Game Reviews P
These reviews are in alphabetical order according to the name of the game reviewed. The index also has a few extra features. First and foremost of these is the instant gratification feature. If you see the SPAG button:
Then you can click on it to retrieve the file from ftp.ifarchive.org, or to go to that file's directory on the archive (in the case of competition games).
The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date. All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign.
Table of Contents
Paint!!! Pantomime Pass the Banana The Windhall Chronicles I: Path To Fortune The Pawn Perdition's Flames Perilous Magic Persistence of Memory Phantom: Caverns of the Killer Phlegm Photograph Photopia Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye Piece Of Mind Pirate Adventure The PK Girl Plague Planet The Plague (Redux) Planet Of The Infinite Minds Planetfall The Plant Plundered Hearts Poor Zefron's Almanac The Potter and the Mould Prized Possession Prodly The Puffin Promoted! Provenance Punkirita Quest One: Liquid Purple The Pyramids of Mars Pytho's Mask
Paint!!!
From: Laurence Moore <laurence SP@G turntopage.com> Review appeared in SPAG #40 -- April 12, 2005 TITLE: Paint!!! AUTHOR: David Whyld EMAIL: me SP@G dwhyld.plus.com DATE: 2004 PARSER: Standard SUPPORTS: Adrift AVAILABILITY: IF Archive URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/adrift/Paint.taf VERSION: Release 1 Paint was originally intended for a one-room competition but that was aborted due to a lack of entries. In fact, only two games emerged: The Last Hour and Paint. You certainly couldn't find a bigger gap between the two. Initially, I thought that the one room concept would be impossible to work with (as a writer) and surely dull to play (as a player). Where is the fun in only describing events, characters and items in one room? Where is the fun in not being immersed in hundreds of locations? Well, To Hell In A Hamper, another one-room Adrift game, certainly showed the quality that can be produced in a one room adventure. With Paint, I feel there is a healthy second to such a benchmark classic. The premise of the story is typical of David Whyld material. If you're unfamiliar with his prolific work (and by prolific, I really do mean prolific, with 30 titles penned using Adrift) then you'll find the vein of comedy and silliness at its core. Personally, I don't really get comedy in IF. It takes quite a lot to raise a smile or even draw forward a laugh. So, for this game to have the money shot, it's definitely quite special. You are in charge of a crew of dozy painters who have to paint an office. Yep, that's it. Sounds simple, right? Of course not -- this is IF. As with other Whyld outings, we have an array of traditional text adventure puzzles from the sublime to the downright silly. This is tongue-in-cheek stuff and, unlike in some games, it really works here. I think that is because the initial scenario is plausible, credible and easy to imagine. It's madcap nonsense and all the better for it. From the start, and don't even try to pronounce your client's surname, I enjoyed having a nosy around the office, looking out the window and then telling my crew to snap to it with the work. All seemed sane until a meteor crashed through the roof...oh, yes, it's that kind of game. Interacting with your crew is vital in solving this game. They hold items you require and answers that you need. Other characters also pop in, including your client and a rather interesting female secretary. I won't give too much away but you'll encounter the meteor very quickly. From that point on it's one loony encounter after the other. I enjoyed the game. The witch doctor was my favourite encounter en route to completion. This is a tough game, but enjoyable, with enough clues -- some subtle, some less. I came across no bugs or parse errors. A fun outing! 8/10 Recommended.
Pantomine
From: Mike Snyder (wyndo SP@G prowler-pro.com) Review appeared in SPAG #44 -- April 30, 2006 TITLE: Pantomime AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin EMAIL: beaver SP@G zombieworld.com DATE: March 31, 2006 PARSER: Hugo SUPPORTS: Any Hugo Interpreter or GLK Hugo AVAILABILITY: Freeware URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/springthing/2006/pmime.hex VERSION: Release 1.00 In the early morning minutes of October 1st, 2005, a list of IFComp entries (at the official IFComp website) showed 50 or so potential games. As titles were knocked off the list (probably because the authors never completed and uploaded them), the list dwindled down to 36. For those of us online at the time, it was an interesting thing to watch. Among those original intents, though, was Robb Sherwin's Pantomime. Now released for Spring Thing 2006, it weighs in on the light side (considering the competition's focus on medium- to long-sized games). As an intended IFComp entry, this makes sense. From chatting with Robb at his Hugo forum, I know that it took much effort and some sleepless nights even to finish for the Spring Thing deadline. Even short and perhaps rushed, Pantomime is a solid game with an entertaining story. In Pantomime, you live on Phobos, currently a moon of Mars, but soon to break apart into an orbiting ring of debris. It's the last place anyone would choose to be, even before the crisis. It's a world where cloning is commonplace, robots named after Unix commands are a man's best friend, and being good at chess is cause for embarrassment. This is a vision of the near future. I've only played the beginning of one or two Robb Sherwin games prior to this. That's probably why my reactions bounced between "whoa. did he really say that?" and "wow. what's it going to be *next*?" Somehow, even if he's holding back, it doesn't *feel* that way. Aside from a few typos - probably the result of the hurried effort to meet the deadline - the writing is great. It flows better because it's more casual. It's not just *how* Sherwin writes - it's also *what* he writes: the insults between characters, the one-off jokes, the clever descriptions and bits of back-story. I usually cringe at coarse passages and lowbrow humor in a game, but that's part of what makes Pantomime so interesting. Sherwin seems to write it in a convincing, honest way. Pantomime is what an episode of Futurama might be, if the script came from Cartoon Network's Williams Street crew and it aired on HBO after hours. The little censor that lives inside Robb Sherwin's mind has a freedom not given most other IF authors, save maybe Adam Thornton. I mean, if a wacked-out robot needs to sport a cloned copy of a male porn star's money-maker, Sherwin will work it into the story. And it'll be *funny*. The game *is* meant to be funny. I think. It's sometimes tongue-in-cheek humor. It's *definitely* black humor, where the absurd and the macabre come together. It might be an allegory for some of today's issues, but if so, I didn't really get that. More likely, it's just a strange but fascinating story. The puzzles aren't difficult (generally just a matter of figuring out what action to take to move things along), and inventory is almost non-existent. antomime is very story-driven. The most difficult bit may have been passing the spiked gate, but even that obstacle yields to some creative but simple reasoning (okay, okay - I solved it by blind luck and experimentation, but it made sense afterwards). Even the second-to-last confrontation doesn't require anything more complicated than following instructions and listening to the bad guy's diatribe. This should be particularly appealing to anyone who prefers IF to be more *fiction* than *game*. A few minor bugs remain in the competition release. They range from typos to an odd exit back to Kangaroo's Club - nothing game-killing. This seems to happen more toward the end. What's most likely to work against Pantomime, though, is that it doesn't seem long enough for a Spring Thing game. It also glosses over the additional detail in most places, when it comes to interacting with (even if only to "look at") scenery objects. Knowing Hugo, I think this could be fixed easily, even without real objects. Just add an "extra_scenery" property to each room, with lists of keywords that will cause a different reference message. It means the difference between something "not there" when it really is, and simply being "unimportant". A few plot points left me confused. Who sent me the vial? What was the purpose of the seemingly unnecessary gate code? And how drunk was Sherwin when he came up with the interaction that helps the PC escape the airlock? Other than that, everything is wrapped up tidily at the end, where a couple of fitting plot twists are thrown in. I enjoyed Pantomime, and I recommend it - especially if an update comes after the competition. Without hints, I finished in two and a half hours (plus some re-play of select earlier bits). It's definitely a game that wouldn't have been out of place in the annual IFComp, but even snack-sized by Spring Thing standards, it's a worthy entry. My Spring Thing score: "7"
Pass The Banana
From: Mike Roberts <mjr_ SP@G hotmail.com> Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000 TITLE: Pass The Banana AUTHOR: Admiral Jota E-MAIL: jota SP@G tiac.net DATE: 1999 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive) URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/banana/banana.z5 VERSION: Release 1 This disturbing study of a descent into madness is at once shocking and sublime. Yes, the symbolism is all here: candles in a dark-paneled room, a stage representing the subconscious mind with its flickering and fragile consciousness surrounded by the dark sea of the subconscious; the empty trophy case juxtaposed with the full junk closet, a devastating portrait of lost hope and failed dreams; a flaming skull alluding to nothing so much as Death caught in an inferno of alienation pervading modern civilization and ultimately consuming it; a monkey, a non-human animal so human in form as to mock our very identity as human, symbolic of our animal needs and the animal lurking, always lurking just beneath the surface of our rational facades; a robot, a machine in human form, the ultimate symbol of our dehumanization at the hands of our own cleverness; the plentiful seating, symbolizing man's inhumanity to his fellow man; and, of course, the banana, so strident in its symbolism that it paradoxically becomes subtle, like an angry couple at the supermarket whose loud, pointless bickering we try to pretend not to see. But even such powerful symbolism would be empty without narrative, of which we find more than we can handle. We pass a banana, tentatively at first, experimenting: to the monkey, perhaps, or to the robot? And what about the flaming head? Soon we build confidence, just as the hero in the prototypical mythological framework gains confidence from early tests, and start passing bananas more aggressively. Before we know it we are in a banana-passing frenzy - bananas everywhere, coming, going, faster than we can keep track of, just as we lose track of things in our daily lives: this banana an overdue bill, this one a friend we've lost touch with, this one the wreckage of a marriage. And then it stops, suddenly, and we find to our shock that we have no more bananas - but, in a bitter indictment of western society's glorification of hoarded wealth, this is how we win: just as the Japanese gardener considers her garden complete only when she has removed everything that she can remove, this game is not complete until we have no more bananas. Other games in this year's competition might have more plot, more puzzles, or more elaborate settings, but none have more bananas. Score: 2 (there's nothing to it, but what's there works)
The Path to Fortune
From: Stephen Granade <sgranade SP@G phy.duke.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #9 -- June 11, 1996 NAME: The Windhall Chronicles I: Path To Fortune PARSER: Inform's usual AUTHOR: Jeff Cassidy and C.E. Forman PLOT: Spacious EMAIL: ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net ATMOSPHERE: Well done AVAILABILITY: Shareware, IF Archive WRITING: Slightly uneven PUZZLES: From enjoyable to illogical SUPPORTS: Inform Ports CHARACTERS: Static DIFFICULTY: Medium+ Path to Fortune (PTF) is the first in the Windhall Chronicles series. In it, you play Aerin, "a simple blacksmith's apprentice, nothing more." However, by a bizarre bit of reasoning on your village's part, you are chosen to save the village from taxation without representation by finding the treasure horde of Kirizith, a huge dragon. The game begins with most of the world available for exploration, and the world is large and complex. There are many places to explore and many puzzles to attempt, which helps if you are stumped by one particular puzzle. It would have been nice had the game not shown its whole hand at the beginning; additional areas which you can explore only after solving a puzzle hold my interest more than being able to visit (almost) everywhere at the beginning. There were only three areas I couldn't visit without solving a puzzle, and all three involved at most two rooms. After enough tromping about Windhall, I was ready for something new to explore. Of course, "enough" is a relative term--as large as Windhall is, it took a long time before I was familiar with it. The open design of PTF weakened its plot somewhat. At times I felt as if I were slogging through endless puzzles, marking time until I could find the dragon. If you ask Denvil the elf about the fish dinner he wants you to supply, he says something to the effect that it is just one of those sub-plots adventurers are always fulfilling. A lot of the game felt like that--sub-plots I had to finish in order to get to the dragon. More direction towards the end goal was needed. The initial puzzles' difficulty range from fairly easy to slightly more difficult. However, as time went on, I found the puzzles becoming more and more illogical, possibly due to my solving the logical ones early on. The puzzle involving a werewolf and ogre locked in battle struck me as completely unmotivated, even after I was helped by someone who had already finished the game. Too often I had to resort to the brute force approach of trying every object out on every other object; I would have much rather reasoned how to solve the puzzles. The main strengths of the game, its size and number of NPCs, are also its main weaknesses. Due to the size of the game and the number of NPCs, it felt as if none of the NPCs were fully realized. The NPCs reacted to a large number of questions, but all were of the "ask xxx about yyy" category. None of the NPCs had a life of their own. Every day Baezil cursed over his unlit stove; every day Mielon and Idah stayed in their house. There are an ogre and werewolf who are fighting to the death, day in and day out, for as long as you are willing to watch. The NPCs could have been improved by having motivations of their own. I enjoyed playing PTF immensely, the above nitpicks notwithstanding. The game is an excellent addition to the growing pantheon of Inform games, and well worth the time spent. I look forward to seeing the next installment in the series.
