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naturally some of them may be out of date.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
Saied
Sangraal
Sanity Clause
Sardoria
Save Princeton
Savoir-Faire
Scapeghost
Scavenger
Screen
Seastalker
Shade
Shades of Grey
Shadowgate
Shadows On The Mirror
She's Got A Thing For a Spring
Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
Shogun
Shrapnel
A Simple Theft
Sins Against Mimesis
Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla
Sir Ramic Hobbs and the Oriental Walk
Six Stories
Skyranch
Slouching Towards Bedlam
Small World
Snatches
The Snowman Sextet
So Far
Solitary
Son of a...
Sorcerer
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
South American Trek
Space Aliens Laughed at my Cardigan
Space Horror I: Prey for Your Enemies
The Space Under the Window
Space War! ...and the PDP-1
The Spatent Obstruction
SpeeedIF 8: A Freak Accident Leaves Seattle Pantsless
Spellbreaker
Spider and Web
Spiritwrak
Splashdown
A Spot of Bother
Spur
Square Circle
Starcross
Stargazer
Stationfall
Sting of the Wasp
Stone Cell
Stranded
A Sugared Pill
Sunset Over Savannah
Suprematism
Suspect
Suspended
Swineback Ridge
Sylenius Mysterium
Saied
From: Jarvist Frost <BOBFROST SP@G compuserve.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #15 -- October 11, 1998
NAME: Saied
AUTHOR: Robb Sherwin
E-MAIL: robb_sherwin SP@G juno.com
DATE: 6/8/98
PARSER: Slightly below Inform Standard
SUPPORTS: ZCODE interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/chicken.zip
VERSION: Release 1
{ Editor's note: this was one of the entries of the 1998 Chicken Comp
(see the NEWS section above), hence the reference to chickens crossing
the road. The file chicken.zip contains not only this game, but the
other entries as well. }
In this game you play the role of the spurned lover (male). Your Ex
has left you for someone else 18 months ago (while you were standing
there at 3am waiting for her in the freezing cold). Now, she has
phoned you and asked you to come round and comfort her since she has
just been arguing with her new lover, your replacement. You start this
game in your bed, and have to get up and decide whether you are going
to respond to your Ex's call for help.
This game has more bugs than a tropical swamp. Instead of typing
'stand' or 'get out of bed' you have to type 'pump it up' to get out
of bed. The direction of your door (the only exit from your apartment)
is not actually mentioned in the room description and so you have to
guess wildly by typing in directions at random until you realise that
it is towards the east. This game hardly recognises any of the items
mentioned in the room description. The main way that the story
progresses is through people phoning you up. After you finely decide
to get out of bed and exit the house you find yourself faced with a
decision (which will, either way, end the game). Should you go to your
Ex lover's house you should you cross to the other Saied to see your
close (female) friend?
This game had some _very_ infuriating parser problems. The two items
(of which only 1 can be picked up) served no purpose other than to be
looked at. Only the second of the 2 locations contains any information
about the exits from it. The telephone calls are hard wired in, where
ether you are, you still get the telephone calls (which occur at 'so
many turns').
From the last two paragraphs of complaints you would expect the
writing to be terrible and the game to be boring, frustrating and
excessively hard to understand. It wasn't. The writing was of a very
high standard throughout and both endings seemed very fitting, in
particular I liked the joke about why the chicken crossed the road
(and no it isn't "to get to the other side"(TM) but it is something
similar).
As a whole, this game was good fun and I would heartily recommend it
to anyone with experience with bad parsers (i.e. all you Speccy Ifers
out there). Once the parser bugs have been navigated, this game turns
into a fun, short game and I found it well worth the download time. I
will certainly look forward to the 1998 i.f. competition entry from
Robb Sherwin.
Inform .z5 file, bundled with other chicken-comp games (.zip)
Sangraal
From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
Review appeared in SPAG #21 -- June 15, 2000
TITLE: Sangraal
AUTHOR: Jonathan Partington, ported to Inform by Adam Atkinson and Graham
Nelson
E-MAIL: (Adam's) ghira SP@G mistral.co.uk
DATE: 1987 (ported 1999)
PARSER: Two-word
SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/phoenix/games/zcode/Sangraal.z5
VERSION: Release 1.18 of the original, release 1 of the port
Sangraal is one of the three Topologika games recently ported to
Inform--the others are Fyleet and Crobe--and it's an odd experience in
several respects for present-day IFers. While it doesn't meet the
fairness and friendliness standards that latter- day IF has developed,
the overall level of literacy and wit is high enough to make it worth a
look.
The parser represents the biggest adjustment. It's a two-word parser
that simply ignores anything after the first two words, so GIVE X TO Y
will generally work, but PUT X IN Y will not. This requires some fairly
tortured inferences at times--DROP is sometimes taken as the equivalent
of PUT, improbably--and on the whole it's not a major highlight. EXAMINE
is disabled--the "initial" description of each object has everything
that's relevant--and other standbys like ENTER and WEAR aren't on the
scene either, and nor are meta-commands like UNDO and OOPS. (On the
other hand, lots of highly unusual verbs are recognized, and there's no
way of guessing what the game does and doesn't allow as a verb.) There
are other, smaller differences--abbrevations like I and L aren't
provided for--but the parser is the biggest adjustment, and whether it
drives the modern player completely insane depends in large part on
whether the player grew up on Infocom (whose parser was never limited to
two words) or discovered IF only recently (and therefore never
encountered the earlier, cruder days of IF parsing).
As you might guess from the above, the puzzles don't, by and large,
involve particularly subtle object manipulation--i.e., discovering
subtle hidden properties of objects generally isn't key to solving the
puzzles. They do, however, involve some baffling logical leaps, and it's
possible to solve some of them without figuring out the key, so to
speak. Moreover, a few are simply infuriating--there's a maze that ranks
with the most annoying in the history of IF, which is saying quite a
bit, and an extended one-of-these-three-doors-is-telling-the-truth
sequence. Some are more creative, admittedly--there's a "seven deadly
sins" puzzle that would feel quite original if the idea hadn't been done
several times in recent years (i.e., long after Sangraal was
released)--but few are real highlights. Supposedly, Sangraal is the
easiest of the three ported Topologika games; if so, that should give
IFers pause, because in no sense are the puzzles in Sangraal easy, nor
is the game design particularly forgiving. It's not at all hard to close
off the game without realizing it, and some of the puzzles don't allow
for trial and error. The game itself is fairly wide--lots of puzzles are
available for most of the game--but many of the available puzzles aren't
initially solvable, and solving them in the wrong order can render the
thing unfinishable.
Sangraal's saving grace is its literacy and cultural acumen. The game is
littered with references to various authors--Keats, Poe, Shelley, Homer,
the Bible several times over, and many, many more. Some of the digs are
rather subtle--there's a Wailing Wall that, initially, you get driven
away from because you don't belong there, and you (minor spoiler) evade
getting driven away by changing your appearance so that you look the
part, a barbed reference to the ongoing controversy in Jerusalem over
Orthodox Jews refusing to allow Reform and Conservative Jews to pray at
the Wailing Wall. Equally subtle is the following:
There is a five-foot high pillar of salt here, which looks a bit like
a running woman. But not a lot.
Sangraal abounds with humor along these lines, and while not all the
jokes work--one sequence involving the "Eleventh Commandment" and a
bunch of computer programmers feels rather forced--most of them are
funny enough to make the game consistently amusing. The drawback,
however, is that much of the humor requires that the player think in the
same bizarre and subversive way as the author does, and Sangraal is
hence best played with the aid of a walkthrough or a helpful friend
who's already finished it. Particularly difficult in this respect are
the puzzles that draw on certain poems by Keats and Shelley--the logical
progression is highly obscure.
Sangraal occupies such an odd niche that it's hard to liken it to any
recent work of IF. There's no plot, really--the initial premise
(retrieving the Holy Grail) is entirely irrelevant, as with most fantasy
quests--and neither is there anything binding the game's world together.
