IF Competition 2005 Reviews
by J. Robinson Wheeler
"My InitQuips should be overloaded," says the mendicant. [BUG]
"My InitQuips should be overloaded," says the shopgirl. [BUG]
>stats
Your play stats:
Attack: 1
Defense: 2
Damage: 1 to 2
Base Damage: 1
Armor: 0
Speed: 2
Health: 10 out of 10
About your magic, theese are your current abilities:
Power: 1
Mana points bonus: 0
Timing bonus: 0
Mana points: 10 out of 10
>q
Are you sure you want to quit? y
Okay, this is a bad choice for a Comp 05 starter, so I'm electing to set it
aside for the time being. It's a little hard to read, although that's not
something I'm going to dock it points for, since it's understandable. However,
it does make it extra tedious to play.
It's also an RPG that involves stats and worrying about attack and defense
and hit points and armor and spells, and I don't like that stuff very much.
So, in general, I'm going to leave this unrated for the moment and (maybe)
return to it later. If I don't, I just won't give it a score, rather than
give it a bad one.
But I did quit it before even taking a first turn, which is pretty fast.
Okay, I'm officially old and cranky. This is the second game I've quit
almost immediately, a habit which I've heard other comp judges employ
over the years but never practiced myself. Until now.
What made me cranky? Oh, I suppose hitting a menu before I get to see
any of the actual game, that bothers me. That, and the tone of the
"About" text that I read.
Then I started the game, wandered around a bit. The only thing that
seemed remotely like a minor goal to keep me occupied and get me into
the game was a buggy one about swiping my bunkmate's journal from his
locked chest while he's in the shower. There was a timing issue, where
acquiring the journal gives you only a few turns before he reappears.
Everything I could think of to do as far as reading the journal, or
hiding it so I could read it later, was rebuffed by the game. No, don't
do that, Simon won't like it. Well, screw Simon, this is the only damn
thing to do in the game. Simon can take it and like it. I don't even
want to steal and read a journal; my motivation for doing so isn't
explained, even though apparently the PC has one.
So then I decided, okay, enough nonsense. Let's look at the hints and
see what the deal is for reading this stolen journal. Har har, the
joke's on me. The hint for it says I'm on my own, since this is an
optional puzzle, and it's not going to explain what to do.
Well, if that's going to be your attitude, then I'm bailing on your
game. There's dozens of others competing for my attention, and maybe
I'll find them more engaging.
[Review continues below]
Well, this was okay, and didn't take very long. I think the authors
say that this is their first released game, and it has many of the
old-school qualities I associate with new authors. It is neither
brilliant nor terrible, and it is reasonably fun.
Legends speak, of a great egyption warrior. Who rose in the
military ranks faster that any other.
Thus begins the unintentional hilarity of Phantom: Caverns of the killer, a
hilarity that thankfully never lets up. The first time I laughed out loud
was just a few sentences (or sentence fragments) down from the opening text:
[...] somewhere along the lines, a book was written about where
Phantom was buried. Though never widespread released, it made
its way to many towns.Everyone who saw it thought it to be a
myth...........
So let me get this straight. Everyone who actually saw the physical
existence of the book with their own eyes considered it to be a myth?
One wonders what it would take to turn them into believers.
Anyway, so this one was amusing, but not the way the author intended,
I suppose. I'm figuring it's a young guy who wrote it, one who hasn't
studied English grammar and spelling per se. He has a certain visual
imagination (not that he communicates it well), and in his own naive
way, he's trying to deliver some IF entertainment as best he can.
The second time I laughed out loud was when I entered this rusty
shack I came across. (A rusty shack? I suppose it could be a metal
shed type of thing, except it's fallen apart from termite damage.)
>in
Inside the shack
You are in the half collapsed shack near the east of town.
You can hardly tell that this is a shack from the inside.
You can see a Lantern here.
>get Lantern
Taken.
[Your score has just gone up by thirteen points.]
>ha ha ha
That's not a verb I recognise.
I can't exactly explain why that was funny. You had to be there, I guess.
I think the fact that it was precisely thirteen points had something to
do with it.
The game seems to only have one ending, which leaves you trapped in a
tomb forever, but which still says *** You have won ***.
You get this no matter whether you've explored the game's six or seven mazes
thoroughly enough to get the maximum score of 100 points by picking
up various things.
After I reached this stopping point, I read the walkthrough, and I
found one last piece of unintentional hilarity there. I had been wondering
why I had found a clue that said '15, 37, 12, 12, 40' earlier in the
game that didn't seem to connect to anything. Here's the author's
explanation of what that clue means:
This puzzle is probbably the hardest in the game. The
things you need to solve this puzzle are, the note, and
the numbers scratched into the wall in the prison room.