The Pawn
From: Yuzo Takada a.k.a. Dark Fiber <entropy SP@G mpx.com.au> Review appeared in SPAG #12 -- December 13, 1997 NAME: The Pawn AUTHOR: Magnetic Scrolls DATE: Mid-80's? SUPPORTS: See review of Fish! AVAILABILITY: Commercial (see above) Ahhh, Magnetic Scrolls first illustrated text adventure and, like Infocom's first official game Zork, is just about as famous unless you lived in America in the the late 1980's of course, which is a pity. The story: you have been bushwacked on the way home from shopping at the supermarket and you wake to find yourself in the land of Kerovnia. Things aren't all gold and cheese in the land of Kerovnia though, and you find out why later. The game starts off by not telling you what you are supposed to do, and you only find this out by talking to everyone you meet. The characters you get to meet are a colourful bunch, Jerry Lee Lewis (yes, yes, the one and only), Kronos the Wizard, a horse with no legs, Honest John and a bloody irritable princess. The parser is quite good but has its niggles. Especially in reference to English and some objects. The most noticable bug is the "white" one: you have in your inventory "you are carriny a white" which turns out to be a white light. Kinda dodgy and should have been picked up in bug testing. The puzzles are very crafty and logical. Hands up those of you who got stuck trying to move the boulder!
Perdition's Flames
From: Joe Barlow <jbarlow SP@G ipass.net> Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997 NAME: Perdition's Flames AUTHOR: Michael Roberts DATE: 1993 PARSER: TADS SUPPORTS: TADS ports AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/flames.zip ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/tads/flames_src.zip { This review was previously published in _Intelligent Gamer_, which explains the slightly different format. It is included here with the author's permission. -- MO } A couple of things about this review: please remember that it was written in 1994, before I knew anything about TADS [the Text Adventure Development System], which was used to create the game. I touted a couple of the features in PF as being very unique, such as the ability to dump a transcript of the game to a text file. Of course, that's a standard feature of all TADS games, but I didn't know it at the time. Also, at the time I reviewed it, the game was still commercial. Obviously, the comments about the game's copy-protection and all of the game's "included goodies" don't apply to the freeware version. I am leaving them in the review, however, because the final rating the game received was due in part to its extensive Infocom-like packaging. Even without it, though, this game is well worth a look, especially for FREE! "I'm too young to die...." It has been said that man's greatest journey is the one he makes at death, and with good reason. People have always been fascinated by what lies beyond our "mortal" world, and the book and film market have been quick to capitalize on this interest. Even the computer gaming industry has explored the concept, much to the delight and surprise of many gamers. More than one recent game has allowed players to explore the afterlife, including Sierra's King's Quest 6: Heir Today Gone Tomorrow, which offered would-be adventurers the chance to see the Realm of the Dead, complete with eerie background music and frightening graphics. Now, California-based software publisher High Energy has taken a look at the afterlife (with tongue firmly in-cheek,) and death will never be the same again. Let's face it: any game which opens with the message "*** You have died ***" can't be all bad! Quite the contrary, in fact: Perdition's Flames is a marvelous adventure game, and the best way I've yet found to explore Hell without leaving the comfort of my own home. As the game begins, the player's soul is drifting down a river on a yacht, along with several other newly deceased people. The player is free to wander around the ship, have a few drinks at the bar, chat with the crew, or just enjoy the scenery. This opening sequence is a fantastic way of familiarizing yourself with the "feel" of the game. Wander around and enjoy the atmosphere. Get used to being dead. You'll find out that it's not terribly different from the life you're used to. (Hmmmm. I wonder if that's significant.) After a short while, the ship will arrive at a dock leading to the Hell mainland. Once you leave the ship, you'll find yourself in the merry land of Hell, which is quite a bit different than most of us have been led to believe. If the player wishes, he or she may attend a welcoming seminar, during which various other new arrivals will ask some hilarious "newbie" questions, and receive answers from the Hell Welcoming Committee. From the seminar, the player learns that Hell has decided to update its image. Gone is the "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter" sign that used to hang atop the main gate. Gone is the eternity of damnation and suffering that every church preacher in the history of the world has shouted and sweated about in his sermons. Now, Hell is just like any other nice place to live, with shopping malls, suburbs, and a Department of Motor Vehicles. (Somehow, we all knew that Hell would have one of these, didn't we?) What if a soul is uncomfortable in Hell? No problem! People are able to freely go back and forth between Heaven and Hell, staying as long as they like in either place. Transportation to and from Heaven is accomplished via an enormous elevator in the middle of town, provided one has a ticket. Just think of it as Sim-Hell... Perdition's Flames (PF) features incredibly detailed descriptions of rooms and objects. Its text-only interface recalls the greatness of Infocom (a software publisher from the late 1970s-late 1980s who wrote many text- only adventure games), without resorting to some of the shortcomings that were typical of even this mighty software giant. For starters, PF is "100% Certified Maze-Free!" For folks like me who still occasionally wake up screaming in the middle of the night because of Zork III's Royal Puzzle, this is a heaven-sent (no pun intended) gift. True questers will also be relieved to learn that it's quite impossible to get yourself in a position from which it's no longer possible to win. This was my only real gripe with Infocom's games: all too often, if you didn't do something trivial way back at the beginning of the game, you were unable to solve a puzzle much later in your quest. (The cheese sandwich puzzle from Hitchhiker's Guide comes to mind.) Hell on Wheels Moving around Hell is easy: the player simply types in which way he or she wants to go: "Go north," for example. More complicated sentences are also allowed: the player may type something along the lines of "Go north. Open the door then take the shiny gold coin." Players can keep track of the items they are carrying with the standard "inventory" command. One of the more unique features PF has that many other games do not is the ability to dump a transcript of the game in progress to a text file. Infocom's classics allowed transcripts to be dumped to a printer, so the tradeoff is a fair one. Even some of Infocom's more obscure commands like VERBOSE (turn on long descrip- tions) are present (and welcome) in PF. All in all, this game is something I wouldn't be surprised to find on a hypothetical Lost Treasures of Infocom Volume 3. Is it hot in here, or is it just me? What makes PF stand out above the countless other text games currently on the market is its wonderful sense of humor. The game makes some truly awful puns, pokes fun at everyone's notion of what Hell is "supposed" to be, and generally keeps you looking forward to coming back to Hell every time you have to leave the computer. If the player should find a pitchfork in a barn, for example, the game mocks: "Now if you only had horns and a tail, you'd own this place!" During your welcoming seminar, the player discovers that it is unwise to try and sue anyone in Hell because the Hell Judicial System is based on the one in the United States, and it will take an eternity (literally) for cases to come to trial. And hearing the woman in front of you answer questions in the Celestial Security Office will make you laugh out loud, in the style of Douglas Adams' Bureaucracy. PF was written using TADS (Text Adventure Development System), a programming tool also published by High Energy. TADS allows users to write games that are of Infocom quality, and, if PF is any indication, they ain't just whistling "Dixie" with this claim. "I may be going to Hell in a bucket, baby... but at least I'm enjoying the ride." - Grateful Dead PF's elaborate packaging is another way in which the folks at High Energy software have summoned the ghosts of Infocom. PF comes with a handsome map, a detailed, well-written manual, a hint book, a reference card, and "The Official Tourist Guide to Hell," an illustrated, side-splitting pamphlet that contains the game's copy-protection, in addition to many amusing items of interest. Let's talk about the quality of the game's prose. Although comparisons with Infocom are unavoidable when reviewing text adventures, the prose of PF is elegant, often funny and immensely enjoyable, equaling (and in some cases, even surpassing) many of Infocom's works. (It easily beats out the Zork trilogy, for instance, and is on par with Deadline or even A Mind Forever Voyaging in terms of the quality, if not intensity, of its writing.) I loved the non-linear nature of the game. Although by neccessity certain puzzles have to be solved before other puzzles can be reached, the game is tremendously flexible. You truly feel like you are PLAYING the game, rather than being sent to Location A to get Object B to take to Location C to exchange it for Object D, etc. (Indeed, this free-style type of play is neccessary, since the game's goal is not revealed to you until quite late in the adventure.) Finally, I enjoyed the difficult *BUT STILL LOGICAL* nature of many of the puzzles. While many Infocom games had brain-twisting challenges, the solutions were occasionally not very logical at all (I'm thinking particularly of the two Douglas Adams games here). There are two great head-scratchers that particularly stand out in Perdition's Flames: the Haunted House/Ring puzzle and the Lion-Headed Statue puzzle. These are two of the best puzzles I have ever seen in ANY interactive-fiction game, in both implementation and originality. Both of these obstacles were *very* difficult to solve, but in the end the solutions made sense, and I felt a sense of accomplishment after conquering them. System requirements for the game are tough to reveal: the review copy INTELLIGENT GAMER received from Michael Roberts (the author of the game) didn't list them, but they seem to be just about as minimal as you could expect. The program uses a swap file to run on machines with small amounts of memory, and a hard drive is recommended. The program ran equally well on my 286/12 and my 486/50. RATING: 9.5 out of 10. Perdition's Flames is an incredibly entertaining game with an original premise, and would be a bargain at twice the price. Fans of text adventure games will not want to miss this one. If, however, you don't think you'll be able to see past its lack of graphics, you should probably look elsewhere.
