Initial thoughts before playing any of the games…
There are more games this year than in the previous few years. Quite a few more in fact. 44 in all. 2005 had 36, as did 2004; 2003 had just 30; 2002 had 38; it's way back in 2001 (before I started following the IFComp) that there were more games. So the total of 44 for 2006 is positive in one way. Of course, as three of those entries are by the guy widely regarded as the worst IF writer of all time, it's not quite as positive as it may at first seem. And then there's the fact that half the games are Inform games. Who's going to bet that a good number of them are written with Inform 7 by people 'learning the language'?
Very few TADS games this year, just two in TADS 2 and three in TADS 3, compared to a whopping 22 in Inform! The Inform 6 and Inform 7 games were all lumped together but even so, either seemed a lot more appealing to the IFComp entrants than TADS. It seems the ease of use of Inform 7, even in beta format, is seen a better thing than the overly complex TADS. It'll be interesting to see if Inform 7 continues to dominate the Comp in future years or if its newness is the main reason for its success.
…and after playing a few of them…
Only one ALAN game, one Hugo game and one Quest game. While Hugo is considered to be on a par with Inform and TADS (couldn't say myself as I haven't used it), it still seems surprisingly unpopular. ALAN is now up to version 3 but not proving very popular either. Then again, I had problems getting last year's sole ALAN entry to run (constant crashes) and this year's entry's colours settings and fonts seem to be non-customisable, so maybe people are reluctant to use it when more stable alternatives exist. As for Quest…? Well, I suppose it's nice to see a Quest game in the IFComp as there was once a time when I considered Quest (with a huge amount of improvements and a completely redesigned GUI) to be a viable alternative to ADRIFT, but based on the latest Quest game and its general lack of polish, not to mention the flaws in the system itself, I don't think Quest's reputation is going to increase in leaps and bounds as a result. There's apparently a new version of Quest out shortly and not a moment too soon.
ADRIFT? Five entries. Equal to last year's, although again we've had the pleasure of Slan Xorox releasing his bugfest with ADRIFT. Gee, we drifters sure are blessed to have such a persona using our system to create his 'masterpieces'. Still, I suppose I should look on the positive side of things. Whatever faults my own game has, by comparison with Xorox's game I've written a masterpiece.
I see three (count 'em! Three!) games by none other than Paul "I've quit IF 'cos you're all a bunch of losers" Panks. He's achieved the rather remarkable distinction of coming last place in both of the last two IFComps (last and third last in last year's), and this time he looks set to outdo himself. While it was tempting to play his games and write lots of derogatory things about them, I decided to resist the urge this year. No doubt every other reviewer will give them a slating anyway so I thought I'd save myself some time.
Of course, even Panks isn't guaranteed last place this year. One of the game's I tried wouldn't work at all; one was in some horrible Java program that made my eyes ache just looking at it (seriously, a font that small is never a wise move); another was in a foreign language which probably isn't a very clever idea considering most of the judges are likely to be English speaking and not able to read it. But hey, it didn't work for me anyway so the fact that it's written in a language I don't understand is kind of irrelevant.
...and after playing them all…
Was the IFComp better this year than the previous years? Did the extra games make this a more memorable year than 2002, 2003, 2004 or 2005? Hard to say.
Overall, I enjoyed the games I played more this year than for the previous few years. But note the phrase "I enjoyed the games I played". This year, I was a little more harsh in disqualifying the games I wasn't going to play, thus leaving me with the games that, initially at least, seemed playable. The unplayable messes, the bugfests, the games written by a certain someone who I shan't name here… all these got abandoned after the first few minutes due to their sheer naffness. So what I was left with in the end was just the cream of the crop.
Not an especially impressive cream, though. No game scored a 9 this year; there was just a single 8; two 7's; six 6's; four 5's… so just 13 games out of a possible 44 got a score of higher than 4 this year. Not exactly anything to write home about.
Games I didn't play for whatever reason
As there were more games this year than the previous few years, and I didn't manage to get through all of the games in the last three IFComps, I decided to be a little harsher in disqualifying the games I wasn't going to play and review this year. Most of them I quit within five minutes of starting them (some I didn't even play at all), long enough, I felt, to sort the bugfests from the proper games. I think most of the reasons I've given for not playing any further into the games are valid, but if you're writer of one of them I'll understand if you disagree.
"Another Goddamn Escape The Locked Room Game" by Riff Conner - Not a joke game as I'd guessed from the title, but… sigh… a satire. You're in a locked room and you have to escape. I tried to find enthusiasm for playing it but couldn't.
"Enter The Dark" by Peter Shushmaruk - First thing I noticed: it doesn't understand X for EXAMINE. I'm sure the last Alan game I played (the sole Alan entry in the IFComp 2005) understood X so why this one doesn't is a bit of a mystery. Next thing: the colour settings don't seem to work. There's an option to change the defaults (I like white text on a black background) but for some reason they don't have any effect. The colours stay black text on a glaring white background. Final thing: the font overrides *do* work, but as soon as you exit out of the game and go back in, they've reset themselves to the defaults. Seems Alan 3 still has a few teething problems. Oh, and there doesn't seem to be a VERBOSE command meaning I need to type LOOK every time I return to a location so I can see what's there. All in all, more trouble than it's worth.
"Fetter's Grim" by Paul Panks - Because it's Paul Panks. He's written the worse games in both of the last two IFComps (heck, the worst *two* games in last year's Comp) and I haven't the patience for his efforts any longer. As every game he writes is essentially the same anyway, feel free to read my reviews of "Nina" or "Ninja II" and just substitute this game's title for one of them.
"Green Falls" by Paul Panks - See reason for "Fetter's Grim".
"Initial State" by Matt Barton - It's a Windows game. Sorry. But if people are going to persist in writing their games in this way, they need to get used to people not playing them. Oh, and it doesn't understand the X command for EXAMINE. Explain to me one way a system like this is better than any of the proper interpreters out there and I'll consider reconsidering.
"Labyrinth" by Sami Preuninger - I've never been fond of puzzlefests and this was one. The first puzzle involved playing a randomised game of counters with a fellow called Ray which put me right off playing the rest of the game. Maybe if there had been an option to skip the game of counters, I'd have tried the rest of the game but as I didn't see one, I didn't play any further.
"Legion" by Ian Anderson - For some reason which probably seemed like a really good one to the author, this game overrides the default colour settings and won't let me change them back to what I want. Bad move. Off to the recycle bin with you.
"PTGOOD" by Sartre Malvolio - Funnily enough, there are people who enter deliberately bad games in the IFComp every year. Sartre Malvolio, aka Slan Zorax, aka Zorax (or Patient 1151 of the local lunatic asylum as he's probably more commonly known) is one such person. Why do they do it? Beats me.
"Requiem" by David Whyld - My own game. Strictly speaking, I *could* still review it but I suspect my review might be a tad biased…
"Simple Adventure" by Paul Panks - See reason for "Fetter's Grim".
"Tentellian Island" by Zack Wood - Miniscule font. Absolutely tiny. I was literally leaning forward in my seat and squinting at the screen in order to be able to read it. As there's no option to change it that I could find, and the game is written in, of all things, Java, I decided to push it to one side.
"Visocica" by Thorben Burgel - Wouldn't work. I double clicked the icon, something flashed on screen, then it shut down. Normally I'd have posted a message on a forum or newsgroup asking for a solution to this, but as the walkthrough for the game was in a foreign language and the game itself some horrible Windows things instead of a proper interpreter, I decided not to bother.
"Yasmina's Quest" by jalbam - 1) It was in a foreign language which I don't understand so couldn't play. 2) I couldn't figure out how to get it to run. Double clicking on each of the icons didn't do a thing and there were no instructions.
And for the games I *did* play, the scores:
1) "The Elysium Enigma" by Eric Eve (TADS) 8.0
2) "Floatpoint" by Emily Short (Inform) 7.1
3) "The Primrose Path" by Nolan Bonvouloir (Inform) 7.0
4) "Aunts & Butlers" by Robin Johnson (Windows) 6.6
5) "Tower Of The Elephant" by Tor Andersson (Inform) 6.5
6) "Tales Of The Travelling Swordsman" by Anonymous (Hugo) 6.4
7) "Moon-Shaped" by Jason Ermer (Inform) 6.3
8) "Unauthorised Termination" by Richard Otter (ADRIFT) 6.2
9) "Game Producer!" by Jason Bergman (Inform) 6.1
10) "The Sisters" by Revgivlet (ADRIFT) 6.0
11) "Delightful Wallpaper" by Edgar O. Weyrd (Inform) 5.3
12) "Madam Spider" by Sara Dee (Inform) 5.1
13) "The Bible Retold" by Celestianpower & Justin Morgan (Inform) 5.0
14) "Star City" by Mark Sachs (Inform) 4.2
15) "Carmen Devine: Supernatural Troubleshooter" by Rob Myall (Inform) 4.1
16) "Fight Or Flight" by geelpete (Inform) 4.0
17) "Man Alive: Part 1" by Bill Powell (Inform) 3.7
18) "Man Alive: Part 2" by Bill Powell (Inform) 3.6
19) "Strange Geometries" by Phillip Chambers (Inform) 3.5
20) "Lawn Of Love" by The Santoonie Corporation (TADS) 3.4
21) "Pathfinder" by Tony Woods (Inform) 3.3
22) "A Broken Man" by Geoff FortyTwo (TADS) 3.2
23) "Mobius" by J. D. Clemens (Inform) 3.1
24) "Polendina" by Christopher Lewis (Inform) 3.0
25) "Hedge" by Stephen Richards (Inform) 2.3
26) "The Wumpus Run" by Cheryl Howard (ADRIFT) 2.2
27) "Ballymun Adventure" by Brendan Cribb (TADS) 2.1
28) "Beam" by Madrone Eddy (Quest) 2.0
29) "Sysyphus" by Theo Koutz (Inform) 1.1
30) "The Apocalypse Clock" by GlorbWare (Inform) 1.0
The number before the decimal point is my actual score; the number after a way of determining which I felt was the better game if there were games with the same score. So a 2.5 is better than a 2.4, and a 2.4 is better than a 2.3 and so on.
