasn't happy with the level of execution
 here; too many oversights and unimplemented synonyms.
 Unimplemented synonyms are forgivable in most games,
 but AV literally becomes a guess-the-verb game in many
 places, at which point those valid-but-not-implemented
 solutions change it from being clued (*any* word obeying
 the constraint) to being unclued (the *right* word obeying
 the constraint--i.e. the one the author is thinking of).
 Of course, when the author has implemented 8 different
 synonyms, it may seem unfair to criticize him for missing
 the 9th, but that's the standard I'd hold myself to if it
 were my game; *any* valid guess should work.  (The fact
 that once I figured out the constraint, the very first
 command I tried in the first room I needed to didn't work
 no doubt has caused my opinion on the subject to be
 stronger than it otherwise might.)  Of course, in a
 crossword puzzle, there may be multiple words that fit
 a clue, but only one will fit the crossword puzzle as
 a whole; but (a) Ad Verbum isn't a crossword puzzle
 and (b) the other answers in the crossword puzzle provide
 clues to which word is right, so in the end it *is* clued
 which specific word is needed.

 Anyway, was AV fun?  Sure.  I solved the NEWS rooms without
 clues, but at the one hour mark I started hinting.
 I don't think I'd have ever figured out the some of
 the puzzles, some from just being hard, and others
 from being insufficiently synonymized.


>XYZZY

 6: "Castle Amnos" by John Evans
 7: "YAGWAD" by Digby McWiggle

 I don't remember very much about CA; it's one of those
 games I really need to sit down and continue playing
 sometime soon. I know why I quit, and I know I hadn't
 gotten far enough into it to say much meaningful about it.

 YAGWAD, despite not having finished it either, I'm pretty
 comfortable talking about.

 Let me say that, in hindsight, it reminds me a lot of
 Winter Wonderland in a few ways.  Hopefully people aren't
 putting status line compasses or ASCII art into their
 games just because last year's winner had them; but certainly
 as far as I've looked at them I have no complaints (here,
 Transfer, and Masquerade--all three games that finished
 in my top 10).

 The other way YAGWAD reminds me of Winter Wonderland
 is in how, after the prologue, it throws you into a relatively
 wide-open section full of puzzles in the classic totally
 unmotivated wander-around Zork tradition.  There are some
 clever ideas here, and the writing lives up to the quality of
 writing from the prologue while finding a reasonably different
 style and tone of voice (just like Winter Wonderland--well,
 not WW did it better, but you can't have everything).

 Advice to authors: please organize your hints so that they
 make sense to the player by making them goal-directed.
 Suppose the puzzle of how to get past the killer tree
 requires the player have the purple sphere.  Suppose
 getting the purple sphere requires solving the darkroom
 puzzle--but there's no way for the player to tell that
 in advance.

 Then you have a choice. Your hints for the killer tree
 can say "you will need the purple sphere" or they can
 say "you should solve the darkroom puzzle before reading
 further"; but they should say one or the other early on,
 to keep the player who has no possibility of solving the
 puzzle from ruining it by reading more hints then he needs.
 (Well, of course, if telling him which object is required
 would ruin it, how early "early on" means is up to you).

 If you choose the former--"you will need the purple sphere"--
 you *must* include a hint somewhere with a title like "How do
 I get the purple sphere?"  The hint for this can just be "You
 need to solve the darkroom puzzle", which still has its own
 set of hints.  If you don't do this--if the player knows
 he needs the purple sphere but doesn't know how to get
 it, the player has two choices: work on other puzzles
 until he eventually finds the purple sphere, or start
 reading hints to other puzzles until he finds the one
 that provides the purple sphere--potentially ruining
 unrelated puzzles.  But think about the situation.  The player
 is *already* reading hints.  He's probably stumped on all
 the puzzles in front of him.  So which is he more likely
 to do, go back to working on other puzzles, or start reading
 random hints looking for an answer?  I know what *this*
 player does in that situation.

 Of course, it's even better IMO to write a game in which the
 player can determine in-game that solving the darkroom puzzle
 will provide the purple sphere, and in which the player can
 determine that the purple sphere is likely to be needed for
 the killer tree puzzle. But you can't have everything.