Perilous Magic
From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G pangea.ca> Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000 NAME: Perilous Magic AUTHOR: David Fillmore EMAIL: Noslwop SP@G Hotmail.Com DATE: June, 1999 ???? PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/permagic.z5 3 rooms, 2 characters, 8 tangible objects, and 1 joke; that's all that there is to David Fillmore's 1999 offering Perilous Magic. Perilous Magic is one of a growing number of 'bite-sized' pieces of non-COMP IF that have become quite popular over the last year. 'Bite-sized' IF is interesting in that there's usually one convention that's being pushed or one joke that's being promoted and the games are typically finishable in a few minutes. Often, these smaller games are a nice break away from the bigger pieces out there that can seem more laborious than fun to finish. Perilous Magic takes place in the Zork/Enchanter universe and is entirely built around a historical reference from the accompanying material in the Infocom game Enchanter. The game actually reminded me a bit of the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the story of Hamlet is told from the confused perspective of the aforementioned bit players. With Perilous Magic, we look at a bit of Zorkian history -- specifically the misuse of a spell resulting in disaster -- through the eyes of the person who caused the disaster. The puzzles are straight forward and the goal easy to attain. The end result is amusing but alas, even for 'bite-sized' IF, the game is a little too sparse with many interesting options left untouched. Most of the problems revolve around not putting enough effort into coding objects. As I'd mentioned previously, there are roughly 8 tangible objects in this game. 2 of these objects are Enchanter-like spell scrolls that are implemented using Graham Nelson's source code for Balances. One of the spells is a stand-alone spell that can't be cast on anything while the other spell can be cast on objects and people with interesting effects. You can imagine my chagrin then, when I started getting the dreaded non-default response, 'The spell fades and fizzles' when I cast the spell on objects that were part of the game's scenery. Considering the scope of Perilous Magic, it left me wondering whether it would really have taken much more energy to implement a few creative results. There were similar problems with the game producing too many default messages for actions that should have had less than ordinary responses. This was especially true in areas where I felt a good snarky comeback would have been easy to come up with. I realize it's tough to come up with good non-default responses for everything, but we're not talking about a game the size of Jigsaw here. We're talking about 8 objects, and 1 NPC. Spells should never fade and fizzle in this universe and towering stacks of paper, precariously positioned on the corner of your desk should not be hardly movable when pushed. I know a few of you readers are probably asking why I'm being so tough on Perilous Magic for its poorly 'padded' objects when it was obviously intended to be nothing more than a small diversion and considering the fact that a lot of smaller games are conceived of, programmed, and released all in the span of an hour or two, and in those cases polish isn't particularly important (take Speed IF for example). Well consider this oddity: If you download the latest version of Perilous Magic, you'll find that you've download version 10 (yes, 10) of the game. How is it a game the size of Perilous Magic has been updated 10 times while larger games like The Mulldoon Legacy and Enemies only need 3 or 4 releases? The point is that after 10 updates of a 3-room game, I expect to see non-defaults for every action I can think of let alone the obvious ones. If I try to squeeze my desk, jump over my co-worker, or kiss my report something interesting had better happen in every instance! Hmmm... that's going a little overboard (well actually more than a little...), but I think you catch my drift. Non-default problems aside, Fillmore seems to have promise as an author because of his good sense of humor. In fact, Perilous Magic's INFO section (much like in his '99 IFCOMP release) is as memorable as the game because of it. Fillmore also seems to grasp the basics of programming Inform well enough and even pulls a few neat tricks straight out of the Inform manual including a little Microsoft Windows sound that goes off when you get points (at least I heard them using Winfrotz). Still, quirky sounds, a good INFO section, and flashy quotes can't disguise the fact that their isn't much flesh on this skeleton and it all left me wondering what might have been had Fillmore focused his attention more on the game and less on the bells and whistles. When you reference your IF heavily to the Zork/Enchanter series there will always be comparisons drawn. The question is then, does Perilous Magic successfully qualify as a new chapter in the wonderful Zork/Enchanter anthology (like perhaps Nate Cull's game Frobozz Magic Support)? Nah, it's more like an extension to an existing footnote, but probably still worth the download if you have five minutes to kill. From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net> Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000 How great an influence do the games of Infocom still have on today's IF? Hard to say, but there must be some presence there if an offhand remark in one of Infocom's manuals can turn into a game in its own right, as is the case with David Fillmore's Perilous Magic. The joke in question was a reference to a great fire--which, the manual said, was caused by some bureaucrat meaning to cast the ZEMDOR spell ("turn original into triplicate") but slipping up and casting the ZIMBOR spell ("turn one really big city into lots of tiny, little ashes"). It's a cute joke, and as long as you know the source, Perilous Magic is a cute game. There isn't a lot more to it than that: you end up causing the spell switch, and the whole thing's over in 15 moves. It's not flawless--it's possible to render the main puzzle unsolvable by doing things in the wrong order-- but there's not much wrong with it, either. The main appeal of the game is in the humor: there are Infocom references sprinkled here and there, and the wonder-what-happens-if-I-try-this results are suitably amusing. There isn't really enough here to call this a full-blown homage, but it's enough to capture the feel. Perilous Magic is a short but reasonably entertaining effort that suggests that IF authors and players have ridiculously good memories for throwaway jokes in manuals published in 1984. As a game, it's nothing special, but it's not a bad way to spend five minutes.
Persistence of Memory
From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999 NAME: Persistence of Memory AUTHOR: Jason Dyer E-MAIL: jdyer SP@G u.arizona.edu DATE: 1998 PARSER: Hugo SUPPORTS: Hugo interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive) URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/hugo/memory VERSION: Release 1.0 I can count the amount of works of IF set in wartime--that I know of, at least--on one hand, and I wouldn't even need all of that hand. There have been spy-thrillers that drew on Cold War assumptions, but Once and Future is the only work to be set even partly on a battlefield, other than Persistence of Memory. It's not obvious why; after all, latter-day IF authors appear to be fond of grim, bizarre, chaotic situations, and not many things fit that description better than war. Persistence of Memory is an interesting spin on war IF, though an extremely brief one, as well as yet another in a large collection of one-location games in the 1998 competition. The premise: you're a soldier in a nameless war against a nameless enemy, stuck in a field with one leg on a land mine, with a malfunctioning radio. Unlike some other one-location games, the puzzles are not available at the outset for you to find; rather, they come to you, one by one, and you have a limited time to deal with each one. The experience is consequently rather limiting; the game attempts to make you feel powerless, and it does that quite well, with the exception of one puzzle solution that breaks the "powerless" feel somewhat (though there's a good reason for it). Among the obvious ironies of the game is that the protagonist is forced to depend on the inhabitants of the country he has been happily destroying, but the game doesn't do as much as it might have with that idea. Indeed, it's hard to say what Persistence of Memory is about, other than the superficial plot. If your encounters with the natives are supposed to be cathartic, or cause you to Rethink This Whole War Thing, the text provides only oblique hints to that effect. One message is that failure to communicate causes waste and destruction, a point well made, but is that the point of the story? It's hard to tell. Perhaps it's merely that certain experiences humanize an otherwise faceless enemy--not all that groundbreaking an idea, but then again just about any thoughts on war in the IF medium are new, as noted. Whatever the underlying message, the story works well; the game changes your motivations and thoughts effectively over its course, from "getting off this land mine" to more complex goals not necessarily centered on survival. Or, alternately, one could view your motivations as still focused on personal survival even as you realize the consequences of war upon the villagers, and your internal conflicts are a product of your guilt. Persistence of Memory is susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations; it is to the author's credit that he doesn't fill in many of the blanks. The scene is vividly described: one particularly well-done aspect involves the various physical discomforts you encounter over the course of the day, stuck in your awkward position, developing cramps and soreness and becoming more and more thirsty. (On the other hand, the game doesn't make as much as it might of your psychological discomfort.) The puzzles themselves aren't particularly hard; most of the solutions are fairly obvious. There are no multiple solutions. Indeed, it is almost impossible to deviate at all from the main narrative path and still complete the game, meaning that there is no replayability here. That's not a major drawback, given the nature of the story--the goal is less to challenge the player than to present some ideas--but the small size of the game makes it likely that, just when the player is settling into the character and the setting, the game ends, and there really isn't much incentive to go back and try again. (The message of this game and of Photopia, for me at least: if you want us to care about characters, make us spend significant amounts of time with them.) To the extent this game works, then, it does as thought experiment or as a statement about the nature of war; no one should play it for the puzzles. That's not, of course, a bad thing. But, as with Photopia, it isn't entirely clear that this story _needed_ to be set in the IF medium to be effective; this one has somewhat more claim to interactivity than does Photopia, since there _are_ problems to solve, but it does lay a rather linear path. The one-room aspect reinforces that; more so than in the other '98 one-room entries, the premise is a limitation, a confinement, and you the player do actually feel confined. That sense of limitation pervades the game and constrains the available experience considerably. The Hugo game engine is up to the task, though the task, technically, isn't all that much. The game does handle one action not easily translated into IF-speak quite well, though, accepting a wide variety of syntaxes and synonyms. Moreover, the WAIT command is altered for the occasion: time passes until something of note happens, rather than 1 or 3 or 10 turns. This proves very handy, though the player might find the game unspeakably boring if he or she does not realize that the action comes to the character, rather than the character producing the action. This and other functions are handled quite well; the hint system is minimally necessary but thorough nonetheless. Persistence of Memory does, I think, what it was trying to do: it's a short piece of IF set in wartime that raises complex questions of a soldier's personal responsibility and the needless loss wrought by war. It does all that reasonably well, enough so to merit a 7; it doesn't, unfortunately, work quite as well as a game. From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999 NOTE: Because of the nature of Persistence of Memory, it's difficult to talk about it without revealing a key secret. Therefore, be warned that any and all of the following review could be considered a spoiler. Memory is a new twist on the one-room game. The setting is war; could be Korea, could be Vietnam, but it's never really specified, and it doesn't really matter. It's a war in a foreign land, with villages, dense foliage, helicopters, rifles, and land mines. Especially land mines. In the first move of the game, you step on one, and realize that if you remove your weight from it, it will explode. Thus the potential paths which the game appears to have at its outset are reduced to one: wait. This restriction of freedom is a recurring theme in Memory. In incident after incident, the scope of action contracts until it becomes clear that there is only one action which will lead to your survival. Sometimes these actions are rather horrifying, but the game demands them if you wish to finish. I have mixed feelings about this kind of forcible plotting. On the one hand, it makes for an extremely linear game, and it curtails interactivity quite dramatically. This obstruction seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom about IF -- it violates one of the Players' Rights in Graham Nelson's Craft of Adventure: "To have reasonable freedom of action." In Nelson's words, "After a while the player begins to feel that the designer has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him." On the other hand, I also think that interactive fiction can be a very good medium for conveying a sense of futility or entrapment. Because IF by its nature seems to require at least to a certain degree freedom of movement and action, and because it also creates a sense of immersion in the story's world, when a piece of IF chooses to violate that perceived requirement the player's sense of identification with the trapped character can be very strong indeed. Something about the frustration of having so few actions available to me which would not result in death made the equation of my situation with the character's feel more intense than it would have were I just reading a story about this character. Because of the game's premise, you don't seek out the puzzles; the puzzles come to you. And each puzzle must be solved if the character is to survive. Luckily, all of the puzzles make sense and have intuitive solutions, though in some of them it's not clear what the deadly moment is until it arrives, and sometimes I found myself resorting to a save-and-restore strategy in order to defeat a puzzle's time limit. I don't think I could have solved the game straight through, because some puzzles had rather unexpected and uncomfortable solutions. This is where I found myself ill at ease with the game's lack of interactivity -- there's a fine line between identifying with a trapped character versus simply feeling trapped into an action because the designer allows you no other choice, even though more options might have been available in reality. It's hard to explain without revealing more spoilers than I already have, but some pieces of the plot felt rather forced, as though only one solution was provided because only that solution would create the game scenario desired by the designer. However, the choices worked in the end, and I found I only needed to look at the hints once, and in retrospect I think I probably could have avoided that had I spent more time on the puzzle that was stumping me. The writing could get a little histrionic at times. Some descriptions tiptoed along the line between what works and what doesn't. For example, the mud around your feet is described as "torpid", a word which usually refers to a sluggish mental state. I suppose the mud's thickness and viscosity could be compared to slow mental processes, but it's a stretch. There weren't too many moments like this -- for the most part the prose did a fine job of conveying the situation, and in fact sometimes was quite good indeed. The description of the hairs rising on the back of your neck as you try to conceal yourself from enemy soldiers was chilling and engrossing. I found no technical errors in the writing, nor in the code. Overall, Memory does a very good job with an unusual choice of subject matter, and when it was over I felt not triumph, but relief. I suspect this is what the game intended. Rating: 8.3
Phantom: Caverns of the Killer
From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru> Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006 NAME: Phantom: caverns of the killer AUTHOR: Brandon Coker EMAIL: grimslade1135 SP@G yahoo.com DATE: 2005 PARSER: Inform AVAILABILITY: Freeware URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/zcode/ phantom/Phantom.z5 An example of an unsuccessful attempt at the genre. You play an archeologist trying to find the burial place of a legendary Egyptian warrior. Most of the game, you just wander around, collecting artifacts for non-obvious purposes. I expected them to become more clear later, but in vain -- said artifacts didn't affect the outcome of the story in any way, only reflecting themselves in the number of points I received. Although the author demonstrated intentions to inject atmosphere into his work, and to sorta build up tension towards the finale, the results turned out to be pretty pathetic. To a no small degree, this was the fault of the writing, and the many spelling mistakes. Phantom failed entirely as a representative of the horror genre, and hardly won any points back even as a puzzlefest. Most of its puzzles could be subdivided into two categories: (fairly generic) mazes (there were three of them), and "choose the right option or die". It seems the author invested a lot of work into making up intricate clues for the second ones, and believed them to be fairly challenging. However, he overlooked the fact they could be solved by brute force (pick option -- die -- undo -- pick another option -- repeat until solved). I don't want to offend anybody, but, speaking in F1 terms, this is the Minardi of our today's race. SNATS (Score Not Affecting The Scoreboard): PLOT: Generic (0.5) ATMOSPHERE: The author did his best to maintain it, but failed (0.5) WRITING: Clumsy and full of spelling mistakes (0.3) GAMEPLAY: Pointless treasure hunt (0.6) BONUSES: None I could think of (0.0) TOTAL: 1.9 CHARACTERS: None PUZZLES: Rather unoriginal (0.2) DIFFICULTY: Nearly trivial (3 out of 10) COMP SCORE: 3 COMMENTS: OK, I encountered a few games (even) worse than Phantom, and thus had to set it off a bit. Besides, the author's intentions clearly were good, his work didn't take too much of my time, and wasn't meant to annoy me -- all that was worth an incentive in the form of an additional point. Wasn't it.