Quick note on my scoring:
10 = Masterpiece, best damn game I've ever played. Never awarded a 10 yet because no matter how good a game is, there's always the chance that a better one will come along one day.
9 = Brilliant.
8 = Very good.
7 = Good.
6 = Above average.
5 = Average. (Strictly speaking, on a score of 1-10, 5 and 6 are both 'average', but I consider 5 to be 'average average' and 6 to be 'above average.)
4 = Below average.
3 = Poor.
2 = Very poor but got a few redeeming qualities (though only a few).
1 = Terrible, terrible game. Poorly written, buggy, prone to crashes, uninspiring storyline, etc, etc. Avoid at all costs.
Played but not reviewed
Mainly because I ran out of time…
"The Bible Retold" by Celestianpower and Justin Morgan - A biblical epic? Hmmm… Can't say I really care for the subject matter but I suppose at least Jesus doesn't have hit points :) . Seemed okay but, well, biblical games just aren't my thing.
"Fight Or Flight" by geelpete - Started off with one scene and then switched to another. Neither were very interesting. As I was running out of time when I came to this game, I didn't go any further with it.
"Xen: The Hunt" by Ian Shlasko - I played the previous Xen game from last year's IFComp but never really cared for it. This one I started playing but after reading the recap of the first game - bizarre just doesn't describe it - I didn't play it for much longer.
And a few random awards doled out to authors who really should have known better:
The visually challenged PC
… for "The Ballymun Adventure" which features a hall full of students but EXAMINE STUDENTS reveals I DON'T SEE ANY STUDENTS HERE.
And how was I supposed to figure *that* out?
… for "A Broken Man" which requires me to wear a tutu in order to steal a key off a little girl (yes, really) and then glue a man's bottom to the toilet seat in order to kill him (yes, really).
Nice writing but what the heck was it all about?
… for "Man Alive 1" which… well, didn't seem to make any sense. At all. Not one bit. Definitely not.
Not very nice writing and what the heck was it all about?
… for "Hedge" which… well, didn't seem to make any sense. At all. Not one bit. Definitely not.
Nice title, shame about the game
… for "Carmen Devine: Supernatural Troubleshooter" whose author impressed me with his willingness to enter a game with such a cringe worthy title in the Comp, but didn't impress me with anything else about the game.
Shot itself in the foot
… for "Aunts & Butlers". One of the best games in the IFComp… if it had been written in a proper IF system and not a custom one.
Er… this doesn't work.
… for "Visocica" and "Yasmina's Quest" which didn't even work at all as far as I could tell. Could well be the finest games in the Comp, but as they don't work I guess we'll never know.
Why disabling UNDO is never a good idea
… for "The Wumpus Run". Seriously, why?
Why including a maze is never a good idea
… for "The Wumpus Run". Seriously, why?
Why it isn't a good idea to remake retro games and enter them in the Comp
… for "The Wumpus Run". Seriously, why?
There are proper systems out there, so why are you still writing your games in this godawful way?
… for Paul Panks. Just because.
A few teething problems?
… for "Enter The Dark" which didn't have a verbose command, understand X for EXAMINE and whose default colours couldn't be changed. Despite being written in Alan 3. A proper programming language. What gives?
Leave the defaults alone! (part 1)
… for "Legion" which changed the default colours and wouldn't let me change them back.
Leave the defaults alone! (part 2)
… for "The Travelling Swordsman" which changed the default colours but, thankfully, let me change them back.
"The Apocalypse Clock" by GlorbWare; an Inform game (reviewed 4th October 2006)
This one started off bad. You're in a bedroom with wallpaper that can't be examined, carpet that can't be examined, clothes that can't be examined. Impressive stuff.
It's a timed game. Another non-favourite idea of mine. It's a weird timer as well because it counts down even when you make a typo. In another room there was a front door which couldn't be examined or even opened. Was this game tested? At all?
As is often the case, rather than struggle with a game that didn't even have the basics covered, I went to the walkthrough and cheated something awful. Just as well, too. I see one of the first commands needed to be entered refers to an NPC who isn't mentioned in the room description and who I was unaware even existed until I saw her mentioned in the walkthrough.
That was about all I could take. It's a depressing thing when an IFComp entry appears to have bypassed the testing process altogether.
1 out of 10
"Aunts & Butlers" by Robin Johnson; a web-based game (reviewed 25th October 2006)
I initially passed this one by as it was a web-based game and my past experience with them hasn't tended to be favourable. At best, I'm left with the opinion that the game was okay (for a web-based game) but would have been a lot better if it had been written with a proper IF system. But after a conversation (well, dialogue on IFMUD) with the author, I decided I'd at least give it a try.
Normally I don't bother commenting on the system itself when reviewing a game, but I'll make an exception here. For some of the time, the system works well and it's occasionally possible to forget that you're playing a web-based game and not one written in a standard interpreter. But only some of the time. On the positive side of thing, the game understands the UNDO (although only one UNDO at a time is allowed) and SAVE commands, which is certainly refreshing as most web-based games don't. On the down side, there is no transcript command and the scrollback window only allows about a screen and a half of text, so while I usually make a transcript of the game during play and base my review off that transcript, here I'm writing part of this review whilst playing the game and the other part from memory. I *could*, if I was so minded, simply copy and paste every screen of text into a Word document or something similar, but this isn't much fun and seems entirely too much trouble to bother with.
The parser is better than average, going on my limited experience with web-based games, but seems pretty temperamental. Sometimes I'm able to refer to an item by its name and then afterwards as 'it', like:
> X BOTTLE
A CONICAL BOTTLE FOR SUPERIOR-GRADE BALSAMIC VINAIGRETTE. IT IS EMPTY.
> DRINK IT
(A VINAIGRETTE BOTTLE)
YOU HAVE ALREADY DONE SO. THE BOTTLE IS EMPTY.
But at times it doesn't work properly:
> X PIANO
A HUGE, THREE-LEGGED BEAST THAT BELONGED TO YOUR FATHER, BUILT FROM WOOD DREDGED FROM THE SMOKING REMAINS OF ENDANGERED RAINFORESTS AND IVORY HACKED FROM THE BLEEDING CARCASSES OF MAJESTIC AFRICAN ANIMALS. YOU KEEP IT FOR THE AIR OF CULTURE IT LENDS TO THE ROOM.
> PLAY IT
SORRY, YOU CAN'T DO THAT.
> PLAY PIANO
*PLINK* *PLUNK* *PLONK* *PER-LUNK!*
You're also limited to just one command per line. No big deal really as it's seldom I ever enter more than one command, but most interpreters can handle this sort of thing. I'm also not able to repeat the previous command by using the up arrow. And the time-saving GET ALL command doesn't work.
But what of the game itself?
Most of the time, it's well-implemented and shows a fairly high level of testing. But at others, little bugs/errors have crept in. Examining me showed I was wearing a suit, but attempts to examine the suit had the game think I was referring to a suitcase. There are also items frequently mentioned in room descriptions that can't be examined, or which carry descriptions that look like they're meant for another item:
> X DRESSING TABLE
A CONICAL BOTTLE FOR SUPERIOR-GRADE BALSAMIC VINAIGRETTE. IT IS EMPTY.
The storyline is nicely comical, with the kind of over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek humour that I've always found appealing. Aunt Cedilla's nephew, the gun-toting Jirgule, could have stepped right out of a Monty Python sketch.