The elements have gone. They must be brought. You have a rock.
>LOOK FOR CHANGE

 9: "Metamorphoses" by Emily Short

 Everything positive I could say about it has been said
 elsewhere, and I don't care to say anything negative
 about it.

 Well, since I have publically critiqued the undescribed
 exits problem in it, I probably owe the author better
 than that, since it was my top-rated game.

 Last year, I think my favorite game was Dan Schmidt's
 For a Change, which I playtested and therefore didn't
 vote on, and didn't ever really decide how I ranked it
 relative to the other games, especially since he is also
 a friend/ex-coworker of mine and therefore I wasn't sure
 whether I was unfairly biased.  Nonetheless, it came in
 second place in the comp, and this year my favorite also
 came in second place.  Beyond these parallels, and those
 suggested by the title of this section, I think I see
 some deeper parallels for why they ranked highly for me.

 In a thread on r.g.i-f, I tried to describe how I see
 both the writing and the interactivity of a work of IF
 as being important; that one cannot be traded off for
 the other.  A work of IF with noticeably buggy programming
 will rank low, no matter how good the writing; a work
 of IF with incomprehensible writing will rank low, no
 matter how good the interactivity.  In the middle, a
 work with flawed design cannot be significantly offset by
 better writing, and a work with significant grammatical
 errors cannot be offset by better interaction.  The perfect
 work of IF is perfect in both regards; and to fall off
 from perfection from either detracts from the experience
 as a whole. [For the mathematically inclined, let I and F
 be the value of each aspect from 0 to 1; then consider
 judging the overall value as (I+F)/2, or as max(I,F), or
 as min(I,F), or as I*F. Although the description may
 sound more like min(), I'm thinking I*F. Since true
 mathematicians would write this last as IF, clearly I've
 chosen the most aesthetically pleasing function; and as
 any mathematician will tell you, mathematical truths
 are aesthetically pleasing; hence the one I prefer is the
 mathematically correct function--though I leave a more
 formal proof of this to the reader.]

 In terms of the writing, both Metamorphoses and For a
 Change feature not just good writing--mechanically
 flawless, as clear in meaning as the author felt appropiate
 to the game context--but both offer a distinctive voice that
 helped define the universe of the game for me--in both cases,
 a distinctly otherworldly universe.

 In terms of interactivity, both of them are unashamedly
 "traditional" adventure games, both biased to the easy side.
 (For a Change was one of the only puzzled-based comp99 games
 I completed without any reading any hints at all.)  The programming
 implementations, as adventure games, were careful and detailed;
 for example, For a Change took advantage of the INVENTORY command
 to provide yet another little "description" of each object,
 an addition that was primarily writing yet was inextricably linked
 to the form being an adventure game; Metamorphoses' care shows
 in its toys.

 Now, I don't want to knock non-game IF, nor to knock
 puzzle romps.  I imagine I could score a well-designed,
 well-implemented puzzle romp high; it's just that doing
 such things so well is much harder.  Non-game IF and
 "less interactive IF" has the challenge of exploring
 new territory more than building on the efforts that
 have gone before and the expectations those efforts
 have created in players.  So herein I'm going to stick
 to talking about games literally since although the
 theory of computer game design may be underdeveloped,
 at least it's in the process of being developed, as opposed
 to the theory of non-game IF.

 Returning to For a Change and Metamorphoses, that leaves
 the hard vs. easy puzzles question, and rather than try to
 solve it or convince anyone of anything about it overall,
 let me turn to one specific context: the end game.
 I mentioned in my review of Dinner with Andre that its
 ending was perfect--by which I meant not merely the plot
 but the level of interactivity, which was easy (although
 perhaps too easy--indeed, I'd love to see a game with
 a final conversation like that where the answers made
 a difference).