Phlegm
From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net> Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997 NAME: Phlegm AUTHOR: Jason Dyer EMAIL: jdyer SP@G u.arizona.edu DATE: October 1996 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Inform Ports AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/phlegm VERSION: Version 1.0 Ever wanted to see "Space Aliens Laughed at My Cardigan" on the Z-machine? Here it is. Enjoy. The scary part is that the author seems to know what he (she? it? none of the above?) is doing -- the writing is for the most part gramatically correct and game is not as buggy as "Cardigan," with the exception of some screwed-up directions and incomplete direction lists, which almost appear to be intentional. It's every bit as incongruous as the great Andre M. Boyle's work, though. One minute you're in Ancient Mayan Ruins, the next at the End of the World. Add a series of blatant, gratuitous rip-offs (the needle in the haystack from "Nord and Bert," the llama food and Restaurant at the End of the Universe from Douglas Adams' works) that don't fit in at all, and some thoroughly motivationless, illogical puzzles -- I'm guessing that NO ONE figured out how to use Leo the lemming to scare away the moose worshippers, right? -- and you've got a great contender for absolute rock-bottom last place. Perhaps "Phlegm" was intended as a satire of the likes of "Cardigan" and "Detective"? If so, it ultimately fails because there is no discernable difference between the parody and the parodied. Good for a number of cheap laughs (particularly Leo), but unlike "Kissing the Buddha's Feet," few of them are genuine. The title itself is also misleading - I found no phlegm anywhere in the game. The author must have forseen all these problems. His/her/its/whatever's name is left off the credits. Wise choice, friend.
Photograph
From: Suzanne Britton <tril SP@G igs.net> Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003 TITLE: Photograph AUTHOR: Steve Evans EMAIL: trout SP@G netspace.net.au DATE: September 2002 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters AVAILABILITY: IF Archive URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/photo/photo.z5 VERSION: Release 1 "Photograph" is a vivid, professionally well-written and competently programmed work. It is story-based and nearly puzzleless, but manages to carry the player through the plot at a comfortable pace, without dissolving into the tedium that sometimes characterizes pure-story IF. There are things to do, problems to solve, and each project serves to drive the plot. Occasionally, though, the prodding feels a little too blatant, as if the player is being bounced from point to point (need to eat, need to sleep, etc.) with bits of story in between. "Photograph" is a rather dark character study, reminding one of "Rameses" from two years ago. It is the story of a man who fixates on a single "wrong turn" in his past, only to find, in the end, that the hollowness within him runs deeper than he knew. What most raises "Photograph" above the ordinary is the rich symbolism with which it embellishes this tale, particularly the use of Egyptian mythology. It skates the thin line between over-blatant and over-obscure, occasionally erring towards the former, but usually just right. One is left with a host of questions and intriguing ideas, especially regarding the parallel between the Akhnaten dream and the fate of the protagonist (a parallel reinforced throughout the story by subtle and not-so-subtle means). Akhnaten stands on the shore, awaiting the boat which will take him to the afterlife. Belatedly, he wonders if it was wise to reject the Egyptian pantheon in favor of Aten. But then he reaches under his robe and finds a cavity where his heart should be. This "doesn't auger well for [his] meeting with Osiris (the weigher of hearts).". Consider the protagonist, who also made a decision that he later regretted, and blamed that decision for the hollowness that grew within him. Yet when he gets a chance to go back and take the other branch of the fork, the epilogue describes a man who dies just as lost, just as empty. Akhnaten worried that his choice of deities might bar him from the afterlife, only to find in himself a deficiency so severe--a hollow heart--as to render the question moot. Perhaps Jack's deficiency is also pre-existing. This is but one of many lines of thought to follow. Another would explore the symbolism of the picture frame. Is it, as the final lines suggest, a shriveled organ, waiting in a jar for the boat of Ra? Was Jack's mistake in fixating on this frame--this single deciding moment in his life--to the exclusion of all else, much as Akhnaten threw away the richness of the Egyptian pantheon in favor of his pet god, Aten? But on the other path, Jack makes the same mistake of fixation: he gets swallowed up in his work. Whichever way you approach it, "Photograph" is irredeemably fatalistic. The protagonist seemed doomed from the beginning, by his own nature, to lose himself. I can't agree with such fatalism; nevertheless, the work is too rich and thought-provoking not to love.
Photopia
From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999 NAME: Photopia AUTHOR: Adam Cadre E-MAIL: adamc SP@G duke.edu, grignr SP@G retina.net DATE: 1998 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive) URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/photopia.z5 VERSION: Version B If there was a prize for "competition game most mentioned on the newsgroups before the deadline had passed," Photopia would win hands down. Everyone was quite courteous about it, spoiler warnings and rot13 and all that, but there was a marked impatience to talk about this game, recommend it to other people, make it the test case in any number of arguments. There is a reason behind this impatience: Photopia is an amazing piece of work. It's also very hard to talk about without giving spoilers away, so please forgive me if I'm a little vague in my language. One of the most brilliant aspects of the game is its plotting. It has what Adam Cadre, in an unrelated discussion, called a Priest plot, named for writer Christopher Priest. I don't know if this is a term that Adam just made up, but it's a useful term nonetheless. It refers to a plot which just gives you fragments, seemingly unrelated to each other, which coalesce at (or towards) the end of the story. When the fragments come together, and you figure out how they relate to one another, the result can often be surprising or revelatory. When they came together in Photopia, I found the revelation quite devastating. I won't say too much more about this, except to say that it wasn't until the end of Photopia that I realized what a truly incredible, powerful story it is. It's the kind of thing where when you've played it all the way through once, you can then replay it and all the pieces fall into place, everything interlocking from the beginning in a way you can't understand until the end. I think that this is the game that opens new frontiers of replayability in interactive fiction -- I needed to play through Photopia twice in order to see all the text again, knowing what I knew after the end of the game. Actually, I hesitate to call Photopia a game, but not because it failed to live up to a standard of interactivity. It's just so patently clear that Photopia is not interested in puzzles, or score, or some battle of wits between author and player. Photopia is interested in telling a story, and it succeeds magnificently on this count. Unfortunately this deprives me of the use of the word "game" in describing it -- perhaps I'll just call it a work. In any case, it's a work that anyone who is interested in puzzleless IF should try. At no point was I even close to getting stuck in Photopia, because the obvious action is almost always the right one -- or else there is no right action and fated events occur with heavy inevitability. Oddly enough, this creates a strange contradiction. I was on ifMUD looking for a word to describe the plot of this work (I couldn't think of the phrase "Priest plot") and someone said, jokingly, "linear." But actually, that's true. Despite the fact that it's completely fragmented, and despite the fact that it jumps around in time, space, and perspective, Photopia is a linear composition. There's only one way to go through it, and the player has little or no power to make it deviate from its predestined course. I think the reason that this didn't bother me, that in fact I *liked* it, is precisely because Photopia isn't a game. Because it is a story, the emphasis is taken away from a teleological model, where the player tries to steer for the best outcome. Instead, you're really just along for the ride, and the ride is one not to be missed. Now, this is not to say that Photopia may as well have been a short story rather than interactive fiction. In fact, it takes advantage of the capabilities of the medium in some very inventive and almost unprecedented ways. One of the foremost of these is its use of color -- each section of the game (oops, there's that word again. Make that "the work") is presented in a preset color, and these colors also play a part in the Priest plot. I understood their function by the end of the piece, and once I understood, I knew exactly why they were there and how much they enhanced the storytelling. Unfortunately I found the colored text a little hard to read at times, especially the darker colors on a black background, but I wouldn't go back and play it in blue and white. The colors, like everything else in Photopia, worked beautifully, adding artfully to the overall impact of the story. The work is interactive in other important ways as well. In fact, in many aspects Photopia is a metanarrative about the medium of interactive fiction itself. Again, it wasn't until the end of the story that I understood why it *had* to be told as interactive fiction. And again, to explain the reason would be too much of a spoiler. I have so much more I want to talk about with Photopia, but I can't talk about it until you've played it. Go and play it, and then we'll talk. I promise, you'll understand why everyone has been so impatient. You'll understand why I loved it, and why I think it's one of the best pieces of interactive fiction ever to be submitted to the competition. Rating: 9.9 From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999 [Disclaimer: what follows is my own opinion, as always, but it is also distinctly a minority view. For other views on Photopia, the reader is advised to consult Deja News, or alternatively to read Paul O'Brian's review in this issue.] There is no denying that Adam Cadre's Photopia is a well-written, engaging work of fiction. (Well, okay, somebody probably will deny it. But it won't be me.) It tells a powerful story in well-crafted prose heavily seasoned with implicit allusions to other works, notably Russell Banks's "The Sweet Hereafter" (and Atom Egoyan's film thereof), and Carl Sagan's "Contact." (The power of the story, incidentally, derives in part from figuring out its nature and structure, and hence I won't go too much into detail here.) It skillfully uses multiple narrators to tell its tale, and carries themes and images throughout that help give the story life. In short, it's an excellent work of fiction. SPAG reviews works of _interactive_ fiction, however, and the interactivity quotient in Photopia is slight enough that it would arguably work just as well as a short story. Graham Nelson wrote several years ago of linearity in game design, noting that the player comes to feel that "the author has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him," and