(I.e., the world depicted feels less like a setting than an excuse for a
lot of silly puzzles.) The puzzles have a way of disappearing once
they're solved, and most of them either give the player a treasure-type
object or simply award points; none, as far as I can recall, changed the
game's landscape, and not many even opened up new territory to explore.
No doubt this is a function of the memory limitations of the day, which
made it difficult to code for both a solved and unsolved state of a
puzzle, but the effect is to magnify the random-collection-of-puzzles
feel.
While it's an uneven work in several respects, there's plenty of wit in
Sangraal, enough to overcome the clumsier bits, and if you enjoy rather
obscure satire, you may well enjoy this.
Inform .z5 file
Source code
Sanity Clause
From: Audrey A. DeLisle <rad SP@G crl.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #1 -- May 15, 1994
NAME: Sanity Clause PARSER: AGT Standard
AUTHOR: Mike McCauley PLOT: Excellent
EMAIL: ??? ATMOSPHERE: Funny
AVAILABILITY: IF Archive S10 WRITING: Excellent
PUZZLES: - SUPPORTS: AGT Ports
CHARACTERS: Good DIFFICULTY: -
You are Santa Claus and you must deliver all the presents before
midnight in each time zone. This can be done in five trips. When you have
to go to the same place, you will find a different puzzle. It is tedious,
but fun if you have the patience. The author wrote S.O.S. (Son of
Stagefright, both with AGT.) Understand that each trip will be shorter
than the previous one. Your elf is a delightful companion.
Author--Mike McCauley, has MAC version, sends map and hints on reg.
AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)
Source (.zip)
Sardoria
From: J. Robinson Wheeler <jrw SP@G jrwdigitalmedia.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003
TITLE: Sardoria
AUTHOR: Anssi Raisanen
EMAIL: anssi.raisanen SP@G cop.fi
DATE: October 2003
PARSER: ALAN standard
SUPPORTS: ALAN interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/alan/sardoria
VERSION: 1.0 (competition release)
Normally, I don't play ALAN games, mostly because they're a lot of extra
trouble. There doesn't seem to be a way (and I might be wrong about
this) of automatically saving a transcript, and that's something I like
to do when playing comp games, so that I can refer back to it when
writing reviews. [Editor's note: Apparently, ALAN games can in fact
generate a transcript when they are started at the command line with the
-L switch. This fact does not necessarily overturn Rob's point about
these games being "a lot of extra trouble." --Paul] As a result, I ended
up doing this very tedious thing of copy-and-pasting a screenful of text
at a time from the ALAN terp window into a text editor every twenty
seconds. This has served to make me grumpy and irritable and likely to
rate the game more harshly than I would have if it had been an Inform or
TADS game, which isn't really fair. Maybe I'll add a point at the end to
try to compensate, but that isn't really fair, either, I suppose.
This is a fairly standard and fairly short old-school type game set in a
castle with dining halls, secret passages, a bearded old wizard, and a
king who's in trouble. That sort of thing. You start out in a locked
room, and figuring out how to get out of there was, to me, the most
troublesome puzzle of the game. I went to the hints fairly quickly, and
all they did was suggest that something else was hidden in the room with
me. Given the extremely limited set of things to interact with, I
eventually found it, but it was a total read-the-author's-mind type of
situation.
The next puzzle after that was equally perplexing. I guess if I'd really
taken the time to examine everything (which I was steered away from
doing, because it was a kitchen full of knickknacks, the first dozen or
so of which yielding nothing more than a note saying that they're not
worth playing with), I might have figured it out on my own. Instead, I
used the WALKTHROUGH command.
After that, things went a little better. I'm an old hand at looking
behind things and finding secret passages and so forth. There was a
curious cultural gap that made one puzzle here a bit more of a stumper
than it was supposed to be, I think. You have a clue sheet of abstract
concepts, and then a grid of icons you have to touch, matching the
concepts. Two of the concepts were "night" and "wisdom". One of the
icons was an owl. The mismatch and the correct solution are left as an
exercise for the reader.
Later on, I unintentionally found the solution to a puzzle because an
NPC blurted out the solution, due to a bug, as if I'd already stumbled
on it and was showing him the results. Oh well, whatever works. Just
after this, there was something that I guess was a bug -- I was told to
proceed through a set of color-coded doors in a certain order, and that
order was incorrect: two of the colors needed to be swapped in order for
me to get to the end. I don't know what that was about, but it seems
like a beta-tester should have found that. Unless it was deliberate, in
which case, it was just weird.
Right after that, there was a puzzle that reminded me of something I
made fun of in one of last year's games. It's the equivalent of going
into a room with a gigantic vault safe, with a description saying, "Oh
no! How will you ever get this open? Also, there's a note attached to
the safe." Examining the note says, "The combination is 59-73-102."
Makes you wonder whether it even qualifies as a puzzle at that level.
Following one more read-the-author's-mind puzzle, the game suddenly
ended, and I had won. Uh -- okay. Well, that was, hmm, brief, I guess.
There is nothing especially bad about the game, but nothing especially
unique about it, either. Sometimes I like old-school games like this,
but this one left me kind of wishing for more in the way of
entertainment value. My natural reaction would be to rate this one a 4,
but is that because I was grumpy about the lack of a logging feature?
Hmm, nah, I think it's because that's the proper rating to give it.
RATING: 4
Zip archive with Alan files (updated version)
Directory with Alan .acd and .dat files (competition version)
Save Princeton
From: Brian Reilly <reillyb SP@G gusun.georgetown.edu>
Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996
NAME: Save Princeton PARSER: TADS
AUTHOR: Jacob Weinstein PLOT: Rescue Princeton from
terrorists.
EMAIL: jweinste SP@G alcor.usc.edu ATMOSPHERE: Good
AVAILABILITY: IF Archive, shareware,$10 WRITING: Good
PUZZLES: FAIR SUPPORTS: TADS Ports
CHARACTERS: FAIR DIFFICULTY: Moderate
Egads! Gun-toting radicals have infiltrated the Ivy League. Nope, it's
not Columbia of '69, but Princeton of today. As a mild-mannered
perspective Princetonian, you duck away from your tour of Princeton
out of boredom and begin to explore the the campus on your own,
only to be startled by the sounds of gunfire erupting in the usually
tranquil Princeton, NJ. When you come out of hiding, you can tell that
something has gone drastically wrong.
Your explorations around Princeton soon lead you to discover that the
Administration Building has been seized, and the President of Princeton
is being held hostage. Now, it's up to you to oust the terrorists, and
rescue President Shapiro. The puzzles in this game are done fairly well,
but some tend to be rather illogical or bizarre. The game is full of a
good amount of humor, although a lot of it is dependent on Princeton
history or a familiarity with the campus. The characters add to the
humor of the game, although many of the characters could have been more
developed. I do have to add though, that I was ecstatic when I realized
that the maze was a non-maze, and did not have to spend hours mapping.
All in all, Save Princeton is a fun, enjoyable game.
TADS .gam File
Macintosh (.hqx)
DOS executable (.zip)
Solution (text)
Savoir-Faire
From: Daphne Brinkerhoff <cendare SP@G hotmail.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002
TITLE: Savoir-Faire
AUTHOR: Emily Short
EMAIL: emshort SP@G mindspring.com
DATE: April 2002 (original)
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
URL: http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/savoirfaire.htm
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Savoir.z8
VERSION: 6 (most recent)
(Note: I have recently moved, and my computer is still in pieces in
boxes, so I am not able to replay the game to get exact details. Also, I
played an older release (not sure which one).)
Savoir-Faire is an excellent game, featuring a strong sense of place, an
innovative backstory & magic system, and a protagonist whose
idiosyncrasies are charming in a way that reminds me of Varicella.
Place: The opening "room" is so present and alive that I spent many
turns there before even going inside. Throughout the house, the
furniture, doors, molding, and knickknacks all contribute to a feeling
of really being there. But what would you expect from the author of
Pytho's Mask and Best Of Three -- both games which focus on conversation
and still have room for books, costumes, inlaid tiles...? "Place" also
encompasses the idea of culture. With sausages strung up on the rafters
and seven planets in a model of the solar system, it's clear that we
aren't in Kansas any more. So *this* is "old skool"? I don't remember
Zork and Advent being quite like this.