The numbers correspond with letters in the note.
The first number , 15 , refers to the fifteenth letter
in the note, which is the letter "G". If you count out every
number you find that you get the word "green" so apparently,
you need to open the green box.
Ingenious! But here's my transcript of how I solved this puzzle:
>d
Smooth room
This room is completely bare, the walls,floor, and cieling
are all smoothed stone. The room is very small, and the cieling
is very low, you can easily touch the roof. A ladder
leads up.There is writing on the wall.
You can see a green box (which is closed), a red box (which is closed),
a white box (which is closed) and a black box (which is closed) here.
>x green
A small green box
>open green
You feel a strange sense of disorientation and suddenly, the
room changes.
1
[Your score has just gone up by ten points.]
To be fair, that really was the hardest puzzle in the game, not counting
maze navigation. In passing, I would like to note that touching the roof
in this room wasn't implemented.
Okay, having quit this one after five minutes the day before, I realized
I at least knew how to solve that "optional" journal puzzle, so I thought
I would give it another go. I got through the game, with a lot of grumbling
and looking at the hints, during this second session.
How shall I put this? It almost seems like a generic Comp game. Maybe only
people who have played seven or eight years' worth of Comp games will know
what I'm talking about. It's about memories and flashbacks, it's got a
kind of portentous self-seriousness, and it involves breaking into a
mansion by distracting large dogs.
It all feels a bit heavy handed and humorless, which means it isn't much
fun. The plot started taking some twists and turns in the middle, where
you find out that the PC isn't what he seemed, or your life has been a
lie, or whatever that is; I've seen that many times before, too. Frankly,
I wasn't very engaged, and I whipped past the explanations of what was
going on too fast to really catch what the deal was.
There's a final section in which you find an old photo with something
written on the back and a letter, and I guess I missed more than I thought,
because I was very confused about whether it was talking about Janice or
about Kaitlyn or about someone else.
It's competently coded, with a lot of implemented scenery. The most common
typographical error was missing periods at the end of simple one-line
descriptions.
There are a few other odds-and-ends mistakes. During a military briefing
scene, there's this:
Once again, standard reconnaissance fair.
Either he means reconnaissance fare, or it's like a Renaissance
Fair, only different.
Once again, standard reconnaissance fair. You watch sleepily as
little green and red dots move around the screen, slowly and
obediently making their way to their designated little crosses.
Occasionally a feeble "boom" or "rat-tat-tat" coughs its way
through the speaker system.
(On second thought, it's exactly like a Renaissance Fair.)
I think it's only fair to let you know I take points off for this:
Bakery
Between you and a back wall filled with shelves containing
a hundred different trinkets and homely paintings of food
and nature, lies a glass counter, in which a dazzling display
of cakes, muffins, pies, croissants and every other possible
bake can be seen.
> x danish
You can't see any such thing.
Sometimes, all I really want from a room description is where the
exits are. Here's one where I couldn't find the basic information
I wanted in all the over-writing:
Cliff
The three-foot wide bit of ground between the estate
wall and a cliff-side falling away to the west has a
dirt trail trampled into what was once grass. The
trail leads in from the south and ends here prematurely
as the ground further north has fallen away from the many
beatings of rain it has recently had. What is left is a
tiny stretch of land along a wall with a magnificent view
of the open ocean to the west.
Smeared by a thick layer of droplets, the sketch of the
ocean to the west ripples in and out of a dream.
> x sketch
You can't see any such thing.
"Smeared by a thick layer of droplets, the sketch of the ocean
to the west ripples in and out of a dream" is a little too --
well, just a little too much. For my tastes. Rippling in and
out of a dream? I get what it means, but at the same time, I
kind of want to ask, "What the hell does that mean?"
Without warning, she abruptly grabs you and sticks
her tongue down your throat. After probing around the
inside of your mouth for at least a minute, two things
happen: your head starts to feel very dizzy, and your
other head starts to swell. Another minute or two later,
you pass out...
Press any key to continue...
Must I? If that had been a "Press any key to continue, or K
to Kill Me Now" prompt instead, things might have gone differently.
Press Space to continue, Q to Quit, or K to Kill Me Now.
> k
[Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
- T.S. Eliot]
*** You have chosen wisely ***
War! The word you first knew, and the reason you live today.
For a thousand years your people, the Sekoniun, have waged a
war against the Altari.
This opening text made me want to shout, "Nooo, start over! Try harder!"
In the end, it wasn't that bad. Well, it was, but in a different way. As
an IF game, it is also sort of generic. It's a fantasy setting rather than
sci-fi, which is what I was thinking it would be. You have to escape from
a prison cell, then collect the five magic widgets that assemble into the
thingy of doom, and then you win.