 In movies, the "ticking clock" of act III (the final act)
 is not just a formulaic cliche--a bomb, a wedding across
 town, an enemy army about to reach a crucial bridge, a
 planet-smashing weapon about to move out from behind a
 moon into position to destroy the rebel base--but a
 component of almost every *good* movie as well; it not
 only works, but a movie without a ticking clock almost
 always works better if it is altered to have one.  The
 ticking clock serves a few purposes, but the central one
 is to heighten the peril; the protagonist has been taking
 actions to try to overcome the problems confronting her,
 but now the ticking clock says: "This is your final chance.
 Succeed here, or fail forever."  More is on the line.
 The audience, already engaged, and wanting to see the
 protagonist succeed, sees the threat of danger more at
 hand then ever in the face of that deadline.

 Now, I'm about to impugn IF implementors everywhere, so
 take this as a bit of a metaphor or analogy or just an
 example scenario if you don't think it's true literally.

 I think game designers (and by this I mean commercial
 game developers as well as IF authors, especially as I'm
 quite certain this isn't a metaphor for the former) tend
 to recognize the power of the experience of movies and
 attempt to recreate it without understanding why the movie
 works and how difference in the relationship of audience
 and protagonist in the two media means the same approach
 cannot be used.

 I personally dislike games which put their hardest challenges
 at the end of the game--whether IF, or a boss monster in
 a twitch arcade game, or simply the endless waves of enemy
 fighters in all the Wing Commander games.  Not only do I
 personally dislike it, but I think it's the wrong thing
 to do in general. And I see similar complaints from other
 people on Usenet quite often (though it's hard to say
 whether where the majority opinion lies).

 A reason you might put the hardest challenge last is because
 the hardest challenge is what produces the most satisfaction
 when it is finally overcome.  The climactic moment of
 satisfaction should come at the climax of the game.

 The problem with this is that as the player comes close to
 the end of the game--starts seeing the end of the game in
 sight--the frustration at failing to overcome the final
 challenge (for a time) will be amplified by being close to
 the end.  "I was *so* close", says someone who almost defeats
 a challenge, of the challenge.  But, if they know they're
 near the conclusion, they say "I was *so* close to finishing,
 to getting to see the ending, to having things resolved",
 and the frustration--from the exact same gameplay failure--is
 greater.

 Frustration is not an emotion movies generally try to bring
 about in the audience during the onset of the conclusion.
 The audience may be frustrated by a passive or incompetent
 protagonist, but act III (at the latest) is where something
 finally happens--almost always where the protagonist is finally
 impelled to act--quite possibly because of that ticking
 clock.

 Game designers attempting to sufficiently challenge players
 at the end of the game seem to quite nonchalantly accept
 the idea that the player will feel frustration at the end;
 all for (I presume) the added payoff of the heightened
 satisfaction.

 But it's not necessary!  The heightened satisfaction can
 be achieved in lots of other ways.  Even just overcoming
 a simple problem can feel more satisfactory if the player
 knows it is what is going to really bring the game to a
 close, especially if that problem is clearly connected to
 the end goal of the game, and not just a locked door with
 a key.

 Even worse, some game designers choose to heighten the
 peril at the end of the game with a ticking clock.  The
 combination of time constraints and hard puzzles at the
 end of a game is the end of the game for me; Spider & Web
 was a great game, but it was all the better (for me) for
 my having played the endgame from a walkthrough.

 One great compromise to heightening user satisfaction over
 the final challenge is to introduce a ticking clock--a time
 constraint--with a relatively easy puzzle.  For a Change
 stands out in my mind for this.  The player has enacted
 the desired change--the goal of the game (the sun must
 be brought), but is in peril of perishing.  The player is
 in a single location, with a single object, whose rules
 in the universe the player has already worked out previously,
 but for which new options are available.  And time is running
 out for our hero... I mean for me!  A *great* moment.  A
 moment I'll remember for a long time.  A moment that defines
 the game.  All that--and yet it was an easy puzzle.

 Alternately, a ticking clock can be introduced, but one
 that isn't actually simulated.  Not as powerful, but players
 who are engaged and participating fully will generally not
 be put off by, say, the failure of the bomb to go off before
 they deactivate it; and how much do you care about the
 opinion of players who have made it to the end of your
 game but aren't engaged and fully participating?