Backstory: Obviously, I can't say much about this without giving away
the plot. But even the brief opening text raises a number of questions:
Where is everyone? What is your relationship to them? To this house? Who
are you, that you can so blithely gamble away your life savings and
assume someone else will bail you out? Like so many games, Savoir-Faire
has a subplot about discovering your true identity, but it's low-key: no
melodramatic scenes of revelation.
The magic system: Figuring this out is one of those "aha!" moments, so
again I can't go into great detail.
In some ways, though, I felt frustrated -- the magic seemed to be so
powerful that the limitations felt arbitrary at times. The thought "If
action A works, why doesn't action B?" crossed my mind many times.
If I may digress briefly, I think this is a universal problem with
powerful characters in general. It could be called the Commander Data
problem (after the Star Trek character). If you have an exceptionally
able character, plots tend to fall apart. "A heavy bulkhead? Data can
lift it. An encoded password? Data can decrypt it. A rescue in the
vacuum of space? No problem!" So the writer ends up inventing more or
less believable reasons why this power can't be used to solve this
problem. For me, this *mostly* works in Savoir-Faire, but there are
occasions when I just rolled my eyes and went to the walkthrough. Of
course, this can be written off as more of that "old skool" atmosphere.
I should add that another alternative (severely limit your character's
powers) is the more usual way of handling things -- hence the numerous
magic systems with equivalents of "fnord: create illusion of blue
antelope", and similar very specific powers. What Savoir-Faire attempts
is more interesting, and mostly more intuitive -- if I *had* magic
powers, this is how I would both prefer and expect them to work.
Protagonist: A bit prissy, a bit amoral (breaking and entering starts
the game, after all!), a bit noble -- yeah, kinda like Varicella. I
particularly enjoyed being hungry and eating. This guy is *serious* (and
seriously vivid) about his food. Fortunately, he does care about
something other than himself. And there is evidence (especially if you
play it right) that he has a strong sense of humor and self-mockery.
Basically, I enjoyed being Pierre.
Other: I especially enjoyed the memories that pop up from time to time
(they reminded me of an aspect of L. Ross Raszewski's Moments Out of
Time. My only quibble is that there weren't quite as many of them as I
wanted, and they seemed to cluster in the beginning parts of the game.
And now I've gotten through a whole review without mentioning the
puzzles! Isn't that why people play "old skool" games? I had fun with
some of them (finding a light source and exploring the cellars,
particularly). Mostly the puzzles are tied up with the magic system
described above. If you like the magic system, you'll like the puzzles
(and mostly, I did).
To sum up, while this game may claim to be "old skool", that doesn't
mean Yet Another Dungeon Crawl. There's atmosphere & polish which bring
Savoir-Faire to a higher level than that.
From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G mts.net>
Review appeared in SPAG #32 -- March 20, 2003
The type of IF I've always preferred has been more puzzle-based than
story-driven, and as a result, I've always enjoyed the old Infocom games
because, if anything, they erred on the puzzle side of that spectrum.
They typically featured mazes, colour-based puzzles, hunger and weight
restrictions, and a whole host of other implements we just don't see in
modern IF today (albeit in most of those cases, for very good reasons).
With the lack of many truly puzzle-oriented games lately, I have been
longing for a big puzzlefest-type game reminiscent of an Infocom classic
and I'm happy to say I've found one in Savoir-Faire.
Savoir-Faire comes out and blatantly calls itself a piece of old-school
IF; a throwback, if you will, to the days of Infocom and perhaps more
recently to the days of Curses and Delusions.
When a game comes out and patently calls itself old school, comparisons
to some of the more popular Infocom classics and early shareware games
will be drawn. So the question is, does Savoir-Faire succeed in
replicating the old Infocom standard? As far as I'm concerned, it
doesn't just succeed in replicating it; it's better in every respect I
can think of while still maintaining the illusion that the game could
have been created in Infocom's heyday.
For example, Savoir-Faire implements many common design strategies used
in Infocom games that are now considered designing no-no's
(encumbrance-based carrying systems, hunger restrictions, the opening of
doors before you go through them), but does so in a much more
contemporary and less threatening fashion. There are different
light-based puzzles for example, a maze of sorts, and an abundance of
locked doors, yet Ms. Short seems to reluctantly (and thankfully) only
put a half-hearted attempt into creating an authentic old-school system.
The hunger restriction, for example, is only that in name and serves
more as a reminder of what goals you should be focusing on as opposed to
a rigid hurdle that has to be traversed (which is to say you can never
die of hunger). Unlocked doors open automatically once unlocked, and any
encumbrance issues are nicely done away with, with a sack that can carry
pretty much anything. It probably grated on a game designer as strong as
Ms. Short in the first place to have to implement so many old-school
faux pas, let alone make them completely unuser friendly. Fortunately
for the player, it appears that her innate sense of good game design
prevailed.
Continuing on with the puzzles, Savoir-Faire again throws up some old
Infocom tropes without the typical old school constraints (i.e.,
unwinnable game states). The credits list the game as cruel, which makes
me typically feel that there are many opportunities to put the game into
an unwinnable state. Actually, when I see a cruel rating for a game
followed by the word 'unwinnable' I get that eerie chill down my spine
that I got so often while playing So Far, where every turn seemed
destined to limit my possibilities. Although some of the puzzles were on
the tougher side, none were unachievable without a little lateral
thinking, and I can't think of one that would be considered truly cruel.
On the contrary there are plenty of ways to solve the same puzzle unless
you go about willfully destroying things (and even then you might find
some possible avenues). At one point, while I was stumped, I attempted
an action that involved the destruction of an item (an action which I
was sure would lead me to an unwinnable state). To my surprise, an
alternate solution that I'd thought of but which I felt unlikely to be
implemented, turned out to work. To my further surprise, upon reading
the verbose walkthrough, I discovered many other solutions for that
particular puzzle and was duly impressed.
Once again in defiance of most classic-IF axioms, there is very little
linearity in this game. As I mentioned, alternate solutions abound and
the puzzle-solving process is aided by a whole plethora of parsed verbs
to choose from. Savoir-Faire is a game that understands the following
sentences equally:
>get water from well with teapot.
>fill teapot with water from well.
And Savoir-Faire also provides for many rare but useful verbs as well as
verb synonyms.
Also remarkable are the impressive bits of programming involved in the
game. There is a magical set of physics to Short's world that the player
learns through flashbacks and bits of backdrop, and the macroparsing
involved in setting up this particular magic system is impressive; all
the more so as the game was originally released in .z5 format (as
opposed to the .z8 of later releases.) When things work as smoothly as
they do in Savoir-Faire, you know there's a lot going on behind the
scenes that makes the game work as efficiently as it does. For the
average author this means adding libraries, extra classes, and more
often than not ugly, redundant bits of programming. But for the true
artist, efficiency is what's important and nowhere is efficiency more
apparent in any recent game in memory, than it is with Savoir-Faire.
Sure, in terms of gameplay I guess it ultimately doesn't matter how big
or small a game is, but as a hack programmer myself, I really do
appreciate the elegance and efficiency with which Ms. Short constructed
her universe, as I know how difficult it is to make it so.
Anyway, all these positives and I haven't even talked about the writing.
Ms. Short, a former winner of an XYZZY for best writing, has an
economical and beautifully descriptive way about her prose. It's
effective and lasting and brings every piece of scenery to life. The
writing is such a pleasure to read that one could still enjoy the game
greatly just playing it strictly with a walkthrough and reading the
responses the game spits back at you. So to sum up, Savoir-Faire is a
great game, and I don't have many complaints about it. Since this is a
critique of the work, however, I feel obliged to talk a bit about
something I wasn't overly fond of in the game, and surprisingly (when I
think back to Short's other works), what I wasn't overly impressed with
was the story. Well that's not true exactly. I thought the story and
background were great up until the ending, after which I felt
differently about the story as a whole.