The game is easy enough to begin with but seems to become harder very quickly. Some of the tasks I'm required to perform - the hat for one - weren't obvious and doing them seemed to be a case of doing them for the sake of it or because there was nothing else to do than because I found a genuine reason for it. Saying that, I managed to get a decent way into the game before dying and then resorting to the accompanying walkthrough. This was the unfair moment involving Jirgule, his gun and an unfortunate case of mistaken identity that left me dead a moment later and the UNDO command didn't undo anything. I suppose it's my own fault for not saving, but in modern IF, with the wonderful UNDO command at my disposal, I seldom remember to save most of the time anyway. When you're limited to an UNDO command which only works with a single command, and then only seems to work patchily, you find yourself wishing for a proper IF system.
So in summing up, I'm left with the feeling that, while this is definitely a step up from any other web-based game I've ever played, it still suffers from not being written in a standard interpreter. There were errors in the game but it's difficult with some of them to know whether these were errors with the game itself or errors with the system. In the end I'm left thinking what I thought at the start of this review: the game was okay (for a web-based game) but would have been a lot better if it had been written with a proper IF system. One of the best games in the Comp? Maybe… if written in a standard interpreter.
6 out of 10
"Ballymun Adventure" by Brendan Cribb; a TADS game (reviewed 2nd October 2006)
Well, it's certainly gaudy. The instructions are in blue text on a yellow background (my eyes are still throwing a wobbly over it) and there are horrid bits of coloured text interspersed within the main body of the text. Room descriptions and objects are green, exits are blue - it's quite nauseous.
But what about the game? Apparently it's set in a school and you have to find four items because your teacher, Mr Byrne, has set you a competition. So off you traipse to find said items.
Playing the game for a few minutes doesn't give me anything favourable to say about it. I head east into the girls yard and see this wonderful description:
GIRLS YARD
YOU ARE STANDING IN THE GIRLS YARD. THERE IS NOTHING OF INTEREST FOR YOU HERE. YOU SHOULD GO BACK.
As room descriptions go, this one isn't up to much.
Upon returning to the first location, the same text as before - Mr Byrne telling me he wants some items finding - is still displayed on screen. It seems Mr Byrne likes repeating himself. I did try to ask him about this at one point but the game informs me that it doesn't know the word "byrne", which is kind of disappointing considering he's the first NPC I encountered. I can't examine him either. Nor, in fact, can I examine hardly anything. The school assembly hall is described as being full of students but X STUDENTS hits me with I DON'T SEE ANY STUDENTS HERE. Even worse, X HALL reveals that I DON'T SEE ANY HALL HERE.
Aside from strange errors like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are oddities like examining the library door (one of the few things I found that can be examined), being told it's closed and then walking through it without any indication of opening it. Then there's the bizarre description of Miss Campbell: THE DOOR IS CLOSED. Yes, that's what she looks like. Poor Miss Campbell. Talking to her is even worse: I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TALK TO THE MISS CAMPBELL'S DOOR..
Okay, it's probably pretty obvious I didn't much care for this game and didn't see any reason to keep on playing it. It's been through minimal testing at best and has a huge number of errors that even a casual amount of testing should have picked up on.
2 out of 10
"Beam" by Madrone Eddy; a Quest game (reviewed 1st October 2006)
Room descriptions are painfully brief - YOU ARE ON A GRASS HILL UNDER A TREE - was the first one in the game. The second wasn't much better - YOU ARE IN THE LOWER BRANCHES OF THE TREE. LOOKING OUT YOU SEE A SORT OF HAZY REFLECTION. Exits aren't mentioned in the room description, but instead displayed in the panel on the right hand side of the screen, so if you're one of those few people who occasionally play Quest games and turn the panels off because you don't like them, you won't have a clue where you can go.
It's a difficult game to make any kind of progress with, although my initial lack of enthusiasm, which took a hit by reading the poorly written intro and never really recovered, didn't help. As a game, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You wake up under a tree having fallen asleep and find you can't actually go anywhere because every time you try you keep bumping into invisible objects. What…? So you climb the tree - only CLIMB TREE doesn't work (another of the many, many basic commands Quest doesn't understand) - and find yourself in the location with the hazy reflection. What to do then is anyone's guess. There are hints but none of them helped much as they all referred to different parts and there was no walkthrough available that I could find. I couldn't get to more than a total of three locations, I didn't have any items, I couldn't find much to do that didn't result in Quest hitting me with its ever-present I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMAND. TYPE HELP FOR A LIST OF VALID COMMANDS* and, in the end, quitting seemed like an acceptable thing to do.
* Which it does with a frequency that makes you wonder just how many commands Quest *does* understand.
On the positive side of things, there were very, very few typos which is worth mentioning because it makes this game almost unique among Quest games. But as that's the only positive thing I could find to say about it, it's still not a good game.
2 out of 10
"A Broken Man" by Geoff FortyTwo; an Inform game (reviewed 22nd October 2006)
(Contains spoilers. You've been warned.)
This was a likeable enough game in its own right, but let down by some serious bugs, guess-what-the-heck-the-writer-was-thinking and a general carelessness in the writing.
It seems you're a guy out to avenge his family who have been killed by a terrorist. So you're intending to break into his mansion and exact a little revenge on him. 'An eye for an eye' kind of thing.
The guess-what-the-heck-the-writer-was-thinking was a pain at times. One of the earliest commands in the game - needed to get inside the mansion of the terrorist by a window - required me to use an item that I doubt I would ever have thought of using in those circumstances. Later on, in order to actually defeat the terrorist himself, I'm required to lure him from where he originally is to another location then trap him there by covering the toilet seat with glue. Yes, seriously. God only knows how I was expected to figure that out.
Certain things in the game need to be done in a certain order. I found myself dead at the hands of the terrorist a couple of times because I'd wandered into his bedroom at the wrong time; at others, I was able to wander in and out of his bedroom to my heart's content and he never batted an eyelid.
I remember quite a few retro games from the 80's that used a similar idea to what is used here, i.e. you start the game carrying nothing important but then, by some astounding stroke of luck, you manage to find every single item you need to finish the game. If I didn't know better, I'd swear someone had actually gone round and left these items for me to find. Pity they didn't just leave me something useful like a gun…
The worst aspect of the game, though, was the deaths. Not the deaths that are down to the player making a mistake, or the deaths that occur as a result of a series of events that you have set in motion, but the times the game tells you that you've died but doesn't give any reason as to why whatsoever. This always occurred in the bathroom. For example:
>PUT GLUE ON SEAT
YOU PUT A THIN LAYER OF GLUE ON THE TOILET SEAT.
>PUT GLUE ON RAILS
YOU PUT A THIN LAYER OF GLUE ON THE RAILS.
*** YOU DIED. ***
IN 134 MOVES, YOU HAVE SCORED 9 OF A POSSIBLE 24 POINTS. THIS MAKES YOU A SLY FOX.
Did I die from the glue fumes? Did the toilet seat flip up and crack me one on the noggin? Or did I suffer a sudden, albeit very quiet, heart attack? Whatever happened, it would have been nice to have been told. This bizarre, unexplained death was also on a timer meaning that even with an UNDO command to hand, I wasn't able to escape it.
I didn't finish the game. A couple of times I died while trying to kill the terrorist - who, even while sleeping and unarmed is more than a match for an awake guy with a knife - and several other times in the bathroom when the game would tell me *** YOU DIED. *** but not why. My enthusiasm to keep playing after that just took a distinct nosedive.
One part of the game was mildly amusing. A sex scene with the maid. No, not for *that* reason but because of the way it was handled. A pity the rest of the game wasn't as good.
3 out of 10
"Carmen Devine: Supernatural Troubleshooter" by Rob Myall; an Inform game (reviewed 9th October 2006)
Hmmm… had to laugh at the title. In terms of kewl, it's right up there with naming a TV show "Buffy The Vampire Slayer". But, well, I kind of liked Buffy so I'll try not to let the name of the game put me off.
I wasn't too keen on the start of the game, which basically involved me sitting in a jeep and being driven along. I figured that after X amount of moves, the jeep ride would end and I'd get out. But after typing WAIT over and over again and finding the jeep ride still going on (we were going a long way apparently), it seems I was wrong. So I read the one item I had - a file folder - and still the ride went on. It seems repetition is the answer here. I keep on reading the file folder, even though there's no indication that I should need to read it more than once, and the jeep arrives at its destination.
Another thing I didn't like: the directions for most rooms not being listed in the body of the text but instead in an unattractive white band at the top of the screen. A nice touch is the way it lists directions you haven't been yet in a different colour from ones you have been to, but I still prefer having the directions in the body of the text. Having to glance at the top of the screen to see where you can go when your attention is focused on the bottom of the screen is a pain.
I didn't get very far with the game before going to the walkthrough. Well, I say walkthrough but it's actually just a series of not very clear hints. Apparently I'm a werewolf and at some point I need to change into my wolf form, yet nowhere does it say I'm a werewolf and have this ability. Trying to figure out what to do when you haven't been told the entire story isn't nice.
I suppose I should finish this largely negative review with one thing about the game I liked. It was well written. I liked the flow of the text, even though I didn't really get most of the game was about. Actually, on the whole I didn't mind the game. Cheating and using the walkthrough whenever I got stuck allowed me to get further than I otherwise would have and as a result I didn't find myself hating "Carmen Devine: Supernatural Troubleshooter" as much as the rest of the review might indicate.