Or not really. On a storytelling level, what you're doing is kind of
creepy. Over and over again, you're warned in no uncertain terms that
by undertaking this quest, you're doing something really evil that
will have the cost of destroying you. And it's all rather occult and
demonic, come to think of it.
I followed this plot on its rails, but by the end I was thinking strange
thoughts like, what if there were a cult of evil guys, and they wrote an
IF game where the player would perform some sort of ritual to loose elder
demons into the world to destroy all goodness, and every player who came
across the game happily went along with the walkthrough and enacted the
rituals and unleashed the curse and destroyed everything?
But of course, if you don't follow along, there's no game. Yet, this
kind of willful release of one's will to the game's plot -- something
I even tend to encourage sometimes -- feels kind of weird to me tonight,
for some reason.
Hey, this game provoked thoughts! Probably by accident, but even so, I
think I'll give it an extra point for that.
This was a short, comic game with a punchy writing style. The author
has a distinct voice and knack with language, something that the authors
of the other games I've played so far have lacked.
>x wall
The oily walls look like a fat man's aorta.
There is one glaring problem, though: he keeps writing "it's"
instead of "its". There's one of these right at the
beginning of the game, and then at regular intervals throughout. Odd, since
the rest of it is pretty much clean of typographical errors, as if it had
been well tested. Maybe none of his testers knew the difference either.
Grind, grind, grind. That's my teeth.
I mainly got through this tiny puzzle-fest with the aid of the included
walkthrough, but I enjoyed myself well enough. There were a few spots
where you had to read the author's mind a little too much, where the
game could easily have provided some textual clues.
There were two or three very unfortunate situations where I tried to
do something that seemed like the obvious move, and was rebuffed in
all my attempts, only to find in the walkthrough that I had failed to
guess the one precise wording that did the trick. Grr, I say! Grr!
>throw gnome at window
You heave the gnome over your head toward the window.
The glass implodes in a shower of shards. The sign falls
the floor inside with a loud clap.
>in
You can go only north, south or west.
>climb in window
I only understood you as far as wanting to climb the inside.
>enter window
That's not something you can enter.
>uh
That's not a verb I recognise.
There was another example where if you tried to look behind or pull
something that was against a wall, you got generic failure responses,
but pushing it revealed something vastly important to solving the
game. Pulling it should have produced the same message, at the very
least.
A more annoying one was near the end of the game, where the problem
was a nest of wasps that needed to be dealt with.
Behind the utility shack
You stand in a narrow corridor between the back wall
of the shack and the fence.
You can see a wooden ladder (on which is a wasps nest)
here.
>i
You are carrying:
a sack (which is open but empty)
a wallet (which is open but empty)
>x wasp
This is the largest wasps nest you have ever laid eyes on.
It's the size of a large watermelon. Dozens of its surly
looking black and yellow striped inhabitants buzz around
it menacingly.
>throw sack at nest
Futile.
>put sack on nest
Putting things on the wasps nest would achieve nothing.
>cover nest with sack
I only understood you as far as wanting to cover the
wasps nest.
>cover nest
That's not something you can close.
>shake ladder
That's not a verb I recognise.
>get wasp
A cloud of angry wasps emerge from the nest. Within seconds
you feel the searing pain of hundreds of venomous stingers [...death, etc]
>undo
[pause to consult walkthrough]
>dammit
That's not a verb I recognise.
>put nest in sack
You deftly pull the sack over the nest and pull it's
drawstring tight. The wasps buzz furiously inside.
See, because, hey, PUT NEST IN SACK to me conjures
the idea of picking up the nest and putting it somewhere else, not the
idea of putting the sack on it. Which I tried. Grr.
Gnash, gnash, gnash.
Still, this was a decent game. Pity about the apostrophes.
I played this one for only fifteen minutes or so. I wasn't enjoying
it that much, although I'd gotten used to the stylistic conceit of
jumping from protagonist to protagonist. This is the second comp game
now with a character called Kaitlyn, I note in passing.
Then I got to another one of these scenes like I commented on with
the Sword of Malice game. I'm desecrating an ancient tomb, carrying
an artifact of black magical energy, and the game is demanding that
I hand this evil thing to this evil corpse, such that all manner of
awful curses is unleashed -- no doubt that which I've already seen
the results of, as all these other characters.
And I didn't want to. I tried to leave, and the game just kept telling
me how compelled I was to do nothing else but hand this evil guy the
evil amulet.
Well, I have more willpower than the PC I was playing, so I exercised
it and quit. Take that.
What a refreshing change this was from the other games so far. Admittedly,
if I'm looking for complete originality, other comps have had their share
of office comedies like this. I guess it was just that the spirit of the
thing was light hearted and chipper, and I needed that change of pace.