Photopia suffers in that regard. No one would complain of having the plot shouted at him in a short story; the nature of story-based non-interactive fiction is that the author dictates and the reader absorbs. But the genius of good IF is that the player shapes the development of the story, even if the author has a certain end in mind; choices that the player makes affect the text recited at him in a material way. Admittedly, many games throw in the towel with rudimentary or nonsensical plots that serve as excuses to cobble together puzzles--the victory of the crossword over the narrative, in Graham's terms. Photopia represents the opposite, and less explored, extreme, with no puzzles to speak of--and though there is more to chew on here than past "puzzleless IF" efforts such as "In the End," the result, for me, was just as unsatisfying. It should be noted that the game does not simply ignore idiosyncrasies in the way you play the game; many choices are accounted for. Notably, one choice regarding whether you bring along a certain object or leave it behind is particularly clever and well-written. But the result is that the game achieves precisely the same result-- your "choice" affects the beginning of one paragraph. (The minimal changes in the text highlight the noninteractivity; it's almost as if the author were seeking out ways to keep the player from changing the course of the story. There is an obvious purpose to that in this particular work, but it puts a major crimp in the interactive aspect.) The difference may seem to boil down to quantity rather than quality--the amount of text that the player's decisions affect--but quantity matters: it can mean the difference between the player feeling like he has actually experienced the events described and feeling like he has watched a lot of text scroll by. Adding to this effect is the sheer amount of stuff that often happens between inputs--or, in other words, the amount and type of unforeseeable events that your actions produce; again, it's as if an existing work of fiction were translated to the IF medium. Photopia's invention of plastic geography--the player in some instances may travel in any direction, but the direction chosen will always lead to a certain location--makes the world seem larger than it is, and while it does that very effectively, it once again lessens the player's impact on the story. Another experiment that the author attempts ends up cutting off the player from the story even more, namely the conversation trees: rather than ASK/TELL, the player types TALK TO [character] and is given a short list of topics (1. TELL PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IRAQ, 2. ASK PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IMPEACHMENT, or 0 to say nothing). This is, of course, a matter of taste, but I found the conversation trees the least successful part of Photopia, because they completely destroy what illusion remains of interactivity. In one sequence, your character explains the basics of solar radiation, planetary accretion, gallium production, and other astrophysical phenomena; it is _very_ hard, unless the player has ample background in astronomy, to avoid the feeling that you are watching a conversation unfold, not participating in it. I don't think it's impossible to give the character more knowledge than the player is likely to have, and then have the player act on that knowledge. But that requires more development of the character than Photopia affords: the player's involvement with the character is so brief that there is no time to warm to the part before the character starts rambling about the inverse square law. It is undeniable that the scene plays an important part in the story; it is also arguable that identifying the explainer of astrophysics as "you" heightens the emotional impact. But that scene and others like it give Photopia the sense that the "interactive" element is only a thin veneer over the "fiction" part. It is possible that more extensive conversation trees, encompassing a broader variety of topics relevant to the conversation might help; perhaps future games will answer the question. Having severely limited conversation topics is not essentially different from ASK/TELL with only a few subjects available, admittedly. But most games that implement ASK/TELL do not put words in the player-character's mouth to the extent that Photopia does, and leaving to the player's imagination how he or she would have phrased a question keeps the admittedly clunky interface from breaking mimesis excessively. In other words, the presumed advantage of conversation trees, that they give the character more natural speech (one question in Photopia spawned by TALK TO is ASK ALLEY ABOUT HOW I SOUND LIKE HER DAD, which no parser could handle, rather than something like ASK ALLEY ABOUT DAD), assumes that the player actually imagines the character grunting out curt questions. But it ain't necessarily so; it certainly ain't for me. Finally, though Photopia in many ways does what it does brilliantly, it doesn't do it for very long; one has to be a very, very slow reader to play a game this short from beginning to end longer than 20 or 25 minutes. Of course, the player can replay, but he or she will shortly discover that, as noted, the course of the story alters hardly a whit, no matter what the player does. This is, of course, a personal reaction: I can hardly say categorically that the brevity of Photopia waters down the emotional force when the game clearly had considerable emotional impact on many. (On the other hand, the two other people I have prompted to play it were likewise underwhelmed--and I did not tell them my own thoughts on the game until afterwards.) It is possible that the story's major twist would be more effective if there were more preceding it, more time for the player to get to know the characters. (I also thought the game overplayed its emotional hand a bit--exaggerated a certain character's traits--but that can be, and has been, argued.) Technically, Photopia is outstanding--the abovementioned textual changes, even if brief, are woven in seamlessly to preserve the story. A variety of changes in text color didn't work for me when I tried the colored version on WinFrotz, but clearly the colors worked fine for others. The conversation trees, whatever their merits, work just as they are supposed to; the experiment with plastic geography works brilliantly from a technical standpoint. Many other small things indicate that the game was exhaustively coded, never a bad thing--for example, examining a certain NPC while playing different roles yields a variety of perspectives. There are many other little things that are done well--transitions between scenes are particularly well done; the first sentence of each section of the story recalls the last sentence of the previous one, often in illuminating ways. But Photopia stands or falls on the player's reaction to the story, and my reaction, for whatever reason, was tepid enough that I gave it a 7 in the competition. From: Brian Blackwell <blackers SP@G netscape.net> Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999 Few works of IF have caused as much of a stir as Adam Cadre's 'Photopia', the winning entry in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition. It is certainly vastly different from Cadre's last creation, the raunchy comedy I-0. It is a short, puzzleless, literary work which packs a powerful emotional punch, despite some shortcomings. The primary interest in Photopia is its structure - it makes the fairly simplistic plot seem much more complex than it actually is. The game jumps back and forth through the chronology of the storyline, leaving the player to mentally piece together these 'vignettes'. The different scenes are linked by different colours - red, green, blue, and so on. These transitional passages provide some truly magical moments. The very first scene in the game involves a pair of drunken 'fratboys' (an Americanism, I assume) and a car. Following this scene, we are immediately thrust onto Mars, taking control of 'Wendy Mackaye, first girl on the red planet'. This dramatic juxtaposition is confusing at first, but ultimately makes sense in the scheme of things (I won't spoil it for those who haven't played it yet). The story revolves around Alley, a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth sweetie with an extremely precocious grasp of astro-physics. The player, throughout the game, plays the roles of various characters in the story - including her mother, father, a young girl whom she is babysitting, and a smitten teenage boy - but never Alley herself. The wide variety of angles from which we see Alley partially makes up for the fact that she is a relatively one-dimensional character. Beguiling, yes, but perhaps not as believeable as she could be. And the astro-physics? In an conversation with her father, the young Alley - a toddler at this stage - is given an impromptu (and very lengthy) lecture in 'inverse square law' and 'gallium production'. All very impressive, but a little over-the-top. These points, however, still don't dull the sheer emotional impact when you realise how the story ends. And because of the work's ingenious structure, this realisation actually comes around the middle of the game - and of course this will vary from player to player. The clever part about this design is that the game still continues even when it's obvious what the eventual outcome is. Ironically, structure is also the game's main downfall. The player has no real control over the story at all. This is not a problem in itself; in fact, all interactive fiction relies on the 'pick a card' principle - that inevitably the player will choose the author's path, with the number of choices available giving the illusion of 'interactivity'. It's hard to explain why this didn't completely work for me in Photopia, but I could never escape the feeling that I was merely a passenger on the ride. It is not really interactive fiction in the traditional sense, but I must say that this does not alter the effectiveness of Photopia as a *work*. It may seem like I've been terribly harsh on this one, but when a work of IF has been hailed as 'literature' by the rec.arts.int-fiction crowd, it's only fair that it's judged on a similar level. And, at the end of the day, I enjoyed this immensely. It's certainly one of the most groundbreaking works to have appeared in ages, and will generate vigorous debate for some time to come. From: David Ledgard <dledgard SP@G hotmail.com> Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999 I personally wouldn't have given this game first place. This isn't sour grapes, having entered a game of my own, but due to the fact that the game never really grabbed me. The first scene doesn't have any puzzles at all, although the multi choice conversation thing was clever, the usual way you never know what NPC's are going to understand. The second scene has a simple puzzle of find an item, and bring it back to a location. Although it had a clever thing where by which ever direction you went, the next location was created there, I'm not sure how this was programmed, but I imagine it could be quite complicated. A lot of people probably missed this entirely. The third scene, had restrictions on movement that really got my goat, saying you don't have a compass, so can't use the compass directions. This is where my patience ended, and I gave up, the game being too fiddly to play. The rest might have been really good, but I will never know. The narrative to puzzles ratio seemed very large, i.e. too much text, and too few puzzles.
Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza
From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998 NAME: Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza AUTHOR: Michael Zey E-MAIL: zeyguy SP@G aol.com DATE: 1997 PARSER: Inform standard SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive) URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/pizza/pizza.z5 VERSION: Release 1 PLOT: Cliched but sometimes funny (1.2) ATMOSPHERE: Nope (0.8) WRITING: Not bad, but nothing special (1.1) GAMEPLAY: Uneven (1.0) CHARACTERS: Cardboard (0.8) PUZZLES: Some very clever (1.3) MISC: Problems, but still fun (1.1) OVERALL: 5.2 And sometimes, well, the game just matches the title perfectly. The tone of Phred Phontious is relentlessly silly, so much so that several of the puzzles are quite difficult because they require offbeat thinking rather than simple logic. Though the premise is far from original, and though there are plenty of flaws, there is still plenty to enjoy here -- if you don't mind some dreadful puns. The setting is fantasy, sort of, but more joke-fantasy than Tolkien-fantasy; this is the sort of fantasy that allows for things like photographs and coffee and chainsaws. The plot is typical of fantasy, though, even though it's a joke here -- you have to hunt down the ingredients to a pizza, and deliver it safely. Along the way, you encounter a dragon and a vampire -- along with a gnu and a crazed dentist, of course. The layout is sufficiently unencumbered by sense that all sorts of things can sit side by side, such as a spice mine (why not?), a dragon's lair, a haunted cemetery and a travel agency. Obviously, Phred Phontious is not trying particularly hard to convey the scene or draw you into the world it describes; the player may safely register the given stock situation, figure out the twist, and never bother to try to visualize anything. The result is, while enjoyable for a while, oddly forgettable; I found that I could hardly recall the details of the game just hours after playing it. (The silly place names -- Thikk Forest, Idubeleevinspukes Cemetery, etc. -- don't help.) Implementation-wise, Phred Phontious needs work. One significant object is hidden in a scenery object that barely gets mentioned, another important object is never mentioned at all, an enemy notices your hiding place under one set of circumstances but not another -- though it would be just as easy to spot you -- and another fellow goes on addressing you or preventing you from doing things even after he falls asleep. Other objects act _very_ illogically -- a rope in this game has some unexpected properties, and another object embedded in scenery must be dislodged by an action that I never would have guessed. At another point, you find yourself in a hole and are told that "it looks uncertain whether you'll ever make it out." Is the challenge to find some creative means of getting out? No -- just finding the right syntax. There are other things, illogical bits that didn't slow down gameplay but still left me wondering -- for instance, the character brandishing a key next to a locked cage, except that the key doesn't unlock the cage -- the cage is irrelevant to the game -- but rather a gate far far away. There is a bottleneck right at the start of the game -- you have to discover a hidden closet, but the game gives no hint that it's there. Elsewhere, you have a few turns to search certain scenery and get an object; if you don't find it then, the game closes off. Even amid gameplay problems, though, there are some memorable moments -- and even if the setting is clumsy more often than not, the author does manage to send up fantasy conventions in amusing fashion now and again. Two puzzles hinge on dreadful puns -- I, personally, enjoyed them, but then again I have a weakness for these things, and I don't advise that the author do this in the future. The way you get rid of the dragon is reasonably creative, and the gnu-milk puzzle -- the first part of it -- is clever, even if distasteful. And the endgame is quite rewarding, though made more difficult by the requirement of random scenery searching; I enjoyed the puzzles in the endgame more than any in the game. Though there are coding problems aplenty associated with the puzzles, many of them have excellent ideas; with some more time and attention to programming difficulties, the author might produce a first-rate -- and very challenging -- game. (One puzzle I never figured out: a "last lousy point" that's a clue from a British crossword.) Phred Phontious is large, hardly finishable within two hours unless the player relies heavily on the walkthrough, and the game both encumbers you with a lot of objects and limits your inventory severely. Perhaps the most welcome thing about the endgame was that the goal was clear and the territory to explore limited; there was no question of wandering around looking for the right object only to find that the solution actually turned on a bad pun. Moreover, the endgame is the only area where the room descriptions come alive -- and they do for a very obvious reason then, of course, but it does make things more vivid. And even though it's predictable, the ultimate ending does, somehow, feel satisfying -- no "to be continued" messages or any such thing. This is a game for the puzzle fan, in short, specifically the puzzle fan who likes to see fantasy sent up and doesn't mind some incoherence in the setting. Though the player should save often -- the game closes off without warning -- Phred Phontious is one of the few competition entries that I found enjoyable despite serious flaws, and I gave it a 6 on the competition scale.
Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle
From: Adam Myrow <myrow SP@G eskimo.com> Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002 TITLE: Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle AUTHORS: David Dyte, Steve Bernard, Dan Shiovitz, et al. EMAIL: Too many to list DATE: June 2001 PARSER: Inform Standard SUPPORTS: Any Zcode interpreter AVAILABILITY: Freeware IF Archive URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/PUTPBAA.z5 When several regulars of rec.arts.int-fiction got together and decided to do yet another parody of Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die, they decided to also parody Sam Barlow's Aisle while they were at it. The result is one of the most side-splitting things to ever be uploaded to the IF Archive. Not only do we see the two games mentioned above being ripped to shreds, there are more inside jokes than you can shake a stick at. This has Sins Against Mimesis beaten hands down. Basically, you find yourself in the town square with the phone booth from the original Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. However, you quickly discover that like Aisle, this is a one-move game. You have exactly one move to do something and then it's over. However, unlike Aisle, it doesn't loop back to the start. You'll have to restart the game by typing restart or undo and try something else. It's too bad that they couldn't have done it like Sam Barlow, but that's the only flaw in what is supposed to be a big joke. Anyhow, every time you make a move, the response is totally off the wall. Nearly all Inform actions are handled, and there are few default responses to be had. Most of the responses bear no relation to each other, so forget trying to make a story out of it. The point is to have fun and I did. However, there is one set of responses involving a particular object that are related and I had fun trying to get them all. For a starter, try >INVENTORY. Here are a few of the responses to illustrate what I mean by inside jokes. I've cut out the restart/restore/quit prompt and the initial description since they never change. >kick booth The booth's eyes widen as you draw your foot back. "Terry, no, please, oh God you can't--" Its cries are cut short as your foot slams into it. With the sound of eggshells cracking, the booth fragments into countless pieces which are quickly lost in the mud. *** You have quit smoking *** >smell You inhale deeply, smelling for the background scent of this particular location. It smells like broth... no, wait, is that tortillas? *** You have been ruined *** >enter booth There are 56 fellow MIT students in there already, but one more and you get the WORLD RECORD. You somehow squeeze between Misty and Muffy, and end up sandwiched beside Mindy. Then the creaking begins. Then the cracking. Then the exploding. Fifty-seven MIT students end up scattered across the town square, many crippled for life, but every single one ends up in the Guinness Book of Records. *** You have been recognized *** So, only if you know something about the history of Infocom, a bit about Losing Your Grip, and have some familiarity with the Inform Designer's Manual will all those responses make sense. There are tons more like that. Be sure to try out your spells from the Enchanter series and of course, the magic words from Adventure. The bottom line is that an IF veteran who is looking for something to kill some time after a bad day should download this and give it a shot. A newcomer to IF might not understand a lot of the jokes, and if you've never played Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die or Aisle, you should play them before to understand why PUTPBAA works the way it does.
Pick Up The Phone Booth And Dye
From: Stas Starkov <stas_ SP@G mail.rb.ru> Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002 NAME: Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye AUTHOR: Eric Schmidt EMAIL: None given DATE: 2002 PARSER: Inform Standard SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/boothdye.z5 VERSION: Release 1 This game is a short one-joke game with a single puzzle. (And the joke is not very much in the style of "Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die", which I advise you to play first.) What to say about the game? Well, the game is quite accurately done. That is, it gives sufficient answers to player actions, without visible holes in implementation, or missing descriptions. But the wild psychedelic charm of "Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die" is not there! The only puzzle of the game is not bad, however -- and the game has been written to demonstrate the puzzle, I suppose. Completion time? From several seconds, to several minutes. Resume: If you like short-puzzle-one-idea games -- try "Pick Up the Phone Booth and Dye". It's worth the tiny bit of your time you'll spend on it.
Piece of Mind
From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net> Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997 NAME: Piece of Mind AUTHOR: Giles Boutel EMAIL: boutel1g SP@G wcc.govt.nz DATE: October 1996 PARSER: Inform SUPPORTS: Inform Ports AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/piece VERSION: Version 1.0 Now here's a real dilemma. First, let me congratulate the author on a number of things: 1) The switching of tense - from first-person past in the introduction, to first-person present in the main framework, to an omnipresent third-person tense for a sub-"plot" - is a very ambitious hack of the Inform grammar. 2) I thought it was quite imaginative the way you divided one "room" into six different "locations." A neat map twist. 3) The "Outer Files" parody. ROTFL! Glad to see a fellow X- Phile writing I-F. The truth is out there. Trust no one. 4) I was delighted to see the words of evil Professor Elvin Atombender of Epyx's "Impossible Mission" pop up. Even ten years after the fact, I can _still_ hear that digitized voice perfectly, and it never fails to give me a nostalgic shiver. That was a GREAT game! (And companies today think crap like "Phantasmagoria" can hold a candle. Hmmph.) Now some (hopefully) constructive criticism: 1) Typos. Particularly in the revised default grammar messages. Lots of missing periods, misspelled words, missing line- feeds, etc. Double-check these the next time around. 2) Try to give your entry a little more plot and consistency. This year we've seen a lot of entries - "Phlegm," "Rippled Flesh," and "Of Forms Unknown" come immediately to mind - where plots have been thrown out completely in exchange for wandering from one situation to the next. These get old after awhile. The drawn-into-a-book subgame is not as polished as the T.S. Eliot scene in "Curses," and most of the rest feels like excerpts from someone's private life that I'd rather not know a lot about. Most of the situations make no sense, even under the guise of drug- induced hallucination.Pirate Adventure