But I didn't like it *that* much, either.
4 out of 10
"Delightful Wallpaper" by Edgar O. Weyrd; an Inform game (reviewed 5th October 2006)
Normally weird arty games that dump me in the first location without any indication what I'm supposed to be doing there get swiftly deleted. But something about this one - perhaps its weirdness and its artiness - managed to grab my attention before I could fire it off to the recycle bin along with all the weird arty games currently in residence there. It was the writing style that appealed to me first - the way I could wander from location to location and see these wonderful descriptions of otherwise ordinary and not very interesting rooms -and then the downright strangeness of it. I wasn't able to pick up items or open doors and got told MANIPULATION OF GROSS MATERIAL SUBSTANCE IS NOT YOUR FORTE when I tried. Oh yes, weird and arty alright.
Unfortunately, even the appeal of wandering around and seeing nice descriptions pales after a while and I started yearning for a bit of actual gameplay. A bit of storyline. Both seemed strangely absent. As a guide to exploring a large mansion, "Delightful Wallpaper" worked well. As a game, it had more than a few flaws. Namely, that there didn't seem to be anything to do. When opening doors and picking up items is out (I'm carrying a notepad but not able to pick up anything else), there aren't NPCs and there don't seem to be any real puzzles, what you have left is… not much actually.
So to the walkthrough I went.
It seems the game is split into two parts. The first part is unusual in that every command in it (bar one) involves simply moving from one location to another. The walkthrough frequently has the player going one way and then returning, though if there's a reason for all this backtracking I wasn't sure what it might be. It *could* have something to do with the only puzzle in the first part of the game - manipulating a bridge allowing access from one part of the mansion to the other - but as I was blindly keying in commands one after another from the walkthrough by this stage, I couldn't say for certain.
The second part of the game, where I was able to pick a few items and move them to different places (although why I was doing this, other than it was in the walkthrough, I don't know) was a little more interesting. There was still a distinct lack of gameplay and the only thing I could find to do was the moving about of certain items. The walkthrough told me what I needed to do with them, but never went into any explanation for why I was doing them.
As a weird and arty game, this was better than some I've played. At least it was well written, so I'll bump its score up a point for that. But ultimately I was left wandering around with not much to do and actually wishing I was playing something else instead.
5 out of 10
"The Elysium Enigma" by Eric Eve; a TADS game (reviewed 26th October 2006)
There was clearly a lot more going on with "The Elysium Enigma" than I discovered on my first play through, considering my score at the end was an unimpressive 3 out of 30. The game even went on to wryly inform me *** YOU HAVEN'T ACHIEVED MUCH *** and I think this must be the first game I've played that I managed to finish with a score as low as 10%. Admittedly I was playing the game in a jokey manner for most of the time - when a half-naked woman asked me for food, I refused her a couple of times then wandered off and left her to starve - so really it's my own fault that I finished with such a dismal score.
You're playing the part of a space age ambassador-type who has to visit the planet of Enigma and convince them that the Federation *does* care about them and *does* listen to them. To do this, you need to hoist a flag on the roof of the main building in Enigma's main city and then sweet talk the populace, who are pretty much of the opinion that the Federations *doesn't* care about them and *doesn't* listen to them.
"The Elysium Enigma" was the 20th game in the Comp I played, about halfway through, and the most polished of the entries I'd come across so far. There's a nice back story to the game, enough information to set the scene without overloading the player. I played a previous IFComp entry by the same author a couple of years back and liked it a lot to begin with, but felt it lost its way somewhere as soon as the introductory scene and the background was out of the way. Thankfully, "The Elysium Enigma" remained entertaining throughout.
The difficulty level was set just right (for me anyway) and I managed to progress at quite a nice pace. The first puzzle that I ran into any problems with - dealing with a dog who resisted my best efforts to strangle/kill/kick/choke - was solved when I stopped to more carefully examine what I had with me and found a very useful item amongst my possessions. Yes, this is a game where it's necessary to pay very close attention to things. There was one slightly unfair part around that time, with EXAMINE and SEARCH meaning different things when finding an item needed elsewhere (never a favourite of mine as it's twice as much work for no real gain), but I don't think this was along the critical path to finish the game and is one of the IF scenes more common problems.
The actual game itself is a simple enough one to finish, but there's a lot more to figure out to reach the true ending. Most of the puzzles seem to be fairly simple and straightforward, with the required items to solve them lying around and it's just left to you to locate them. Normally I'm not a huge fan of this kind of thing as it always seems kind of unrealistic that the items needed to solve the puzzles in a game would be lying around in such a convenient way, but here it's handled a lot better. Yes, the items *are* just lying around, but their location seems perfectly logical; i.e. they're where they are because it's where you'd expect to find them in real life, not because they're required to solve the puzzles.
Conversation is handled in the ASK PERSON ABOUT SUBJECT and TELL PERSON ABOUT SUBJECT ways which don't usually score points with me as I spend most of the time desperately trying to figure out just what it is I need to be asking NPCs about or telling them. But here, as soon as you speak to an NPC, a list of possible conversation topics pops up afterwards so you can see at a glance what you might want to ask them. Nice. I suppose you could argue that it takes a good deal of the challenge out of the conversations by listing the topics this way, but it's certainly a huge improvement on keying in ASK PERSON ABOUT ???? over and over again until you manage to find a subject the NPC responds to.
Minor quibbles aside, this was my favourite game of the IFComp 2006.
8 out of 10
"Floatpoint" by Emily Short; an Inform game (reviewed 31st October 2006)
This was one of the first games I played during the IFComp, yet it took me almost a month before I got round to writing my review of it. In some ways it's a trying game, but ultimately a very good one.
In the game, you are David Moskin, Earth's ambassador to the Aleheart Colony, a planet on the verge of being destroyed. It's your job to make arrangements to bring them home before disaster strikes. (Although as the planet's population is a rather daunting two hundred and thirty-seven million, that's going to take one heck of an effort to pull off.)
The setting of the colony is a wonderful one, and part of the fun in playing the game is just wandering around and soaking up the atmosphere of the place. There's an amazing amount of depth in the descriptions of many of the locations, although unfortunately most of the game takes place within the Aleheart Colony itself so the beautiful scenery that makes up the rest of the world is only seen briefly.
While the setting is impressive, the actual gameplay doesn't quite hold up. While there's nothing especially bad about it, it's just that it seems more time and effort went into making the setting interesting, and less into the gameplay itself. Which isn't to say that the gameplay side of things is bad in any way, shape or form, just that I found exploring the game world interested me more than trying to finish the game itself.
I had a few interpreter problems with "Floatpoint". Gargoyle kept crashing at certain points in the game so I ended up playing it in Glulx where the colour scheme seemed a little buggy. I like playing games in white text on a black background but here the text I entered as commands was surrounded by a black block and at some points in the game, I'd be faced with an entire screen of text like this. Certainly made reading it a pain. However, as I don't know whether this is a problem with Glulx or a problem with the game, I won't mark it down.
There are a few nice touches in the game which deserve mention, the best being the THINK command which will list the things you still need to do and is handy for keeping track of your goals. Really, it's no more functional than taking notes as you go along but it saves time and is a welcome feature.
Even if you don't manage to finish "Floatpoint" without the walkthrough (guilty as charged), it's still worth playing for the evocative setting if nothing else. Highly recommended.
7 out of 10
"Game Producer!" by Jason Bergman; an Inform game (reviewed 2nd October 2006)
The first game in the Comp I played through to completion, though only with a little aid from the attached walkthrough (sorry, but USE OBJECT ON OBJECT was never a command I'd have thought to try). The guide that came with the game informed me there were three different difficulty settings, as well as different choices available if I chose to be male or female at the start. A nice choice but as I'd seen (I think) pretty much everything on my first place through, one play was all I did.
As the title might suggest, you play the part of a game producer. I got to work on a first person shooter called "Regicide", though apparently there are different games available (the game changes at random each time you play), and it was my job to ensure that it got finished, tested properly for bugs and got a decent review from the press. As I finished with a score of 93.3% and was told my game would sell an estimated 2,000,000 copies, I think I did pretty well. Of course, I cheated by looking at the walkthrough but, as I said before, the only part I really needed help with was the guess-the-verb USE OBJECT ON OBJECT. Other than that, it was plain sailing.
Most of the scenery is implemented nicely, with the unfortunate exception of the Demo Room where the game is tested out. I amused myself by trying to examine various pieces of scenery but none of them seemed to be there as the game wouldn't acknowledge a single one of them. Was this deliberate? I can't help but wonder if a location called Demo Room which doesn't contain any examinable items is some kind of in joke.
For the most part, this is a nice and straightforward game. A good number of the puzzles are easy to figure out and just require a little thought. I wasn't too sure about one of them - involving pouring something into a fellow worker's coffee - because it seemed a tad unlikely that he wouldn't have noticed me doing it seeing as he was sitting right there at the time, but no one ever said the game was realistic.