So, in this one you step into the shoes of a young woman who has to
deal with some day-to-day stuff. Running late for work, worrying about
whether her boyfriend is cheating on her, chasing around on dumb errands
to please the boss. You end up having to do some rather unusual things
to get through the day.
It's got kind of a unique style of integrated cut-scenes; you make a couple
of moves, then suddenly get an explosion of text, then get the chance to
make a few more moves, then another explosion. (Eventually, a literal
explosion, but that's neither here nor there.)
I had fun, but I started to almost wish there were a more realistic genre
of IF where you really do take care of real-life challenges in a real way,
but within bounds of the IF medium.
Anyway, this put me back in a better mood, so I'll give it more points
than I might have.
Enjoyment is guaranteed.
Welcome to FutureGame!
1) Normal
2) Hard
>script
That's not a command you can use.
>quit
The corporate-speak bullshit is for comedy, I suppose, but I don't feel
like putting up with it.
This is a fairly standard old-school piece, the first Inform work by an
author of several ADRIFT games. The stuff about pink and pinkness in the
very beginning was sort of interesting as a hook, and then suddenly I was
transported into an Alice in Wonderland middle game. The brief endgame was
sort of a CYOA cutscene, in which it really wasn't clear why I was
punished for choosing reality over fantasy.
The puzzles are logical and solved easily enough with a little exploration.
"Clearly I need a -- oh, here it is." That sort of thing. The mechanical
dog was kind of a new invention, but the white rabbit was, you might say,
completely not.
There's nothing particularly to criticize, but nothing particularly to
praise, either. I used to say I was a fan of old-school games and enjoyed
the fact that people were still writing them, but this Comp is making me
think I've outgrown them. I'm going through the motions here, but with
no interest or joy.
I did notice that I have a lot more trouble mentally keeping track of
a map that is based around interlinking NE-SE-SW-NW pathways. This made
the Wonderland section slightly more fiddly to get used to than it might
have been. I wonder if it's an artifact of ADRIFT authors originally not
being able to go all eight directions, that now they feel like they have
to do it even when it's not all that necessary. Either that or I'm just
cranky.
"This is my first game" says the version text. The "About"
text has a lot of apologies for how rushed it was, being the fill-in work done at the
last minute (the last month) when a more complicated game was abandoned.
It is also completely obvious that the author didn't bother having the
game tested. It is riddled with bugs, including one where I thought the
game was made unwinnable because there was a three-item inventory limit
and one of the items I needed to throw away kept springing back into my
hand. There was a bad short_name routine that was a pity to see.
And, thrashingly, screamingly obviously, there was an average of 2.3
misspellings per sentence. Here's a sample from the introductory text
of the game, the first impression the game makes on a player:
The only thing you know for a fact is that you
still exitst, and as far as you're concerened
everything else you've ever heard may be false.
It's also a bad idea to call a game "dreary.z5",
I feel the need to point out.
But really, dude. I don't care how rushed you were. Get someone else
to look at it before you release it.
This game was well written, coded, and tested, and atmospheric. In general,
it gets high marks from me. I had a little more choice in what to do than
the walkthrough let on, and found a slightly better ending. In the cynical
universe of the game, there's not really any good choice. Apparently Heaven
is just sort of enh.
So that bothered me. But it doesn't really take away from the other
qualities that the game obviously has. It also shows notable growth from
this author from his entry last year, which other people were more fond
of than I was. What bothered me about Sting of the Wasp was that it
seemed to encourage and celebrate acting very badly and doing rotten
things to people for selfish reasons. In this one, everything seems to
conspire to twist things around to be bad even when you attempt to act
as nicely as possible.
However, I did save a small lamb from being eaten by wolves. Thanks,
Francis.
This is a wonderful use of IF technology to create an educational
simulation of a hospital. Alas, it is not a great fit for an IF
competition where I tend to be looking for entertainment rather
than education. Not being a medical student, I did the best I
could with the first patient I could find, and examined her bulging
eyes and enlarged thyroid. Then I didn't know what to do, and --
that's about where the experience ended.
I certainly want to encourage this kind of thing, and it is well
done. The photo graphics could be better, but the authors acknowledge
that. I just am not sure how to rate it as part of the competition
here, and I end up kind of wishing they had just made a public
release of it outside the competition just for general interest
and feedback.
Should the IF Comp only be for games? I don't see why that should
be the case, even though it traditionally is. I suppose this work
would have fared better if it had helped me along just a little
bit more, once I went as far as my layman bumblings could take me.
I might have moved on to look at other patients besides the first
one, but I wasn't encouraged or emboldened enough to try.
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