The plot starts off with the PC, a minor noble in financial difficulty,
returning to the house of his youth where an adoptive family had once
raised him. Upon finding the manor abandoned, the PC decides to ransack
it for profit (and so begins a classic treasure hunt, albeit with a lot
more backstory than the Infocom standard). The story to this point is
fine, but as bits of background became more and more available
throughout the game, it seems obvious that the protagonist was treated
quite fairly by his adoptive parents and their daughter (who it appears
also had a crush on him) despite his poorer upbringing and what you
could only assume was a lower status in their household. I therefore
found it extremely jarring that he would go back and pillage the home of
the people who showed him so much kindness growing up. Other factors
contributed to my growing disdain for the protagonist as well. For
example, the constant reminders of his hunger (as illustrated by his
constant yearnings for different exotic foods) that I had mentioned
earlier, while important to the plot as it focuses the player on the
task at hand, also reinforced, to me at least, the PC's selfishness. I
mean really, worrying about gourmet cuisine when it was becoming readily
apparent that a dear friend was in trouble? These are not the thoughts
of a modern day IF hero. As a result, by the time the ending rolled
around, I didn't have a great deal of respect for the protagonist and
hoped all the while that he would receive an 'appropriate' reward for
his violations and selfishness.
In this respect, the game's PC reminded me a lot of the protagonist from
Infidel (an Infocom classic for those who don't know). Infidel featured
a protagonist who was a self-centered excavator and treasure seeker,
committed to running through anything and everyone in his pursuit to
achieve his goals. Fittingly, he receives a 'reward' worthy of his
self-absorption upon reaching Infidel's conclusion. I was hoping for a
similar result in Savoir-Faire but found none. No ending that befitted
the crimes I'd committed, no slap on the wrist, no scolding, no guilt;
Just some tacked-on sugary sweetness that completed the fairy tale in a
typical and (at least for me) unsatisfying way.
Interestingly enough, Infidel's original ending was very similar to
Savoir-Faire's. I remember reading an interview with Infidel's author
Mike Berlyn, and he alluded to the fact that the game's original ending
finished very positively; the way most treasure hunts did at that time.
But the ending was changed between the initial beta-tests and the game's
final release because of an outcry from testers who disliked the
protagonist, and thought he deserved far worse than the ending had
provided. Faced with such an overwhelming sentiment, Mike and his team
got to work to fix the ending and thus was born Infocom's first tragedy.
Looking at the credits for Savoir-Faire, I noticed 4 beta testers to its
credit -- a normal amount for a piece of modern IF. Let me start by
saying that these four testers did a great job. As I've already
mentioned in this review, Savoir-Faire is a technical marvel, and so
much more playable than any Infocom game I can think of that it's
laughable. But I would hypothesize that one advantage of having tens of
testers look at a game (which was the case with the Infocom games) is
that it's easier for an author to notice trends and sentiments with
respect to storyline and mood. So if an author notices, lets say, 6 out
of 20 people not feeling at ease with a story's direction it's a lot
easier to detect a plot concern than if 1 out of 4 people notice a
similar issue. I'd also hypothesize that having a smaller number of
testers might mean that those same sentiments may be overlooked and that
ultimately having a greater number of beta-testers will improve a
storyline regardless of who writes it. Having said that though, it's
tough to find dedicated beta-testers in the first place these days, let
alone tens of them, and again this is not a criticism of Ms. Short's
work in any way, just a comment on how the IF scene is different today
as compared to the Infocom heyday. Hmmm... I guess the old Infocom games
may have actually had an advantage or two in some areas over today's
games after all. Go figure.
Anyway, my brief quibble with the ending notwithstanding, Savoir-Faire
is an excellent game penned and programmed from one of today's IF
masters and well worth playing. Download it today!
Zcode .z8 file
Scapeghost
From: J. J. Farmer <J.J.Farmer-CSSE94 SP@G computer-science.birmingham.ac.uk>
Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995
NAME: Scapeghost PARSER: Very Good
AUTHORS: Level 9 Computing PLOT: Linear
EMAIL: ??? ATMOSPHERE: Excellent
AVAILABILITY: Commercial WRITING: Good
PUZZLES: Poor (part 1), Very Good (parts 2 & 3)
SUPPORTS: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, PCW, Apple II, Atari ST, XE, 800XL, BBC Master,
Enhanced (sideways or shadow RAM) BBC Micro, Commodore 64 or 128,
IBM PC, Apple Mac, Spectrum +2 or +3, MSX 64k, Spectrum 48k or 128k
CHARACTERS: Excellent DIFFICULTY: Moderate-Low
Let's start at the beginning: Alan Chance was a cop. Alan Chance was
infiltrating a drug gang. Someone (or something) tipped off the gang. Alan
Chance got killed, his partner Sarah was taken hostage and his ex-colleagues
think it's all because of his own stupidity.
But all is not lost. Alan Chance has returned as a ghost and, with the aid
of an adventure game-player intrepid enough to actually locate and purchase
a copy of this game, has three nights to rescue Sarah and bring the criminals
to justice.
Scapeghost was the last game Level 9 wrote before they withdrew from the
adventure market, and evidence of their previous experience is obvious. The
parser understands pretty much anything you type in; you can use the command
"FIND" or "GO TO" to take you to any object in the game, and you can order
around characters in the standard fashion (e.g. "JOE, RUN TO MY GRAVE, WAIT
FOR ANDY, FIND THE WATCH, GET IT, FIND ME"), although whether they actually
do it is another thing.
Like most of the later Level 9 games, Scapeghost is split into three
parts; in this case, the three nights on which the game takes place. However,
unlike many of the previous games, they can be played in any order. I'm
not really all that keen on this; the parts follow each other in a logical
and chronological manner, and later parts do all but give you the solutions
to puzzles in previous parts. I exercised restraint and played through the
parts in order.
The first part, November Graveyard, is probably the weakest. You start the
game by waking up at your funeral just before dusk. There are four characters
in the graveyard at this point (a workman, a supervisor, a detective and a
crowd of mourners), and valuable information can be gained from following
them around.
Then night falls and you are introduced to the first of your fellow
sufferers - Joe Danby used to be a publican, but he's stuck in the graveyard
now because his place "doesn't serve spirits" groans all round. He'll
take you on a guided tour of the graveyard and introduce you to most of the
residents. It doesn't take you long to deduce that each one of them has
a problem, and if you solve it for them they'll help you.
It's all rather routine and there are some awful puns along the way. The
climax of this part involves coordinating your small army of ghosts in
a final effort to delay the drug gang while you wait for part two.
As I said, this part has a good atmosphere but it's pretty much all been
done before. There is only really one innovative puzzle, which I won't
go into detail about because I don't want to spoil it for anyone. It
took me about a day to complete this part.
The location descriptions are very terse; some versions include graphics,
and these help to get the true feel of the locations. I had the BBC Master
version, and whilst the graphics were in an ultra low-res mode, with
the BBC's normal complement of 8 colours not really helping, they were
of surprisingly good quality and quite atmospheric. The back of the box
shows some screen shots from the Atari ST version, and these are of
near-photographic quality. On the other hand, they would put the best
pictures on the box...
Although the quality of the location descriptions is rather poor, all of
the other text is truly excellent. It more than makes up for the other
shortcomings.
Part Two, Haunted House, sees you with enhanced abilities, and you can now
leave the graveyard. Your previous squad of helpers has melted into the
darkness, with only Joe Danby remaining to aid you in your quest to
investigate the gang's old hideout.
The puzzles in this part are really excellent. You must use your ghostly
abilities to piece together your final moments, and to assemble a body
of evidence. All of this can be solved by pure logical thought. There's
still nothing too testing, but it's all good fun.
In part three you can finally get to grips with the criminals - but they're
trying to get to grips with you too, and force a priest to attempt an
exorcism. After your exploits in part two, the police are making their
way to the gang's new hideout - with lights flashing and sirens
blaring. A surprise assault it won't be.