All in all, a fairly decent game. It took about an hour and a quarter from start to finish and even though it was a timed game and needed to be completed in a certain number of moves, I didn't find this bothered me one bit. In fact, the only aspect of "Game Producer!" that I disliked was the introduction which didn't seem to make any sense at the time and only later on, when I'd read the game guide, did I realise what was going on.
6 out of 10
"Hedge" by Steven Richards; an Inform game (reviewed 5th October 2006)
One of many games in the IFComp I played for the most part with the walkthrough to one side of me. Maybe I'm just getting worse at these kinds of games, but when I'm faced with trying to get inside a nightclub and the bouncer won't let me in, asking him about proof isn't something I'm likely to try. (Yes, that's a spoiler there but if you get any further in the game than its first location, it's likely you looked at the walkthrough so I'm not really giving much away.) Then again, even with the walkthrough I'm not guaranteed an easy ride. The second command listed doesn't work.
A puzzle later on, getting through a gate in some kind of war zone (how I got from the inside of a nightclub to a war zone, I'm not entirely sure) seemed to involve waiting a specified number of moves in a different location then rushing back to the gate before it closes… although how I'm supposed to figure that out I can't imagine. This is the kind of game that makes me think looking at the walkthrough isn't cheating as such, but a necessity.
Unfortunately, keying in commands one by one with the walkthrough to one side of me isn't a lot of fun. I persevered to the end of the game just to see if things improved, but as the ending, where I was moved from the nightclub to a highway for no apparent reason, just confused me more I decided I'd have been better off not bothering.
2 out of 10
"Lawn Of Love" by The Santoonie Corporation; a TADS game (reviewed 23rd October 2006)
I generally shy away from the offerings of the Santoonie Corporation for a couple of reasons. One for their constant trolling on RAIF; two because I played one of their previous IFComp entries - "Zero" - and found it to be pretty dire. But I thought in the interests of fairness, I'd give them another go and see if they had improved any.
Had they?
Hell no. "Lawn Of Love" is a poorly written game where little effort has been made to cover anything but the bare basics. Items descriptions frequently are more than a few words long, there are bugs where directional commands will often yield no response at all (not even a YOU CANNOT GO THAT WAY message) and I'm damned if I could find the pants in the first location despite the fact that the GET PANTS command worked fine. If they were in that woefully brief location I don't know where because I looked everywhere, tried everything and they just weren't to be found.
The aim of the is… well, I'm not sure really. The game doesn't really so, but indicates it's some kind of 'romance'. It starts with YOU'VE KNOWN US, YOU'VE LOVED US, NOW LET US LOVE YOU. Unfortunately the command PASS THE VOMIT BAG didn't work. A definite oversight.
Basic commands that the player might type aren't covered. There's a desk in the first location but OPEN DESK doesn't get you anything more than I DON'T KNOW HOW TO OPEN THE DESK. Location descriptions are painfully brief and no attempt has been made to inject any life into them. Then there are the bugs. While none of them are crippling in their own right, they add up to more than enough to make the game seem not like a finished game at all but instead one that hasn't gone through even the most basic testing. Doesn't the Santoonie Corporation have testers? As the game frequently slips between first and second person when referring to the player, I'm guessing not.
"Lawn Of Love" was a slight step up from the previous Santoonie game I played, but it still wasn't enough to make me think any more highly of them as a whole.
3 out of 10
"Madam Spider" by Sara Dee; an Inform game (reviewed 2nd October 2006)
Sara Dee's entry in the IFComp 2005 was my second favourite game of the Comp but I wasn't half as keen on this one. It started off quite well - with me being addressed by a spider. Literally a spider. The Madam Spider of the title in fact. But after that, I didn't find myself enjoying it as much as I felt I should.
The aim of the game is to put Madam Spider's house into some kind of order. There's a snake in the bath, something living inside the wardrobe and a distinct lack of music coming from the music room. Sort them out, warns Madam Spider, or else. The last serving girl was quite tasty…
The setup of the game was interesting and while I was playing the early stages of it, I got quite involved in it. But at the same time, I didn't find myself enjoying as much as I thought be. Weird. Maybe the problem stemmed from some of the guess the verb problems I was running into - seriously, I'd have never got into the attic without the walkthrough - or the non-obvious puzzle with what keys to play on the piano (was it clued in some way that I missed or just as non-obvious as it seemed to be? I suppose through trial and error, mixed with a good dose of dogged persistence, I might have figured it out eventually, but even so…)
On the plus side, I liked the style of writing. I liked the way some of the puzzles were handled. I liked the general creepy feeling of the game. But like I said before, I didn't like it as much as I kept feeling I should.
The ending was… unsettling. I wasn't too sure what to make of it, although I'd guessed early on that the events in Madam Spider's house might well not be happening the way I was imagining them. Apparently there are five different endings, some better than others. The ending I reached was definitely a bad one, although as I followed the walkthrough as closely as I could (unless I missed something vital along the way), I'm not sure how I could have improved on things. Maybe I was just doomed no matter what.
So… mixed feelings overall. Good parts, bad parts. I'll call it an average game and score it 5.
5 out of 10
"Man Alive - Part 1" by Bill Powell; an Inform game (reviewed 12th October 2006)
Damn, but this annoyed one me before I was even out of the first location. It won't let me climb over the wall while I'm carrying items. So I remove and drop the items (one at a time as the REMOVE command can only handle one item at a time). Then it won't let me climb over the wall and leave my items behind. So I have to throw them over the wall (again one at a time) and *then* climb over. Making the start of a game, particularly an IFComp game, so pointlessly frustrating isn't going to win you favours from the judges.
There were a few oddities in the game that didn't really affect the game too much but were certainly a pain. I spent a while chasing my hat around the garden after the wind blew it off, despite the fact that the WEAR HAT command told me
>WEAR HAT
(FIRST TAKING THE WHITE PANAMA HAT)
Strangely, the hat wasn't taken. Another oddity I encountered with a simple movement command:
>SE
(FIRST TAKING THE SOUTHEAST)
THAT ISN'T AVAILABLE.
Bizarre. Was the southeast direction coded as an item or is that unusual bit of code something I'm not familiar with in Inform?
But for the game itself? For the most part, I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be doing. This is the unrevealing intro:
THE SHRUNKEN OLD PROFESSOR TALKS AGAIN. TALKING AND TALKING AND TALKING.
YOUR HAND SLIPS TO YOUR POCKET. YOUR FINGERS CLOSE AROUND COLD METAL...
BUT THAT WAS MANY YEARS AGO. YOU ARE NO LONGER THAT MAN.
NOW YOU ARE THE MAN WHO WILL NOT DIE...
Which doesn't tell me a thing. The game begins with me climbing over a wall, having my hat blown off by the wind, and then going to extremes trying to get it back. If the hat blows away, the game ends (although why the hat is considered so important as to end the game like this I couldn't say). After the game ended prematurely on me three times because my hat-catching skills were somewhat limited, I went to the walkthrough and keyed in the commands one after another. This wasn't helped by the strange format of the walkthrough which seemed to intersperse random bits of text between the required commands (why?) but at least I was able to figure out what I needed to do this way.
While I'm at it, I might as well point out the oddness of the walkthrough which frequently leads me to dying and then undoing the command. Is there a reason for this or simply just flaws in the walkthrough? (It's also quite amusing that the man who will not die seems to die so easily…)
The writing was better than the rest of the game might indicate and if the game itself had been less of a chore to play, I might well have enjoyed it. As it was, I just got more and more confused about what I was supposed to be doing, not helped by the strange, and totally unrelated to the current goings on, the player can say. After being shown to my room, I was given the following list of possible conversation options:
[1] FAIR PLAY, FAIR PLAY...SPORT OF KINGS...CHASE THEIR CROWNS... QUITE HUMANE...TRAMONTANA...CARDINALS CHASE RED HATS...OLD ENGLISH HUNTING...
[2] CAN'T NAB IT...FEELING FAINT...DEHYDRATED...SOMEONE GRAB...BLASTED THING...
[3] ...DEAR OLD HAT...WHITE...LIKE HORSE...
Er… come again?
If you have a fondness for oddball games that don't make any sense, you might have a blast with this one. Unfortunately I don't, so after struggling for a while, and shaking my head in dismay that the garbled mess that was the walkthrough, I was only too eager to play something else.
3 out of 10
"Man Alive - Part 2" by Bill Powell; an Inform game (reviewed 31st October 2006)
"Man Alive - Part 1" confused the heck out of me. Part 2 was even worse. Maybe it made sense to the writer but it sure didn't to this poor player.
What's it about? Well, I don't really know. It begins with you in an unofficial court of law awaiting trial for attempted murder. I didn't finish the previous game - even with a walkthrough to hand I felt it was too much of a chore - so I started this one not really understanding what was going on. Then again, as neither Part 1 nor Part 2 really made any sense as far as I could tell, it's unlikely that if I *had* finished Part 1, I'd have been any the wiser.