From: David Jones <drj SP@G pobox.com> Review appeared in SPAG #47 -- January 16, 2007 TITLE: Pirate Adventure AUTHOR: Alexis Adams and Scott Adams E-mail: msadams SP@G msadams.com DATE: 1978 Parser: Scott Adams (2 word) Supports: Originally custom format, since reverse engineered and translated to Z-code and others Availability: IF-archive URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip I'm playing using the zcode translations of the games found in scott- adams/games/zcode/adamsinform.zip in the IF Archive. Pirate Adventure uses a split-screen style where the top portion of the screen is permanently given over to displaying the location description ("I'm in a Flat in london" [sic]), the available exits, and the visible items. I remember, from way back when, that when I was playing this game on a VIC-20 the split-screen effect was quite convenient; the VIC-20 had a text display of 22x23, and games rarely implemented scrollback (since memory used for scrollback would eat into the memory used to hold the game description, all of which had to be kept in RAM). So it was actually quite nice to have the equivalent of LOOK permanently displayed. These days the split-screen effect is more disturbing; I often use long windows so my focus keeps having to shift from where I'm typing (at the bottom) to the room description (at the top). Many commands (eg GET SNEAKERS) have no response, they simply update the room description. This change is sometimes easy to miss, especially if it happens in one's peripheral vision or during a saccade. Needless to say the writing is extremely economical, but that doesn't really excuse the mistakes that are all too common: its/it's confusion, missing punctuation, and misplaced capital letters. Parsing is two word. LOOK IN SACK and PUT THE TORCH OUT are way too complex. Forget the luxury of having synonyms or helpful hints from the parser. A typical example that crops up early in the game is that there are stairs in the initial location, but neither UP nor DOWN works, GO STAIRS being the required invocation. In the location at the other end of the stairs, DOWN works to return to the first location. Is Adams just being stubborn here? Or is he introducing the player to the required mechanics to solve later parts of the game? I think I'd rather give Adams the benefit of the doubt here and say that requiring players to use GO STAIRS instead of UP is getting them to practice a puzzle in simple and obvious form so that later on less obvious uses for GO X can be introduced without the player thinking it harsh or unfair. The parser abbreviates all words to 3 letters and this somewhat makes up for the lack of now traditional abbreviations such as X (EXA) and I (INV). Despite the parser's simplicity it does implement automatic disambiguation for some objects. CRA is recognised as "Sack of crackers" or "narrow crack" as appropriate, similarly with WIN. When we review an old game like this we are confronted with questions of purpose. Why are we playing an old game? We can play to gain some insight into the history, to see what it was like to play games of that era (although the experience will of course fall short because of the lack of context, just as attempts at, say, medieval cooking do. That doesn't mean such attempts shouldn't be made of course); we can play to see what value such games hold now, as objects of entertainment; finally, we can play to see what value such games hold for the creators of modern works. What lessons can we learn from this game? As a form of entertainment there is really very little to keep the modern player at the keyboard: no lavish descriptions; a fair number spelling mistakes and similar signs of inadequate proofreading; no cunning plots; the puzzles aren't particularly deep. It's worthwhile to compare the implementation of a bag in Pirate Adventure with how it would likely be implemented today. Today it would be implemented as a container. The player would be able to open it, close, take things out, put things in. Adams avoids the complexities inherent in container objects (capacity, inclusion in self, description of contents, reaching beyond when the PC is inside, etc) by simply having OPEN BAG create a new object in the location with the response "Something falls out". Adams has been spared the expense of implementing containers, and the player has been spared the pointless exploration of a containment simulation. In the modern approach, implementing the BAG as a container, OPEN BAG would yield the response "Revealing an X" or similar, and GET X would get the object in question. Adams solution has all the elegance of the modern implementation, but at a fraction of the cost (in terms of programming and debugging). In either case the player types exactly the same sequence of commands, OPEN BAG. GET X. What the player has lost is the ability to PUT X IN BAG (that would require a preposition in the parser), but that doesn't seem like a huge loss given that containers in adventure games are often used to merely delay the player in finding some object (that is, they are a barrier to getting some object from the container rather than something into which the player might usefully stow an object). The lesson here is that simulation for simulation's sake is pointless. If you implement a complex object then its complexity should be motivation by having an interesting purpose in the game. One recent example which fails this test is the implementation of pockets in Eric Eve's competition release of The Elysium Enigma. The effect of the pockets was to hide from the player objects carried by the PC (a false, and I suspect largely unintentional) widening on the player / PC gap). I'm happy to say that Eric Eve has made a new release which fixes this and brings this aspect up to the high quality of the rest of The Elysium Enigma. Structurally the game follows the classic trinity of beginning, middle, and end. The beginning consists of 5 locations in the London flat and lasts until the player discovers how to get to the islands. The middle bit provides most of the game and takes places on an island with rather more than 5 locations (though you will also be revisiting the flat). A final section (on another island) is reached after the solution to a key puzzle on the first island. The anticipation of solving that key puzzle is quite good and solving it yields a genuine sense of achievement which is sadly deflated by the game's very lackluster response: "CONGRATULATIONS !!! But your Adventure is not over yet... " (that's Pirate Adventure being prolix). When Pirate Adventure was first published the three-part structure had yet to become time honoured; Adams did well to note that the theatrical device could be employed here. Sadly the final part of the game is a bit of a let-down. Like many games (modern and old) it feels like the author ran out of time, steam, or implementation space, consequently the final part feels under-implemented, disappointing, and buggy (the one bug I found concerns an object found in the final section). Although old Pirate Adventure avoids a lot of puzzle cliches. Several objects in the game have multiple uses; some change state and are used in different states. One of the NPCs both provides clues and is used directly to solve a later puzzle. One NPC is an obstacle early on in the game, but needs to be exploited to overcome a puzzle later in the game. Although some cliches are avoided lots are included: instant death; no UNDO; some puzzles require, for no obvious reason, repeating certain actions. Some of puzzles seem pretty reasonable, others seem a bit arbitrary and you can easily unwittingly enter unwinnable states. Fortunately the game isn't very large so restarting isn't very unpleasant and often leads to discovering something new. There is an inventory limit (it never forms the crux of a puzzle, it just means more toing and froing) and a torch that can be exhausted. Pirate Adventure packs quite a lot of puzzles into its small space; the sketch of the puzzle-dependency diagram (DM4's "lattice diagram") that I started making reveals a surprisingly complex and interesting structure. The effect is one that I find all too rare in lots of games: there are always several avenues to explore, always a few objects whose purpose you haven't fathomed, and a few strategies that remain to be tried. There are quite a few pleasing moment when you realise that certain objects have multiple uses. On the other hand I know of no puzzle in Pirate Adventure that has an alternate solution (apart from a trivial rephrasing); it's a notable lack in Pirate Adventure. The setting of the game, a tropical island (well, the game doesn't say it's tropical but let's assume it is), is both a strength and a weakness. The text in the game is extremely minimal, yet the setting manages to be quite vivid. Adams achieves this primarily by placing the game in a setting that is familiar to most players: the classic desert island of adventure stories like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. Such stories were probably read by (or read to) the player as a child; the island takes on nostalgic and perhaps slightly magical qualities in the player's mind as a result. It takes very few words for the player to be transported to a fantasy island with golden beaches, inviting lagoons, huts made from palm leaves, and a cave system in cliffs of soft rock. Those parts of the game are fine. It's the additions that break the spell. The cave system has a toolshed inside it apparently equipped with about half the necessary materials to build a boat, but the only access to the shed is either via a small crack or past a crocodile infested pit. How did the equipment get in the shed? How does the crocodiles' pit fill with water? Why are the keys to a pirate's chest in [LOCATION WITHHELD]? Historically this was totally acceptable, expected even, but these days many players would find it distasteful. Designers would do well to briefly dip into Pirate Adventure to observe how it manages to create a solid and evocative setting with so few words, and how the puzzles and objects are interlinked with such economy. But that is all. Pirate Adventure has little to commend itself to the modern player, though it was great in its day.
The PK Girl
From: Mike Russo <russo SP@G its.caltech.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003 TITLE: The PK Girl AUTHOR: Robert Goodwin EMAIL: sakurafiend SP@G hotmail.com DATE: September 2002 PARSER: ADRIFT SUPPORTS: ADRIFT runtime AVAILABILITY: IF Archive URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/adrift/the_pk_girl/the_pk_girl.taf VERSION: IF Comp release This anime-inspired game takes a story-driven IF and mixes in a dating sim and whole mess of world interactivity. The amount of depth here is impressive; there's something like half a dozen girls you can woo, a bunch of nonessential locations that evolve as the game goes by, and a truly amazing number of objects you can find and play with. The central plot is nothing to write home about -- cute girls with psychic powers stalked by a mysterious conspiracy -- and dating sims in general strike me as somewhere between creepy and pathetic, but where PK Girl really shines is in the incredible amount of stuff you can do. I wound up picking up an ice-cube tray early in the game; later on, I managed to fill it with water, stick it in a freezer, pop out the finished cubes, and started to make a frozen dessert with it. There was no obvious puzzle associated with it, although I'm sure there was a use for it, perhaps in currying favor with one of the girls. That level of interactivity is present throughout the game; you can help a character cook dinner, for example, or help comb another's hair. The sheer wealth of different objects to play and experiment with, some useful to the plot, some not, really makes the game feel more interactive and engaging than much story-driven IF, to say nothing of the average dating sim, which typically relies on simplistic multiple-choice gameplay. I'm not a particular fan of this genre, which hurt its appeal a bit, but for a player with different sensibilities, PK Girl could well be the most enjoyable game in the comp, with enough replayability and depth to have a long lifetime beyond the judging deadline. Rating: 8
Plague Planet
From: J. J. Farmer <J.J.Farmer-CSSE94 SP@G computer-science.birmingham.ac.uk> Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995 NAME: Plague Planet PARSER: Fair AUTHOR: Philip Hawthorne PLOT: Linear EMAIL: ??? ATMOSPHERE: Very Good AVAILABILITY: Shareware (BBC Micro), WRITING: Very Good Commercial (Archimedies) SUPPORTS: BBC Micro, PUZZLES: Excellent Acorn Archimedies CHARACTERS: Rather Shallow DIFFICULTY: Hard Let me start by saying this: Plague Planet is a BIG game. Lots of locations, hundreds of puzzles, thousands of hours of fun for all the family, and at a very reasonable price. Which is rather useful, since you will have to employ somebody to make your food, walk the dog, clean the house, etc., the moment you buy it. Why? Because this game is so addictive you won't be able to tear yourself away from it. The plot is nothing if not unoriginal: you are a peaceful farmer on the agrarian planet of Azura when a spaceship lands in your field. And that's pretty much all you know when you start the game. Like many excellent games, however, you are left to discover the objective for yourself. In fact, you actually create the objective whilst you are trying to do this. I'm not spoiling the plot too much if I tell you: like a prize idiot, you break into the spaceship, releasing the plague virus that was contained within and condemning every man, woman and child (including yourself) on the planet to death. The puzzles in the game are, almost without exception, solvable with nothing more than the objects to hand and a little logical thinking. There are a couple of mazes, but hints to the paths through them are lying around, and there is no need to fall back on the old "drop an object in every location" routine. Many puzzles are a joy to solve. I particularly enjoyed learning to fly the spaceship and satisfying the talking door unhappy with its position in life. And the sheer number of puzzles means that there is a tremendous variety, ranging from variations on traditional ones (a key in a lock on the opposite side of a locked door), to completely original conundrums. There is only one "what on earth is the author thinking of" puzzle; the meaning of the initials "BMUS". Just think of a certain American science fiction serial... As for the other characters in the game - well, there aren't all that many. A few robots, a few animals, a few religious maniacs who will kill you on sight, and one miner with a severe flatulance problem. They don't have a wide variety of things to say, but there are various reasons why you can't spend much time talking to them, anyway. The atmosphere generated by this game is simply wonderful. The descriptions are verbose without being longwinded, and the problems fit into it all perfectly - none are "glued on". You could almost believe you are there, sneaking into a mine on the planet Zanthor, evading a Yillis Gorf on the planet Aquaria, meeting an "old friend" on the planet Arboreta. All in all, this game is simply marvellously addictive and amazingly enjoyable. If you can find a copy, snap it up at once...