Although it initially seems that you are left to develop your own strategy
to bring them to justice, the instructions actually tell you what to do,
which is a mite disappointing.
The atmospheric touches in this part are excellent. It's worth playing the
part through once just to sit and watch the gang's poker game. The puzzles
are once again very original, and in some parts hilarious. Yet again,
though, there's nothing overly difficult.
Scapeghost is a truly classic game let down by a poor first part and some
very brief location descriptions. Another review (in the magazine "The Micro
User") said that it contained "real brain-teasers", and left the impression
that it was rather difficult. I personally found it very easy - I finished
it in three days, which is the quickest I've completed any game, but maybe
I was lucky.
Availability is probably rather low - it was released in 1989, and
when I purchased my copy three years ago Level 9's supplies of all their
BBC games were running very low (sold out of all but three), and it's a
fair bet that a similar situation exists for the other formats. However,
if you do see a copy anywhere, snap it up at once. You won't be
disappointed.
Solution (Text)
Scavenger
From: Virginia Gretton <VGretton SP@G aol.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003
TITLE: Scavenger
AUTHOR: Quintin Stone
EMAIL: stone SP@G rps.net
DATE: October 2003
PARSER: TADS2
SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads2/scavenger
VERSION: Version 1.0 (competition release)
This game was well-coded and extensively tested. I was given choices at
the beginning, which worried me in case no-win states lay just beyond
the horizon. Happily, that was not the case.
The setting did not excite me for a long time. And being forced to
abandon a child in a hostile world went against the grain. Still, it is
a means to an end -- a workman-like way of coding progression.
Inside the main location, I was frustrated by clear solutions combined
with inability to get the required response. That said, the tension
built nicely and crept up on me unawares.
The conclusion was satisfying and mollified my buried worries about
child abuse. Multiple endings were sufficiently interesting to make me
want to try them. In some ways this game achieved more than my favourite
entry -- it drew me in and held my attention in a very subtle way. If
Scavenger were a book, I would find myself pre-ordering the author's
next title from Amazon.
From: Cirk Bejnar <eluchil404 SP@G yahoo.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003
My favorite game of the Comp, this old-school gem combines well-done
puzzles with evocative prose to create an intriguing world. You are cast
as a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, seeking some secret
technology of the ancients. This provides a nice explanation for why you
go off exploring behind every desk and pick up anything not nailed down.
One feature of note is the many alternate solutions that are coded.
There is a store in the opening portion of the game where you have a
choice of several items. Most of them are optional and they provide the
game with a fair amount of replayability.
From a technical standpoint, Scavenger is superb. Most actions are
anticipated and generate interesting customized responses. In addition,
alternate syntax is generously provided. Only once did I have to
rephrase a command. There are a few minor bugs in the end game where it
fails to properly check state, but nothing that adversely effects
gameplay.
Personally, I found the gameplay experience of Scavenger to be very
rewarding. You are given a goal at the beginning that drives the action
throughout. The primary task breaks down nicely into subgoals, how to
enter the base for instance, but there are also puzzles which are more
of less optional, depending on the supplies you have and whether or not
you want a full score. The balance between player freedom and keeping
the plot moving was well handled in my opinion. I would also like to
mention the writing. It is generally quite good at sketching places or
people with a few simple strokes. Details are included with just the
right frequency to give you a vivid picture of the world and its
inhabitants.
The difficulty is not particularly high nor is the game very cruel. And
if you do get stuck it features a nicely done hint system to give you a
nudge (or a shove if you need it) in the right direction. Highly
recommended to all except perhaps very young children. The language and
violence would probably garner a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.
Directory with TADS2 .gam file, license, readme, and walkthrough
Screen
From: Tony Baechler <baechler SP@G myrealbox.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #31 -- January 3, 2003
TITLE: Screen
AUTHOR: Edward Floren
EMAIL: edwardfloren SP@G netscape.net
DATE: September 2002
PARSER: Inform
SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2002/zcode/screen/screen.z5
VERSION: Release 1
I really enjoyed this game, but it had small faults. Before I mention
them, I would first like to mention that it was very well-written. I
found no obvious grammar errors. Almost everything I examined had
descriptions. I found no obvious bugs. I liked the overall premise. The
best way to describe it without spoilers is "short and sweet." However,
it is just the right size for what it is trying to do.
It had small faults. Probably the biggest was that it could not make up
its mind about whether we are in first or third person. At the beginning
it was obviously first person. It moved into standard IF, which I think
is second person. Finally, it was third person in the cut scenes. This
was a little jarring since I had already figured out my name but it kept
referring to me by name as if I was reading a book about a stranger. I
felt myself becoming distanced from the PC, as if I am looking at him
through an outside window or some such. Overall, this was minor but
detracted from the game.
Secondly, I felt it could have transitioned into the three parts more
smoothly. In other words, suddenly I am in a different part and am
trying to figure out who I am and what I am doing. I guess it did a good
job though because the first thing I thought to do was examine myself.
It did a fair job of describing me, but I thought that part 3 was better
done with more described characters. The NPCs were cutouts but that was
perfectly fine for a game like this. They both gave clues as to what
they wanted, so by poking around it was obvious what I was supposed to
do in part 2.
Finally, it lost some points for originality. Sorry, but similar devices
have been used before. Besides, I am a little confused how the screen
got there in the first place. Again, though, I emphasize that these
faults were very minor. The game was slightly above average. The faults
might have been less noticeable if the game was larger, but I think the
reason why I liked the game as much as I did was because of its small
size. It is enough to capture my attention but is not too long and drawn
out. I was never this PC but can relate to his nostalgia, even with the
narrative style changing as it did.
If the transitions were slightly smoother, this would be a good game to
polish and release after the competition is over. It is a pleasant way
to spend 10-20 minutes. Congratulations and good job. I would like to
see more from this author, since I like his writing style.
My comp rating: 6
Directory with zcode .z5 file
Seastalker
From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995
NAME: Seastalker: [Your Name] and the Ultramarine Bioceptor
GAMEPLAY: Infocom Standard
AUTHORS: Stu Galley & Jim Lawrence PLOT: Routine
EMAIL: ? ATMOSPHERE: Good
AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2 WRITING: Passable
PUZZLES: Good SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
CHARACTERS: Good DIFFICULTY: Very Short and Easy
In Seastalker, Infocom's only adventure designed for children, you
play the part of...yourself, a brilliant young scientist who has designed a
two-man submarine. Before it is completely ready, your aquadome is attacked
by a mysterious sea creature, forcing you to rush to the rescue, encountering
danger without and treachery within.
Obviously, ratings for such a children's game reviewed by an adult
will be somewhat skewed, though I tried to compensate for this in Wildcard
Points.
One of the authors has ghostwritten books for the Hardy Boys, Nancy
Drew, and Tom Swift series, and the writing style carries over very well.
The game has the same oh-my-gosh-golly sense of adventure that those books
have. This is not a criticism, I read and enjoyed the Hardy Boys as a child,
but it has a mixed effect on the ratings, causing the atmosphere rating to go
up a bit, but the plot rating to go correspondingly down, as I had read so
many of these books that the plot seemed rather routine and predictable.
The game scored well in the wildcard category, because I thought that
it was very innovative in three ways.
First, it allowed you to give the main character your own name, or
any other name that you chose (this was later used in Moonmist, also by the
same authors, but in no other Infocom games).
Secondly, unlike other text games, items in a room are not
necessarily visible when you walk in the room, even if they are out in the
open. In one room, there is a pile of miscellaneous equipment that contains
something you need. You are not told that the item is there, and searching
the pile will not help unless you tell the game exactly what it is that
you're looking for (If you have your documentation, you should be able to
figure this out).
Third, the system used for piloting your submarine, gives you an
ASCII readout of your radar screen, similar to the sector maps in those old
Star Trek games (periods for empty sectors, a special character for your
ship, and so on).