The first few moves in the game annoyed me. They were different than the moves required to begin Part 1, but equally frustrating and I ended up consulting the walkthrough (which, like Part 1, has the proper commands interspersed with random snippets of text) and finding out that in order to get anywhere I had to TOUCH an item. As I was already carrying this item in my hands at the time, touching it to make it do anything struck me as kind of unusual. But not half as unusual as the rest of the game.
From the court room, I find myself stepping back in time to a garden where I need to perform a lot of non-obvious commands that didn't make any sense to me. For some reason, I need to find a rake. The rake turns out to be in the tree but the game doesn't think much will be achieved by my climbing the tree. So I take the rake. Only I can't use it to rake the garden or, indeed, do anything with it. Instead I speak to my wife, tell her some meaningless babble about having another wife and children somewhere else, throw the rake in the air, and run off…
You can probably gather from the tone of this review so far that I wasn't impressed with the game, can't you? I'll admit I liked the bizarre style of writing but that's about it. The rest of it… well, it didn't make a blind bit of sense and I ended up just keying in commands from the walkthrough because it beat trying to understand what was going on.
Aside from the fact that the game made no sense at all, there were some annoying gameplay flaws that would have let down even a good game. There's a boat that can't be entered, there's a fellow called Polar Bear who attacks me yet who I'm unable to attack back because the game won't even accept that he's there, there are lots of other things.
I'll settle for giving this the first score as Part 1 and just hope that the writer tries to make his next game a little more straightforward.
3 out of 10
"Mobius" by J. D. Clemens; an Inform game (reviewed 15th October 2006)
Unfortunately, this one didn't impress me much at the start. For some reason, it decided to list the room directions as port and starboard instead of the more normal compass directions, so I spent a while having to familiarise myself with where I was. Why did it do this? Beats me.
The idea behind the game seems to be that you're some kind of futuristic soldier who has been sent to some kind of research station where a crisis has occurred. When you get there, there are a couple of badly injured people lying on the floor but the rest of your team haven't arrived for some reason. A few moments later, the reactor explodes and it's curtains…
Or is it? Apparently not as I didn't die then, but seem to have been turned into some kind of ghost. I say 'some kind of' ghost because while I'm able to see my living self standing at the side of me, I can't communicate with him or attack him, yet at the same time I'm able to manipulate other items.
Making progress was a pain. I was stuck in a single room and every action I performed seemed to achieve nothing. And then every dozen or so moves, the reactor would explode and the sequence begin once more. Done differently, this might have been a decent enough game, but as I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing, and was more and more annoyed at not being able to make the slightest bit of progress, I was soon looking around for the ever-helpful walkthrough file. Good job as well because I see some of the commands listed here are ones I never would have thought to try. OPEN REACTOR WITH COAT? Hmmm…
One nice feature that the game had was the way, after the first explosion of the reactor, the other you (i.e. the one still alive) seemed to mimic the commands you'd carried out previously. I don't know whether this affected the way the game was played - if actions you performed then need to be mimicked by your previous self - but it was a cool touch. (Not an altogether successful one, alas, as it sometimes displayed strange things like YOUR PREVIOUS SELF LOOKS CLOSELY AT NOW HE.)
Another game I gave up with before reaching the end I'm afraid. Not a terrible, terrible game by any means, but I couldn't seem to make any progress with it and couldn't find much enthusiasm to keep on playing.
3 out of 10
"Moon-Shaped" by Jason Ermer; an Inform game (reviewed 8th November 2006)
(spoilers within)
"Moon-Shaped" is a take on Little Red Riding Hood, but with a difference. The more I played the game, the more I began to suspect that the identity of the wolf might be someone a little closer to home than in the usual telling of the tale.
This was one of the games in the IFComp that I liked for the most part but never managed to finish. Partly this was because I played it later in the comp, at a time when I was getting too close to the deadline and still had more than a few games to get played and reviewed and so didn't have enough time to spend on it as I'd have liked, but mainly because some parts of it were (in my opinion anyway) pretty much impossible to figure out without the walkthrough. And the walkthrough, alas, is broken. I suppose some of the commands needed aren't *too* reliant on the player being psychic, but would I ever have tried to catch the fireflies in the jar if I hadn't seen that it said I had to in the walkthrough? I don't think so. That strikes me as one of those puzzles that the writer thought was particularly clever, but which the poor player, lacking the writer's way of thinking, is very unlikely to guess.
By the time in the comp I found myself playing "Moon-Shaped", I was going to the accompanying walkthroughs for games as soon as I ran into trouble. Which didn't take my long with this one I'm sorry to say. Here, one of the key commands required didn't produce the necessary response. LOOK UNDER BED? Tried it. Didn't work. I'm guessing this was crucial to the completing of the game because later on I was required to use an item I didn't have and that really finished the game off for me. Then again, there are directional commands in the walkthrough which cannot be carried out in the game itself (due to the locations lacking the exits the walkthrough thinks they should have), so it's altogether possible that I was in the wrong location. Either way, I didn't have the item needed and didn't have a clue where I needed to get it from. Unless, of course, it was under the bed after all but the game didn't seem to think so.
But despite the bugs and the difficulty factor of some of the puzzles, I found myself liking "Moon-Shaped". I'd have liked it a lot more if the walkthrough had worked, though…
6 out of 10
"Pathfinder" by Tony Woods; an Inform game (reviewed 31st October 2006)
"Pathfinder" - another of the many games entered in the IFComp 2006 that didn't make any sense. I started off outside my house, shivering from cold and unable to get inside because I'd left my keys at the office. A few moments later, a sedan pulls up, driven by a total stranger and, for reasons that I can't quite explain, I get inside. (Actually, I can explain them. There's nothing else to do and the game doesn't move on till you get inside so you're forced to either go along with it or just sit there and stare at the screen for a while.) The sedan drives me across town, drops me off at an apartment block and then I go inside and, for another totally baffling reason, kill some poor chap that I work with. Why? The game gives the excuse that he's received a text message from a friend, referred to me as a loser in it and has said he's going to give me a beer or two and then get me out of there. And for this I decide to kill him? After showing up at his apartment and thumping on his door in the middle of the night? And, for that matter, where did I get the knife from that I stabbed him to death with? I certainly wasn't carrying it beforehand (and my knife-free inventory verifies this), so where did it come from?
Setting aside the fact that the motivations of my character didn't make a bit of sense to me, I also wasn't too keen on the game as a whole. I got stuck at a steel door at one point because I kept typing PRESS on the keypad at the side of it whereas the game expected TYPE. Funnily enough, the first thing I typed - PRESS 1 - yielded a proper response so it was even more annoying when PRESS 2, PRESS 3, etc, just yielded error messages. Then there was the weird knocking on the door puzzle. KNOCK ON BROWN DOOR doesn't work. Nor does KNOCK ON DOOR. (Both command responses make mention of a button, even though you never actually refer to a button.) But KNOCK BROWN DOOR does work. Strange.
Part of me feels I should have played the game further than I did but even with the walkthrough to hand, I couldn't seem to find any enthusiasm to play it any longer.
3 out of 10
"Polendina" by Christopher Lewis; an Inform game (reviewed 4th October 2006)
So EXAMINE and SEARCH mean different things? Damn, I hate games that do that to me. You EXAMINE every item, find a few things, then later on realise you have to go back through the game and SEARCH every item. +1 on the Considering Quitting Table.
Another +1 on the CQT: I've been playing the game for ten minutes and don't have a clue what it's about. Most of the actions I'm carrying out I'm doing not because I see any point to them, but purely because there's nothing else to do, so it's a case of me going into the playground then the pet shop because they're there instead of me seeing any purpose in performing these actions.
There's an oddity uncovered while I was walking through the sewers* and the ring I was wearing mysteriously appeared before me on the ground without me ever removing it. I never did discover if this was purposeful or a bug. According to the walkthrough (which I followed because it seemed better clued into the game than I was), there ought to be my dad's ID card here** but it wasn't here at all. Just the ring I had on my finger. Quite why my dad's ID card would be down in the sewers isn't mentioned in the walkthrough, although glancing further on indicates I need it to enter my dad's workshop. Only, of course, as the ID card wasn't there, I can't do that.
* Why was I in the sewers? Er… dunno. Because it's there?
** Is there a reason for my dad's ID card to be down in the sewers? Particularly as I found it at home and left it there?
Well… uninspired game, no clue what I was doing, bugged me with SEARCH and EXAMINE being different things, and a distinct lack of direction. All in all, not one of the better IFComp entries.
3 out of 10
"The Primrose Path" by Nolan Bonvouloir; an Inform game (reviewed 9th October 2006)
The first game in the Comp I played and thought "ah, this one's not bad". Considering it was around the tenth or the eleventh game I played, that's kind of depressing. But, finally, a decent game.