 Personally, I think the strongest moments of satisfaction
 come from intentionality, not from the length of time
 invested in coming up with the solution.  By intentionality,
 I mean the idea that player is faced with a situation, has
 a goal in mind, has options available, and forms a plan to
 reach the goal, and executes that plan.  Again, the ending
 from For a Change reflects this, at least as I experienced
 it; a puzzle where the player is poking at it not knowing
 why a given action will solve the puzzle--or not knowing why
 the player should *want* to solve the puzzle because it doesn't
 relate to the goal--deviates from this notion of intentionality.
 (See http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990716/design_tools_01.htm
 for more description of this idea).  [Indeed, many of the other
 puzzles in For a Change were lacking in intentionality--
 you would just try things because maybe they would do something,
 uncertain of the consequences--and for this reason perhaps For
 a Change isn't really quite that high up by my standards. Or
 perhaps its puzzles were simply satisfying for other reasons.
 Or then again, maybe there was often intentionality, but it
 was limited; I wasn't sure what the consequences of my actions
 were, because I wasn't sure of the nature of the world, but
 that was clearly the author's intent: on thinking of the
 solution to the songlantern puzzle, when I thought to myself
 "Maybe I should <spoiler>", I didn't *know* it would work,
 but it did make sense that it *might* work.]

 As another example, the first scene of Masquerade was to me a
 beautiful, perfectly intentional puzzle; I knew exactly
 what it was going to accomplish as I performed it.  It is
 possible somebody might solve the puzzle without realizing
 why the action was the right thing--since there were so few
 other things to do--but I think for the vast majority of
 people they would have done it intentionally ("intentionfully"?).

 The most satisfying moment of solving an IF puzzle for me
 was, after several days of struggling, coming up with the
 right final command to solve the Royal Jewel puzzle of Zork III.
 That it took me so long no doubt contributed to the
 satisfaction.  But the depth of the satisfaction came
 also from the fact that as I entered the command into the
 game, I knew with total certainty that this was the solution;
 my intentionality was perfect; it was so clearly "the right
 thing" to do that I had thought of it in class, far from my
 home computer, and yet knew it to be right at the instant I
 thought of it. Only a puzzle that was that hard would lead me
 to solve it so far away in time and space from playing the game;
 but any puzzle, no matter how easy, which brings me that moment
 of certainty is far more powerful than any puzzle which never
 does.

 Thus, in Metamorphoses, although I had no clue why I needed
 to ring the bell at the beginning, when it dawned on me that
 it was likely to be a good idea to ring the bell, and I
 canvassed about for ways to ring it, having thought of a
 solution (and having, at this point in the game, faith in
 the author), I was confident that it would work, and there
 was a nice moment of satisfaction when it did.  This "puzzle"
 was incredibly easy; but it was not force-fed to me; I had to
 come to a decision about just how I was going to ring the bell.
 And that's enough to engage me, to involve me, to immerse me
 in a way that static prose (or a game like Rameses where there
 may be interactivity but there is no control) simply cannot;
 and when added to everything else, that's enough to bring this
 game to the top of my list.


>NOTES

 Although I implied at one point that only the top 13 or so
 games make my "worth playing" list, I do not mean to imply
 that the other 36 that I voted on weren't worth writing.
 For those authors for whom there was a substantial audience
 who enjoyed their games, but that audience didn't include
 me, congratulations and feel free to ignore me.  I believe
 that all of the top 18 games according to the comp had at
 least 25 votes that were 8+; and even a game with only ten
 such votes clearly has satisfied some people.  (Two games
 have strangely flat vote distributions--ACS and RtZAS--which
 means they had a larger strongly approving audience than might
 otherwise be implied by their middle ranking... as well as a
 larger strongly disapproving audience.)

 For those authors whose games widely received the same reaction
 that I gave them, and who did not go into the comp expecting to
 never write again, I hope they seek and find what constructive
 criticism they can and come back next year (or even earlier!)
 with something new and improved; certainly there are few
 authors here who I think are beyond help; after all, this
 year there was no entry from Rybr**d.

      +----------------------------------------------+
      | Criticism is the sincerest form of flattery. |
      |                      -- me                   |
      +----------------------------------------------+

>QUIT