There was however, one feature that I didn't like. Seastalker's
documentation comes with maps of both building complexes, and the
neighbouring harbour (not the box-and-line graph paper maps that the players
would make, but floor plans). This is fine in itself, but many times, the
description of a room in the game would not tell you where the exits are.
If you have the documentation you can figure it out of course, and perhaps
this was meant as a form of copy protection, but it was still rather
annoying, as it meant that you had to keep the docs right by your side at all
times.
I did come up with a little joke to counterbalance this. Remembering
the stereotype of the child genius who can design moon rockets, but can't
pronounce his S's correctly, and noting that the title of the game, and the
name of your submarine had three "S" sounds between them (Seastalker,
Scimitar), I decided to play with a main character named Thuthie Thmith.
All children's software today seems to be designed for the preschool
through kindergarten age group. The rest is for adults. Seastalker, like
The Hardy Boys, is for ages 8-14, and even 10 years later it remains about
the only game specially geared towards them. Since the purpose of children's
software is always to educate as well as entertain, an all-text adventure
seems especially appropriate. It's only a pity that there aren't more.
Solution (Text)
Shade
From: Tina Sikorski <tina SP@G eniac.stanford.edu>
Review appeared in SPAG #23 -- December 29, 2000
TITLE: Shade
AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G eblong.com
DATE: 2000
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/shade.z5
VERSION: Release 2
Walkthrough? No (hints)
Genre: Surreal
+------------------------------------------+
|Overall Rating A |Submitted Vote 9|
|Writing A |Plot B+|
|Puzzles C+|NPCs n/a|
|Technical C+|Tilt A+|
+------------------------+-----------------+
*** Initial Thoughts
Mmm. Games that aren't what they seem at first. Except that this one, I
already had a feeling wasn't going to be what it was presented at first,
simply from the quality.
I have to say, with all due respect to Zarf, that I was a bit surprised
to discover he was the author; I generally don't enjoy his games this
much simply because his puzzles are usually beyond me. That is just not
a problem in this game.
It will be very difficult for me to discuss this game without revealing
spoilers, I'm afraid; I'll try to keep it to a minimum.
*** Writing (A)
First-rate, and from the opening paragraphs I was nearly certain that
the pseudonymous author was someone with prior experience. I never
formed a solid opinion about the potential author -- I'm actually not
very good at such things in any event -- but I was sure it would turn
out to be someone whose name I recognized.
Consider, if you will, this bit of description:
"Odd, how the light just makes your apartment gloomier. Pre-dawn
darkness pools in the corners and around the tops of walls. Your desk
lamp glares yellow, but the shadows only draw your eyes and deepen."
This is something well-crafted. Without getting terribly verbose, it
reveals information, sets mood, and (though you don't yet know it) also
firmly sets the plot in motion. Light and darkness are important in this
game (or at least certainly in my view of the game), and they definitely
are properly introduced in the first paragraph.
Beyond that, I could continue to quote, but why ruin your chance to see
the writing develop? The writing is excellent, details abound even where
strictly speaking unnecessary, and responses to your actions are superb.
*** Plot (B+)
This is the thing that is so hard to discuss without giving anything
away, because it is on the one hand so terribly simple, but on the
other, there are some twists. Perhaps one of the most interesting parts
is that there comes a time when you know precisely what will happen (at
least for a while) and yet... there is still this sort of frantic "what
happens next" reaction. It's eerie, it's creepy, it's just plain fun.
*** Puzzles (C+)
This would be the one area the game is a little weak in. Oh, sure, the
puzzles are fairly straight-forward and oftentimes even sensical. There
is an in-game hint of sorts. But... it would be fair to say that the
puzzles pretty much exist to give you something to do while you're
waiting for the next, er, cascade of story, and unfortunately, because
of a few timing problems, it -feels- that way.
*** NPCs (n/a)
Except for possibly once, there are no NPC encounters.
*** Technical (C+)
The way the apartment was implemented was interesting. There wasn't much
else in the way of neat trickage (fairly surprising in retrospect).
There were a couple disambiguation problems, and maybe one bug (but it
may have been on purpose) with the in-game hint provision, but overall
it was fairly bug-free.
*** Tilt (A+) and Final Thoughts
I cannot, without revealing entirely too much about this game, explain
to you just what it was that had me raving about this game for two days
afterwards, including randomly piping up with a particular rant that
would, again, spoil things. Let me just assure you that this is the
case: for two days, I was so haunted by this game that it was constantly
in my head, teasing me... waiting for me in the darkness. In the
shadows.
In the Shade.
Inform .z5 file (updated version)
Mac .hqx archive (updated version)
Inform .z5 file (competition version)
Shades of Grey
From: Molley the Mage <mollems SP@G WKUVX1.WKU.EDU>
Review appeared in SPAG #2 -- September 26, 1994
NAME: Shades of Grey PARSER: AGT
AUTHOR: See Review PLOT: Serious, and quite different
ATMOSPHERE: Excellent AVAILABILITY: F_IF Archive
WRITING: Often evocative PUZZLES: Not the real focus
SUPPORTS: AGT ports (IBM/Mac/Atari ST) CHARACTERS: Atmospheric
DIFFICULTY: Fairly Standard (5/10)
EMAIL: ???
This is an excellent piece of IF and certainly the best game I've ever seen
written using AGT. One of the most interesting factoids about this game
is that the authors have never actually met face-to-face; the entire game
was designed and written on Compuserve gamers' forums and via E-mail.
Despite the geographic disparity, the product is a wonderful game, once you
get past the very first single stupid non-intuitive puzzle, which is all
that keeps this game from being an 8.0 (and thus in my ultra-elite).
Basically, you have amnesia. You are wandering the streets of an unknown
city during an unknown year wondering who you are and how you got here.
Eventually you will discover a clairvoyante who will help you to discover
your true self and your past through the power of Tarot. What you learn is
that this is a somewhat political, occasionally difficult, *extremely*
well-written game which deals with the past, present, and future of Haiti.
Beyond that I can say no more without spoiling the excellent plot, but take
my word for it -- Shades of Grey is a game not to be missed. You might
find occasional frustration with the parser, but overall this is only a
minor annoyance and is quickly forgotten in the stream of evocative images
which will begin pouring forth from your computer as soon as you play...
From: Christopher E. Forman <ceforma SP@G rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Review appeared in SPAG #8 -- February 5, 1996
The AGT programming language was designed to be easy to use, to give
non-programmers the power to create their own games. Yet in games I've seen,
its parser has been almost consistently flawed, leading me to believe that
users didn't find this aspect of the programming as user-friendly as AGT's
developers had intended.
But "Shades of Gray" is different. The annoying quirks that plague
every other AGT game simply are not present. The parser generally accepts
multiple methods of phrasing, a move in a wrong direction does NOT repeat
the entire room description, and trying to examine something that isn't
there gives a better message than the annoying "You see nothing special",
which always seems to imply that something is there when it really isn't.
Add to this the fact that the writing approaches the very best in _any_
text adventure, and you've got something well worth downloading.
What fascinates me about "Shades of Gray" is the fact that it wasn't
written by a single author, or even a creative pair. This game is the
combined efforts of _seven_ authors, from both the U.S. and the U.K. Not
only that, but the authors' only means of communication has been through a
private CompuServe Gamers' Forum! Having collaborated with a co-author
myself, I can appreciate the difficulty in trying to merge the products of
two creative minds into a single streamlined work of art, but SEVEN...! One
would think that conflicting ideas and plot details would crop up incessantly,
reducing the end product to a cluttered, incomprehensible mess. But,
astoundingly, it doesn't.
In fact, "Shades of Grey" has the most fascinating plot I've ever
seen in a work of I-F. You begin with no clue about who you are or what
you're supposed to be doing, shifting back and forth between hallucinations
and reality. Eventually you gain the help of the clairvoyant Lady Magdalena,
whose Tarot cards seek to provide insight into your existence. (I often
wonder if this game was Graham Nelson's inspiration for the Tarot puzzles in
"Curses.") As you learn more about yourself, and your past and future, you
act out the roles of yourself as a young child, a soldier, and Robin of
Locksley and the Sheriff of Nottingham, all culminating in a complex
political thriller surrounding Haiti. To say more would certainly spoil the
entire game, but rest assured that everything fits together beautifully in
the end, after you've faced every facet of yourself and put the events
together.