A confusing one, though. I have to admit I didn't understand most of what happened in the game and even after finishing it (which I did with liberal use of the walkthrough), I still didn't understand it. But do you have to understand what a game is about to enjoy it? Obviously not.
The game starts with you, Matilda (definitely not a good game for the main player methinks), discovering that her neighbour, Leo, has been shot by his mother. Quite why he's been shot is a bit of a mystery at first and he also seems reluctant to let you call help for him. Then he disappears and his pocketwatch turns out to be used for a lot more than telling the time.
The game was way above average for the most part, both in the style of writing, gameplay itself and lack of bugs. However, there were a few oddities which I've seen before in Inform games involving attempts to open locked doors:
>SE
(FIRST OPENING LEO'S TOILET DOOR)
(FIRST UNLOCKING LEO'S TOILET DOOR)
LOCKED. ISN'T THAT ALWAYS THE WAY?
Here you're told you'd open the door, unlocked it (despite just keying in a directional command and not even being aware at the time that the door was locked) but then immediately told that the door is locked. Apparently you didn't open and unlock it at all, though it's certainly confusing when the game tells you that you did.
Early parts of the game were easy, later parts less so. One particular command, involving a music box that needs to be manipulated, I doubt I would ever have got. Whether that's just me struggling with a puzzle that everyone else figured out in five seconds flat, or a puzzle not clued very well, I don't know.
Use of the pendulum is quite inspired (even though I didn't realise what needed doing till I'd seen the walkthrough) and I wish this idea had some more uses throughout the game than the ones I found.
All in all, best game of the comp bar none. Saying that, I can't help but feel that it wasn't a patch on my fave games from the past two comps.
7 out of 10
"The Sisters" by Revgiblet; an ADRIFT game (reviewed 1st October 2006)
(NOTE: I was a tester for this game, a fact that complicated this review as I found when I'd written it that I'd commented on several things that were in the first version of the game but which had been removed or changed in the finished IFComp version. Thankfully, the removals/changes were largely positive so I shouldn't grumble.)
"The Sisters" is a horror/mystery game which starts with the player running his car off the road after narrowly missing hitting a young girl. With the car too damaged to be driven any further, it's up to you to make your way out of there and make sense of what has happened.
Leaving the car and exploring a bit, you find yourself in a wood. You've got a bleeding gash on your head but, as lucky chance would have it, a first aid box just so happens to be lying on the ground. What are the odds…? Good job it was there, too, otherwise you'd have been in a bit of a predicament due to bleeding to death from the gash.
There's an annoying bug while descending a steep decline. If you have a penknife with you with the blade open, you fall down the decline, land on the blade and die. Funnily enough, if you drop the penknife before trying to descend, you *still* land on the blade and die. Clever penknife. Why this puzzle was included in the game at all I don't know. There's no way of knowing beforehand that trying to climb down the decline with the penknife open would result in you dying and no reason to assume you'd need to close the penknife at this stage (it can't be used when it's closed after all) so it's a fair bet that you'll end up dying here before realising what you need to do.
The game uses ADRIFT's built in end game sequence which doesn't allow UNDO and instead makes you restart the game when you die so you have to reload from your previous saved game position. Definitely a point against it. Hopefully this will be fixed when the new version of ADRIFT comes out.
The majority of the game takes place in a large mansion which you stumble on after leaving the woods. This has the usual prerequisite of locked doors which you need to find keys for (what large mansion doesn't?) as well as a number of other puzzles to figure out. Some I managed on my own, some I only got to with the aid of the walkthrough. Even the ones that stumped me - getting open the urn being one that springs to mind - were fairly obvious and I'm annoyed I didn't solve them on my own.
There is an interesting twist at the end of the game which wasn't quite what I had expected. As I explorer the mansion which makes up the bulk of the game's locations, I found myself coming up with the theory that I was actually a ghost of some kind and that the girl I had seen was perhaps my ghostly daughter. As it happened, I was wrong and the ending quite surprised me. It also left me feeling slightly confused about certain things in the game. How much of what happened had *really* happened and how much was in the mind of the player? Actually, part of me felt that the twist in the ending where some things were explained was left interesting than the ghost story idea that had seemed to be the theme before then.
Overall, I found "The Sisters" to be one of the better ADRIFT games I've played recently and, despite a few rough edges (and deaths by penknife notwithstanding), well worth playing.
6 out of 10
"Star City" by Mark Sachs; an Inform game (reviewed 29th October 2006)
I'm not going to pretend I understood most of what was going on in "Star City". Or, indeed, any of it. It, well, didn't seem to make any sense. At all.
The storyline is right out of a sci-fi pulp novel from long ago: the Earth has just survived a war with the Gloss (who must be *the* most unscary sounding aliens I've ever heard of) and now you've discovered that there is an object orbiting the Earth. Deciding this might be a good time to fly up there and see what's what, and maybe help yourself to some interstellar loot in the process, you swipe yourself a Gloss spaceship and head off to the object to take a look.
Most of the game involves your exploration of the object, which actually turns out to be a large space station-type vessel complete with monorails, avenues named after (of all people) Lenin, and a city that looks the same in every location you visit. The basic idea is to find something valuable from here to make your fortune with once you get back to Earth.
"Star City" is a frustrating game to play. Nothing happens for half a dozen or so turns at the beginning of the game as your stolen spaceship approaches the orbiting vessel and you can't do much other than sit back and admire the (lack of) view - wouldn't it have made more sense to start the game after you've arrived? There are many more instances of the game requiring you to hang about for something to happen. You can enter the airlock once the spaceship has landed on the orbiting vessel, but the airlock itself won't open and let you out of the spaceship until X amount of moves have gone by. If you re-enter the spaceship later, you'll have to go through a lengthy and ultimately tedious process of waiting for the airlock to close, heading into the spaceship, heading back to the airlock and waiting again for the airlock to open before you can exit the ship once more. Elsewhere there's a solar furnace which you have to operate by pushing a switch, but this again takes several turns and does nothing that couldn't have been improved upon by taking one. Then there's the monorail call button which, you guessed it, calls a monorail… but only after several turns have gone by. And don't even get me started on how many times I had to wait until the film finished playing.
While I can understand the need for realism, I can also understand the need to not bog the game down with meaningless wait times. If I need to press the button to call the monorail, have the monorail arrive immediately. If I need to watch the entire film, just let it run in one go. There's no fun in typing WAIT again and again.
A large portion of the game was played with the walkthrough to hand. I seemed to do that a lot with the games in the IFComp this year, more so than in previous years, though in my defence I'll say that certain aspects of "Star City" (as mentioned in the previous two paragraphs) were the kind of thing that made me loose all patience in playing the game the proper way and just wanted to get to the next part. The part that tuned me to the walkthrough here was when I needed to press a button to turn the lights on. I found a box and tried to EXAMINE IT but the game just told me I couldn't see it. I tried several more commands, got nowhere, got very frustrated, and then tried EXAMINE BOX and, lo and behold, it worked! Now, is there any good reason to make EXAMINE BOX work and EXAMINE IT not work? If there is, I'd sure like to hear it. It's not even a case that the game didn't understand EXAMINE IT. It did. It just required me to enter a different command to achieve what needed doing.
The game ended with my untimely death when the spacecraft I was travelling in unexpectedly crashed into the ground. I say unexpectedly because there was no warning. I was just travelling along, banging out WAIT as usual because the game doesn't like to do anything in a hurry, and then a message flashed up on screen telling me one of my wingtips had hit the ground and that I was dead. A little unfair, I thought, particularly as there hadn't been any indication that I was in any danger up to that point. Also unfair was the fact that the game won't let me UNDO twice in a row so that effectively screwed things up for me.
There were certain parts of the game I liked - the idea of a space station orbiting the Earth which seemed to be part of either Lenin or Stalin's (I was never sure which) plan to destroy the rest of the world and stay safe - but other parts that just annoyed me. The continual need to wait X amount of times just to progress things was a pain. As was the sudden death at the end. And I never understand what the point of the Gloss occupation of the Earth mentioned in the intro was - did it bear relevance to the rest of the game or was it just there for some unnecessary background info?
4 out of 10
"Sysyphus" by Theo Koutz; an Inform game (reviewed 3rd October 2006)
I don't know whether this is a joke game or not, but I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it isn't. Either way, it's not up to much.
Apparently you're Sysyphus, the Greek king who has been punished by the Gods to continually push a boulder up a hill for all eternity. Sound like a good idea for an IF game to you? Nope, me neither.
Like I said before, I'm not sure whether this is a joke game or not. The only command the game seemed to understand was PUSH BOULDER and that didn't achieve anything. I couldn't walk away, I couldn't interact with anyone, I didn't have any items. There was, literally, nothing to do. The author didn't even bother to include hints or a walkthrough for those people who didn't think that endlessly typing PUSH BOULDER was enough fun in itself. So while I'd have liked to have written a review of the full game (assuming there is one), I'm instead just going to write a review based on what bit of it I saw.