The Plague (Redux)
Space Horror I: Prey for Your Enemies
From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru> Review appeared in SPAG #43 -- January 7, 2006 NAME: The Plague (Redux) AUTHOR: Laurence Moore EMAIL: adv SP@G turntopage.com DATE: 2005 PARSER: Adrift AVAILABILITY: Freeware URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/adrift/ plague/The Plague - Redux.taf NAME: Space Horror I: Prey for Your Enemies AUTHOR: Jerald M. Cooney EMAIL: jcooney_email SP@G yahoo.com DATE: 2005 PARSER: HTML-based CYOA AVAILABILITY: Freeware URL: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2005/windows/ space/space.exe These two games have a lot in common. First of all, both of them represent first episodes of their respective series, implying there's going to be a continuation, and thus stipulating their stories being incomplete. Then, both works don't entrust the arduous task of frightening the player to individualists, employing whole teams of eminently qualified specialists for those purposes -- Plague benefits from the services of old trusty zombies, while Space Horror resorts to the help of no less reliable murderous aliens. Finally, both games represent carefully implemented, solid, and well- polished efforts -- especially Space Horror, which only contained very slight glitches. On the other hand, the author of Space Horror probably has had it somewhat easier, since his work is a CYOA. At this point, it must be said I don' t share the rather widespread in the IF-community bias against that kind of game. Especially if it is done as careful as Space Horror -- with several fully fleshed out plot lines, well-defined characters (although, of course, they aren't too interactive), and great illustrations. The author even managed to squeeze in a couple of puzzles -- quite a feat, considering the game format. The puzzles are logical enough, and fit well into the story. All in all, once you let this game play on its home turf and don't cry for the moon, Mr. Cooney's work leaves nothing to be desired. Plague isn't as strong at presentation and multimedia effects -- it's a text- only adventure, but it possesses its own trump cards, which allow it to stay abreast. The very first of them is the game name -- with all due respect to Mr. Cooney, the title "Space Horror" is one of the leading contenders for the top ten of the Most Generic Names Chart. Besides, Plague has a much more intense beginning that sets the pace and atmosphere for the rest of the game. In fact, the atmosphere and the setting make up about 80 percents of it. They're best described with "bloody chaos". Of course, people could have different opinions on it, depending on their personal preferences -- some players would find it disgusting, others would dismiss it as rather hackneyed -- but as for me, I did like it. The characters... Now, Stacie, our main hero, was well defined from the emotional point of view, so that I found it easy to identify with her. Although the wondrous transformation of a rather inexperienced town girl into a rough zombie slayer came kinda sudden and thus seemed somewhat unrealistic, I guess it was part of the genre... or maybe I'm just underestimating inexperienced town girls (typical case of male chauvinism;). Other characters only have been good enough for a crowd scene -- maybe they'll hit the big time in the next episode(s). Plague is by no means a puzzle-oriented game; the puzzles present are kept rather easy, and their main virtue is not hampering the story too much. They cope with this task pretty well, except for one scavenger hunt requiring careful examination of lots of scenery objects. Fortunately, the walkthrough helped me to get over this unfavourable design choice without any losses. The conclusions. It's true there's nothing groundbreaking about either of these works -- they don't even try to expand the genre boundaries, and probably reproduce every cliche existing within them. However, it's no less true both of them represent solid, competently implemented efforts, and I don't regret any minute spent playing them. I honestly hope the authors won't be put off by the relatively low ranks they got in the Comp, and release the next episodes of their respective works. SNATS (scores before the slash apply to Plague, after the slash to Space Horror): PLOT: Adequate (1.2)/"Truly" branching (1.3) ATMOSPHERE: Makes up most of the game charm (1.5)/Exciting enough (1.2) WRITING: Supports the atmosphere very well (1.3)/Supports the atmosphere very well (1.3) GAMEPLAY: Now that one comes to think of it, it was pretty standard, but when playing, I was too thrilled to notice;) (1.3)/Well... CYOA (1.2) BONUSES: Identifying with the player character (0.9)/Graphics, fake websites and other similar stuff (1.1) TOTAL: 6.2/6.1 CHARACTERS: Rather generic (0.8)/Nice, but not very interactive (1.0) PUZZLES: Not very remarkable, with at least one unfortunate design choice (0.9)/The very fact there are puzzles in a CYOA is a feat on its own (not rated) DIFFICULTY: You should have no troubles completing it (5 out of 10)/ Again, this doesn't apply to a CYOA (not rated) COMP SCORE: 6 COMMENTS: I think no comment is needed. No matter how you slice it, those are good, solid games.
Planet Of The Infinite Minds
From: Matthew Clemson <matthew.clemson SP@G keble.ox.ac.uk> Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000 TITLE: Planet Of The Infinite Minds AUTHOR: Alfredo Garcia E-MAIL: Five-0 SP@G oceanfree.net DATE: 2000 PARSER: TADS standard SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive) URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/tads/planmind/planmind.gam VERSION: 1 Er. Um. It's... odd, there's no denying that. It's generally bug-and-typo free, but it's resoundingly... odd. It's what I'd imagine a Rybread Celsius game to be like if it was done, well, right. Some great puzzles, although there's rather a lot of guess-the-author's-mind - I had to use hints several times - we're back to the oddness again; indeed, parts of it kept reminding me of Nord and Bert. Indeed, like N&B, it's at times laugh-out-loud funny - the problems relating to the end of the universe spring to mind. Some puzzles, OTOH, are really ingenious, although they are, again, sometimes let down by the guess-the-author's-thoughts aspects; I particularly (gasp) *enjoyed the maze*; it was a different approach to any I'd known, and worked well. Mind you, most people would argue that it's not a maze :-). There was one puzzle towards the end which was a little out-of-sorts, though; and the author admits it in the walkthrough. All-in-all, I didn't dock a point for it, since I enjoyed the rest of the game so much; other people might be tempted to, and I'd understand it if they did. In retrospect, looking at the walkthrough, it's at least nice that they allowed a cleaner verb than the one I actually used, which probably says more about my mind than that of the author :-) It's a little too enthusiastic with 'last lousy points', but they do seem at least vaguely logical; OTOH, the entire response to Xyzzy is a whole new and intelligent approach that I've not encountered before. I didn't enjoy the game from the challenge and puzzle aspect - but from the entertainment aspect, I was enthralled. Rating: 7 From: Tina Sikorski <tina SP@G eniac.stanford.edu> Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000 Walkthrough? Yes Genre: Speculative Fiction +------------------------------------------+ |Overall Rating A-|Submitted Vote 9| |Writing A |Plot B+| |Puzzles B |NPCs B | |Technical B |Tilt A-| +------------------------+-----------------+ *** Initial Thoughts I'm definitely not the only person who liked this game, but I may be the only person who did not find the library puzzle baffling.... *** Writing (A) The thing is, the writing was really funny. It wasn't actually as perfectly technically executed as my letter grade might imply; there were awkward turns of phrase here and there and the occasional misuse of punctuation. But it was very, very funny. One of my favorite bits (quite far into the game): "All at once you enter the chimney with a sound that can only be described as a Floop. All around is darkness. Then, with a Binco-diddy-diddy you career downwards through metal ledges and wire meshes. There is a resonating Ting as your body crashes against a curve in the pipe. You slide downward at this angle towards light. The light becomes brighter and brighter until it finally engulfs you, as you shoot out of a large fireplace and into a tasteful room." The subtitle of this game is "an interactive farce", and the author is not kidding. It doesn't take itself seriously. It doesn't take you seriously. It certainly doesn't take the protagonist or the NPCs seriously. Funny. *** Plot (B+) It's surreal, but it's cohesive... and that's a neat trick. Sort of a cross between 1950s sf, a physics major's worst nightmares (I'm betting the author is or was a physics major), and a comedy (well, it DID say 'farce'), the basic plot is... nearly incomprehensible, yet, strangely appealing, much like the sideshow freaks at a circus. Watching it unfold is somewhat akin to watching that guy in the sideshow who does terrible things to his own body: you wince, but you watch anyhow because it's fascinating, and you wonder how it's done. Whether or not the ultimate conclusion makes any sense isn't the point. The point is, it's fun to watch the progress. *** Puzzles (B) Some people found the puzzles baffling, inaccessible, incomprehensible on several levels. I used the walkthrough a lot myself. But they do make sense, and they contain an element of originality... ...and this game has, hands down, my favorite puzzle of the comp. It may not actually have been terribly original, but I don't recall having seen a puzzle quite like it before. Without giving away too much, there is a point at which you have a certain set of objects, and you must manipulate your environment such to match those objects. I found one of the things necessary to do this nearly impossible to figure out, but the rest was definitely a fun exercise. There was a puzzle at the end I found mildly objectionable, but it was obnoxious in a way some people might find funny. It involved a toilet. *** NPCs (B) You don't actually have a lot of control over your interaction with the NPCs, but for some reason this did not bother me. I actually found the characters (or, perhaps, caricatures) rather interesting, particularly one repeating encounter... poor man. I think most important is that they provided color that went well with the rest of the game. *** Technical (B) The aforementioned favorite puzzle, something I thought was a pretty good coding trick, was worth an extra point or two in technical score. I found no noticeable bugs. *** Tilt (A-) and Final Thoughts It's possible I enjoyed this game as much as I did because I used to make a career out of baiting my physics-major ex-boyfriend. (I used to tell him that physicists were just guessing anyhow, for instance.) Or maybe it's just that I have a soft place in my heart for 1950s bad science movies. But I think even without those biases, I would probably have found the game very amusing. Given the existence of the walkthrough for people stuck on the admittedly not always straightforward puzzles, I think I would recommend this to nearly everyone with a sense of humor.
Planetfall
From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com> Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995 NAME: Planetfall GAMEPLAY: Infocom Standard AUTHOR: Steve Eric Meretzky PLOT: Excellent EMAIL: ? ATMOSPHERE: Excellent AVAILABILITY: LTOI 1, Zork Anth. WRITING: Excellent PUZZLES: <blank> SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports CHARACTERS: Excellent DIFFICULTY: <blank> In Planetfall, you start as a deck scrubber on a starship in the far future. When your ship is destroyed, your escape pod deposits you in a deserted high-tech building complex on an alien world. With the help of your faithful robot companion B-19-7 (aka Floyd), you must discover what happened to the people, and correct various problems before your time runs out. Planetfall was the first Infocom game I played, and still my favourite. Often billed as a science-fiction comedy, it really is not. There are many amusing sidelights and funny responses from the author to your failed actions, (one of my favourites is when you are looking at the planet's computer datafiles, and come across an Infocom catalog. When you read the description for Zork, Floyd looking over your shoulder tells you that he played that game and solved all the puzzles...except for how to get into that little white house) but it is not at all a straight comedy in the same sense that Leather Goddesses of Phobos, or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be. It merely feels like one because the game is constantly charming you in one way or another. Floyd, generally remembered as Infocom's best NPC is useful for only three things in the game, but provides you with a constant stream of amusing banter, from relating tales of the time he helped someone find a lost paper clip, to passing along the latest hot gossip about Dr. Fizpick. Oftentimes text games fall into the syndrome of providing one and only one use for each item in the game, so that if you have found a use for an item you can throw it away, confident that it will not be called for again. Not so in Planetfall (and Meretzky games in general). Several items have more than one use, while others have no use at all. Planetfall's original edition contained Infocom's usual batch of interesting freebies (I still keep the Stellar Patrol ID card in my wallet mixed in with the credit cards). However, it was also one of the games selected to be redone as a Solid Gold edition with onscreen hints. Get both editions if possible. The IBM version of Lost Treasures of Infocom 1 contained an original version of the program. The Macintosh version of LTOI 1 contains the Solid Gold Edition. PC users who have Macintosh-using friends can of course try to get a copy of the datafile from the LTOI1-Mac version, and run it off an IBM interpreter. Planetfall was one of the games selected for novelization when Avon Books put out a series of Infocom Books several years ago. The novel version of Planetfall is really a sequel to Planetfall (and Stationfall). This book (not written by Meretzky) was much closer to the Battletech universe than Planetfall's, and was loaded with tiresome, sophomoric, un-clever humour. I read most of the other Avon Infocom books in a day or so each, but Planetfall took almost a month to force myself through. On the brighter side though, another Planetfall sequel is the next game that Activision plans to release under the Infocom label. The game, to be called "Planetfall 2: The Search for Floyd", is scheduled for release late in 1995. As a prelude to this, they included the original (non-Solid Gold) Planetfall game in their recently released Zork Anthology. Still, Planetfall remains not only my favourite text game, but my favourite adventure game. [Well, we've all got our fingers crossed hoping that Activision doesn't fumble this game as badly as they did Return to Zork. But I'm giving public n