The use of seven authors leads to a rather segmented design, but
linearity serves the story well. The individual episodes vary in style and
quality (both in the writing and the overall design), yet somehow this
creates the effect of many pieces coming together. And the whole of "Shades
of Grey" is far, far more than the sum of the parts.
Still, it's not perfect. The parser still isn't up to TADS level,
but it's the closest I've seen from AGT. And there are some small mazes and
a few puzzles that involve trying to guess the author's frame of thinking.
But the rest of the game is so breathtaking that these flaws are easy to
ignore.
Give this one a play. Even if you normally hate the AGT system,
you'll enjoy it.
AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip) (updated version)
AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip) (older version)
IBM Pophints (.zip)
Shadowgate
From: Adam Myrow <amyrow SP@G midsouth.rr.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #36 -- March 16, 2004
TITLE: Shadowgate
AUTHOR: David Griffith (originally published by Icom for the Nintendo
Entertainment System as well as many other platforms)
EMAIL: dgriffi SP@G cs.csubak.edu
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
AVAILABILITY: freeware IF-archive
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/sgate.z5
Source code is also available at:
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/inform/sgate.tar.gz
Sometimes, a game grows larger in the mind when it is not played for
many years. This was the case for a game called Shadowgate which was
released by Icom for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. I have
been totally blind since birth. Thus, I was never able to play the
original game by myself. However, I was able to play it a few times by
having a friend read the text and I would tell him what I wanted to try.
The game was a mixed graphical/text game with a menu of verbs which
could be applied to objects in your inventory. Anyway, I never got very
far, and eventually, lost access to the game.
Fast forward to late 2003. I was casually browsing rec.games.int-fiction
when I noticed a post announcing that David Griffith had just released
an Inform adaptation of Shadowgate based on the Nintendo version. I was
thrilled. After over a decade, I could now finally play this game by
myself and get past the puzzles which had previously stumped me. I
grabbed it immediately.
What I discovered was that this game had become much more exciting in my
mind than it was in reality. First off, as the original was based on a
menu of verbs rather than a parser, the puzzles were rather simple. With
one or two exceptions, one object is used to solve one puzzle. Once the
puzzle is solved, the object is either removed from play or will never
be needed again. There are no alternate solutions, and few hints. Either
you get past the obstacle, or you die. In fact, dying is extremely
common in this game. There are numerous death traps besides the instant
death puzzles. Take an object, go through a door, or attack a monster
with the wrong weapon, and it's curtains for you. As if that weren't bad
enough, there is the light source problem. When you start the game, you
have a torch. You will quickly notice lots of torches lying around for
the taking. Be sure and grab them! Your torches don't last very long, so
you will find yourself constantly lighting new torches and dropping dead
torches. The good news is that there is no inventory limit. This was
fairly minor, as there are more than enough torches to let you finish
the game. I think I ended up with 10 extra torches at the end of my play
session. It's just a nuisance to constantly be told that your torch is
about to go out and having to light one. There are no mazes, and no
hunger or sleep puzzles, so most of the really annoying puzzles of older
games are absent. It's just that learning by death is not much fun.
Here's a typical example of what I mean.
Tower Prison
You are in a bare, round room. A beautiful woman is chained to the
wall. Moonlight streams in from a window.
You can see a golden blade and a beautiful woman here.
>x blade
It's some sort of spike that is made of precious metals. The tips are
as sharp as needles.
>get it
As you reach for the golden blade the beautiful lady suddenly
transforms into a wolf! With a load [SIC] roar, the wolf pounces on
you, taking your life! The wolf's powerful jaws rip your throat out!
*** You have died ***
It's a sad thing that your adventures have ended here.
Examining the girl gives no hint that she is anything other than what
she seems. So, the only thing you can do is learn by dying, undo, and
try to figure out how to get rid of the wolf. Another even worse example
of this.
Stone Tunnel
This hallway is made of large granite slabs. There are exits up,
west, and north.
You can see four unlit torches here.
>w
Without thinking, you jump through the opening and immediately hear a
loud click. Suddenly, the granite slab above you gives way and
crushes you beneath it. It breaks every bone in your body.
As for plot, it is the standard save-the-world type of plot. You must
overthrow the evil Warlock Lord before he releases the Behemoth to
destroy everything. Of course, this involves collecting various items
and assembling them into a weapon of great power. In other words,
nothing that hasn't been done before. There are a few spells as well. I
don't know how spells worked in the original graphical game since I
didn't get that far, but in this version, the good old Enchanter system
of using gnusto to copy them into a spell book from a scroll was adopted
probably because it is readily available. This really isn't a big deal
as far as I'm concerned since like everything else, the spells each are
used exactly once.
So, overall, I was a bit let down by the game mainly because it had
grown into an epic in my mind. What it is, in reality, is a very short
little fantasy game with loads of death traps and one-use objects. There
are also plenty of red herrings. However, while the plot is minimal, the
writing is fairly decent aside from a few spelling errors. I think most
of the writing comes from the original game, but according to the
"about" text, many descriptions were made longer to account for the lack
of graphics. So, it's not all bad. As for coding, I found a few minor
bugs, but for the most part, things work pretty well. The torches, while
annoying, have had a lot of work done on them to make dealing with them
as painless as possible. I would suggest that any game developers have a
look at this game's source code even if you don't plan on using Inform.
Bundled with the source code are some transcripts of very early beta
versions of the game with embedded remarks from the beta testers. These
serve to illustrate the sorts of bugs to watch out for and the crazy
things players might try when they get stuck. So, for me, I actually
found the source code and transcripts very informative despite finding
the game to be a little annoying. If you treat it like a game from the
late 1980's rather than a modern piece of IF, I think it will sit much
better with you than it did with me.
From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G mts.net>
Review appeared in SPAG #37 -- July 10, 2004
This game is a reimplementation of Shadowgate Classic as it appeared on
the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) presented by ICOM in 1989. It's
an interesting experiment and follows somewhat in the recent IF Arcade
tradition that converts graphical games to text. I played Shadowgate in
'89 and always felt it would transfer well to a text adventure setting,
so I was pleasantly surprised to see this game released in late '03.
In its exactness, the Inform version stays very true to the NES version
(from what I can remember of the NES version). Even the little bits of
background noise and red herrings from the original were completely
implemented, and I have a lot of respect for the painstaking amount of
replaying of the original version that must have happened to get this
done correctly. All of the NES version's written responses were intact
although thankfully the IF version cleans up some grammatical and
spelling errors. For nostalgia's sake then, this was a great walk down
memory lane. Unfortunately, once you look past that, it also highlighted
many of the design errors inherent in many of the early NES games.
There are unfortunately many things to gripe about here so let's start
with one of my least favorite foibles: author telepathy. Specifically,
there was major death without warning. Seemingly innocuous actions like
picking up items freely available in the scenery, or entering apparently
non-threatening directions often lead to death with no discernible
justification. It was also fairly easy to break certain structures which
always left me wondering whether or not I had permanently made the game
unwinnable or not. I think the game can't actually be made unwinnable,
unless you don't budget your light resources properly (which is another
issue, but I'll get to that later), however death-without-warning
abounds and waits in every corner, which is something we just don't
accept in IF games anymore.
Another issue is a concern that always crops up in my reviews, and
that's the combinatorial explosion of having too many items in your
inventory. Throughout the game, you collect well over 80 items and when
you begin the endgame, it's difficult to remember what each piece does
or the exact details of each item. This leads to a lot of put X in Y,
hit X with Y experimentation, which gets pretty tedious the third or
fourth time around. It also makes the game more difficult than it
probably should be, as your light resources dwindle very quickly -- the
net effect of all this is that every time I somehow made the plot
progress I would have to save, explore, make the plot progress again,
restore to a previous saved game armed with my new knowledge, and
proceed forward. Ultimately, that type of forced gaming experience is a
recipe for disaster.