In conclusion: it's not much good.
1 out of 10
"Tales Of The Travelling Swordsman" by Anonymous; a Hugo game (reviewed 10th November 2006)
One thing a game should never do by default is override the colours I've specified previously. If I've specified the colours, it's a fair bet those are the colours I want to use when playing the game. Changing them is just going to annoy people. Fortunately this game, unlike one of the others in the IFComp ("Legion"), allows me to change them back to what I want. Which probably explains why I'm reviewing this one and not the other.
The game itself is actually three small games in one, each of them different enough that they could have been released separately and worked well in their own right. The first involves you, the travelling swordsman of the title, arriving at a farm house where a few things need sorting out. The second part has you aboard a flying boat, fighting off overly large spiders and helping the captain to keep things shipshape. In the third part, you come to an abandoned fishing village and have to overcome a tyrant. (There's also the epilogue as well, in which certain things about the game are explained, but as this takes only a few minutes to play through, and can be completed in a handful of moves, it doesn't really count as a part in the same way that the others do.)
Of the three parts, I found myself liking the one with the flying boat the most, with the abandoned village a close second and the farm house a distant third. While the flying boat and the abandoned village had bizarre elements about them that I liked, the farm house didn't. It seems quite plain and ordinary compared to the strangeness of the later parts. A pity the game started here. I think the travelling swordsman coming across a flying boat or a village terrorised by a tyrant would have been a better start to the game than a farm house where he's required to harness a bull, find a way to bar a door and other not very exciting actions.
There seemed to be a few references within the game to the player being deaf (a girl screaming which the player is aware of but cannot hear, and then later on the same thing happening with the tyrant) but this was never resolved at the end of the game so maybe I simply misunderstood the references.
If there are parts of the game I wasn't keen on, it's the puzzles and solving them. Some were pretty easy and even I managed to figure them out (which shows they must have been *really* easy) whereas most just had me scratching my head and referring to the walkthrough for a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing. In particular, the fight with the tyrant at the end of the game was one part I'd have never figured out if I hadn't cheated as it used several commands that it would never have occurred to me try otherwise.
All in all, though, I definitely preferred this to the author's previous two games (yes, I know who he is) even if most of the game was spent with the walkthrough to one side of me.
6 out of 10
"Tower Of The Elephant" by Tor Andersson; an Inform game (reviewed 6th October 2006)
I was always a fan of Conan, Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero so this was one of the first games I tackled during the IFComp. It's a pretty good one, too.
You, as Conan, have taken it upon yourself to break into the Tower of the Elephant of the game's title. Therein, you're planning to steal a jewel known as the Elephant's Heart, the source of power for a priest known as Yara.
Making progress to begin with is fairly easy, with my rugged barbarian hero massacring everyone he came across (whether they needed massacring or not is another question…) but I ran into a few problems with dealing with the giant spider and came completely unstuck when it came to Yara himself. A conversation with an idol also threw me and had me peeking at the accompanying walkthrough for a hint as to what I needed to do next. The necessary conversation topic wasn't really an obvious one (at least not in my humble opinion) so it's not really surprising I didn't figure it out myself.
The ending was kind of unusual in that a message flashed on screen telling me I'd won, yet I hadn't achieved the one thing I had set out to do: get the Elephant's Heart. I had had it at one point, yet been forced to get rid of it in order to kill Yara. Several times I went back to a previous saved game and tried things differently, yet every time the end result was the same: if I kept hold of the jewel, I died if I sacrificed it, I could defeat Yara and win the game. So maybe I misunderstood the intro and the aim of the game was actually a spot of priest-butchering instead. (As it happens, Yara is a black-hearted scoundrel so butchering him is all for the good.)
All in all, a pretty decent game. Nicely paced, nicely written.
6 out of 10
"Unauthorised Termination" by Richard Otter; an ADRIFT game (reviewed 1st October 2006)
I'll start with a disclaimer that I was a tester for this game so reviewing it was complicated by the fact that I had already seen what it had to offer, yet had to play it through again just to see what had changed. I won't list the changes I noticed between the first version I played and the finished IFComp version (that wouldn't be fair), except to mention that they improve the game play side of things quite significantly. A number of annoyances I noticed have been fixed and another aspect of the game changed entirely for the better.
In "Unauthorised Termination", you play the part of Epsilon-Beta, a senior examiner at the Centre of Examination on the planet of Morbian. A senior examiner seems to be some kind of investigator/executioner for those who break the law and need to be punished. And this is in a society where almost every crime is punished by termination. The 'unauthorised' termination of the game's title involves the death of one Gamma-Sigma which you are assigned to look into. Only when you start to investigate the death, you find there's more to it than meets the eye.
Where the game excels is in its depiction of the aliens who, for a change, actually seem genuinely alien and not just thinly-disguised humans with silly names. In appearance they are robotic and have little warmth and personality, but rather than hinder them it made them seem all the more believable. Their strange liking of simple personal belongings, appropriate to their level of achievement, is another nice touch. In a world where even the powerful seem to make do with nothing more lavish than a single, barely furnished room, I guess a pebble or rock seems like something to aim for.
Travel is via teleporters for the most part, as the game is broken up into many smaller parts making conventional travel only possible in a limited number of locations. Using the teleporters is easy, though can sometimes be frustrating as, for example, the teleporter from one location will only allow access to certain other locations, and the teleporters from there only allow access to certain others, and so on… So it's sometimes a pain finding the teleporter you need to reach location X when you're at location Y and quite often you'll need to visit A, B, C, D, etc, before finding the teleporter which leads to where you want to go.
I preferred the setting of this game to that of the writer's IFComp entry of 2005 - "Escape To New York" - and found myself preferring the main character as well, even though I was playing the part of an emotionless robot. Uncovering what has happened to Gamma-Sigma, and the larger conspiracy that you stumble on during the investigation, is quite straightforward to begin with, though gets difficult further on in the game. The more of the game that opens up via the teleporters, the harder it is to find your way around. I wasted more than a few moves at one point in the game going back and forth from one teleporter to another trying to figure out what I needed to do next. Fortunately, help is provided and this gives you just enough information to get past the harder parts.
"Unauthorised Termination" wasn't my favourite game of the IFComp, but it was a nice enough game in its own right and the setting was certainly a refreshing one after the rather mundane settings of so many of the other entries.
6 out of 10
"The Wumpus Run" by Cheryl Howard; an ADRIFT game (reviewed 2nd October 2006)
I never played the original Wumpus game but I have a vague idea what it was about: hunting for some creature called the Wumpus through a cavern system, killing it and getting out in one piece. This is the author's interpretation of the idea.
Unfortunately, I can't much say I cared for it. The introduction is nice, but the game goes downhill quickly from there. ADRIFT's built in map is disabled - never a popular decision with me, particularly in a game set within a maze - which means I had to figure out my way with constant glimpses at the map contained in the game package as I couldn't be bothered to map it out myself. I should probably say that I dislike mazes intensely and while I have many fond memories of retro text adventures, of which this most definitely aspires to be, that fondness doesn't extend as far as mazes. Especially mazes that kill the player off without warning merely by going the wrong way (one location has a hole in the middle which you fall into the moment you enter the room).
There were some strange errors in the game, like when I tried to throw my starblade at the Wumpus:
HMMM ... THE DARK IS STARTING TO GET TO YOU ... WHAT %CHARACTER% WHERE?
THE SOUND OF A STARBLADE SHATTERING ON THE WALLS OF THE CAVERN ECHOES THROUGHOUT THE CAVERNS. SO MUCH FOR SNEAKING UP ON THE WUMPUS ... DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE MANAGED TO WAKE IT UP YET?
YOU SLUMP TO THE GROUND EMOTIONALLY AND PHYSICALLY SPENT FOR A FEW MOMENTS ... COULD THIS BE THE END OF YOUR ONE AND ONLY CHANCE OF BEING SOMEBODY?
UH-OH! YOU ARE ONE LUCKY ADVENTURER ... YOU MUST HAVE MASKED MOST OF THE LIGHT WHEN YOU PASSED OUT, ALLOWING THE WUMPUS TO SETTLE BACK TO SLEEP.
Aside from the obvious mistake of %character% popping up in the text (I'm assuming that should be the name of some NPC), there seem to be four totally unrelated paragraphs there. At another point, I tried throwing the starblade at the Wumpus only to be told that I couldn't do that with the starblade - despite the fact that this is what the game's intro specifically tells me to do! - and when attempting to kill the Wumpus, I was told that that wasn't very nice (ADRIFT's default response when trying to kill an NPC that the writer has forgotten to program a response in for. When the very idea of the game - killing the Wumpus - isn't even covered, you really have to wonder just what kind of testing this game went through). While I'm sure the game *can* be finished, I just couldn't summon up any willpower to keep on playing it. Take a maze, a disabled mapping facility and the most obvious commands not working properly and you have one remarkably poor game.
2 out of 10