It's unfortunate, too, because many of the game's structure problems
could have been easily alleviated by loosening its light restrictions a
little. The light issue I keep referencing actually has to do with the
limited life cycle of the torches you find lying around. As I played
through the game a second time with walkthrough in hand, I completed it
with a reserve of only 5 usable torches (having picked up every
available torch I could find). Essentially, I won without wasting a
move. Unfortunately, the game is so cavernous and the amount of author
telepathy need to win the game so great, that winning without wasting a
move is next to impossible, as is completing the game with any usable
torches. There is a spell of sorts that you can find that might help you
with this issue, but it has to be invoked in every new room you enter,
which leads to further tedium. And, considering the tight restrictions
on your time, I'm not entirely sure you'll find the spell before you run
out of torches, so the benefit might be moot regardless.
Still, the torch issue remained faithful to the NES original, as did a
number of other conventions, which have to be commended. For example,
the original Shadowgate loved to bury clues in the scenery --
specifically, the game's walls. The regular Inform parser has a wall
object parsed for each of the cardinal directions, and the author here
did a great job of subtly clueing the player into examining a wall
without blatantly telling us which one. I believe this involved a nice
hack in the Inform source code's wall objects. That is to say: a general
query of X WALL, would still generate a disambiguation request, listing
all the cardinal directions, but if you examine the right wall there
wasn't a simple default response [I am impressed here because I believe
I attempted to parse something similar a while back and made a mess of
it]. Before I started playing the game, I was curious to see how the
author was going to implement the puzzles buried in the room's
constructs and for the most part, I was really happy with the way he did
it. There was only one glaring omission, where a clue of vital
importance was buried in the scenery with no hint as to where or even
why a player should look. I knew it was there from the NES version, but
were I a first-time player, there is absolutely no way I would have
found it.
So, overall the game is effectively parsed, diligently researched and
implemented (the attention to the original game's detail is impressive
and the consistent representation in the face of the original's poor
design choices -- i.e., torch issue -- was commendable), but ultimately,
due principally to the original's shortcomings, it doesn't live up to
the standards we expect in IF nowadays. Despite this, however, I was
surprised by how much I really enjoyed the nostalgia. As a result, you
may want to check this out if you've actually played the NES version,
but probably skip it otherwise.
Zcode .z5 file
Inform source code
Shadows On The Mirror
From: Jessica Knoch <jessicaknoch SP@G mindspring.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #35 -- December 31, 2003
TITLE: Shadows On The Mirror
AUTHOR: Chrysoula Tzavelas
EMAIL: exstarsis SP@G msn.com
DATE: October 2003
PARSER: TADS3
SUPPORTS: TADS3 interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2003/tads3/shadows
VERSION: IFComp ver 1.0
A major part of this game is figuring out who you are, why you're stuck
in this car, who the driver of the car is, why you don't want to see
your grandfather, and so on. It's tricky; there's a lot to it, and it
can't all be explained, even when you play through it several times. But
what I have seen of the story and background is pretty intense. There's
some supernatural stuff going on, and the PC is in the thick of it, and
you get to be cool, and the driver of the car is cool, and there's just
a lot of cool parts. But... there is a problem.
It's kind of like the third quarter of a really close (American)
football game. Sure, the score is tied at 24, but that's what it was at
the half, and you're not down to the wire yet, because it's still the
third quarter. Or maybe it's like the second to last chapter in a short
novel -- all the really good stuff has already happened, and all of the
explanations are saved for the last chapter, so even though you're in a
great story, it isn't happening now. It's already happened, or it's
going to, but everything that happens in Shadows is subtle and under the
surface.
That said, what you get of the story is definitely worth playing the
game to see. I was initially put off by having to repeat actions to get
the whole effect, but it's mentioned in one of the "hint" or "about"
menus, so I guess I should have known. There are some pretty good liner
notes, which is always nice. Hints and a walkthrough are included, so I
can't complain too much about the puzzles, such as they are. In this
game, "puzzles" are either an action you have to take, or a milestone
you can reach in the conversation. In this sort of situation, getting to
a "losing" ending and having to replay loses a piece of the game's
appeal, but there's nothing to do for it but restart and try again.
Shadows makes it worth the trouble.
TADS3 .t3 file
She's Got A Thing For a Spring
From: Duncan Stevens a.k.a. Second April <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998
NAME: She's Got a Thing for a Spring
AUTHOR: Brent van Fossen
E-MAIL: vanfossen SP@G compuserve.com
DATE: 1997
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/spring/spring.z5
VERSION: Release 1
PLOT: Reasonably interesting (1.4) ATMOSPHERE: Effective (1.6)
WRITING: Strong (1.6) GAMEPLAY: Mostly good (1.4)
CHARACTERS: Excellent (1.8) PUZZLES: Not especially notable (1.3)
MISC: Attention to nature is a nice touch (1.6)
OVERALL: 7.6
Though it's arguable whether She's Got a Thing for a Spring has the
best or most memorable setting in this year's competition, Brent van
Fossen has clearly given the backdrop a wealth of detail: there are
ample descriptions of flora and fauna that play no part in the game
other than scenery, and the player gets a feeling that Mr. van Fossen
lives among and enjoys observing the sights that he describes. The
rest of the game doesn't quite live up to the setting, unfortunately,
but She's Got a Thing... is a solid entry in this year's competition
nonetheless.
The story: you've received a note from your husband asking you to meet
him at a hot spring, and you have to get over there, first, and then
assemble all the little things needed to enhance the
experience. Getting there is fairly straightforward, and gathering
most of the accoutrements isn't difficult, but one puzzle at the end
requires considerable intuition and, even when the gap is bridged,
doesn't make much sense. (It feels like the author is either trying to
make the game harder or trying to come up with an excuse for the
puzzle -- which is, to be fair, a reasonably clever one, though the
game doesn't give you much of a nudge.) Still, the idea is compelling,
and the sensual delights associated with the various features of your
dip in the hot spring are so vividly described that it seemed a safe
bet to me that this is among the author's favorite real-life
experiences.
Among the more intriguing parts of the game is only tangentially
related to the plot: you encounter a fellow named Bob, who resides in
a cabin in the woods and can offer his knowledge on virtually
everything in the game. Bob seems to serve as a stand-in for the
author in providing useful information about the various forms of
wildlife you encounter -- he has a paragraph for all of them, as far
as I can tell -- and he'll go on about the various aspects of his
little cabin and garden. (In fact, he so fits the image of the
benevolent kindly old fellow that his one off-color comment, when you
ask him about the spring, seems slightly out of place; dirty old man,
perhaps, but it doesn't seem to fit his persona.) One gets the feeling
that Bob is so happy to have someone to talk to that interaction isn't
much of a problem for him; he'll often babble on whether or not you
respond.
If there is a side of Bob that is lacking, it is Bob himself -- we get
something about his wife Sally, dead of breast cancer, but virtually
nothing else. (Moreover, you are told repeatedly that you remind Bob
of Sally, certainly effective in painting Bob as a slightly forgetful
old coot, if that was the intention, but it breaks the spell more than
anything else. (Even a forgetful old coot doesn't word it the same way
every time.) If you stay by Bob's side, you can watch him picking
strawberries, fixing a rocking chair, fixing the porch, making lunch,
making a strawberry shortcake, painting the forest (no, silly, on
canvas) -- and though all this takes hundreds of moves, the passage of
time is slowed while you're with Bob (a comment on the stimulating
nature of his company?) so that you don't forfeit the main story by
hanging out around the cabin. The main problem with all this is that,
apart from a few things right at the beginning, you're largely
confined to typing Z endlessly -- there are undoubtedly a wide variety
of things to ask Bob about, but they slow down his various chores, and
even those run out after a while. There doesn't, sadly, seem to be any
way to participate in Bob's actions, and watching Bob put together the
batter for the shortcake, ingredient by ingredient, loses its
fascination after a bit. And if you're an IF player conditioned to
expect that something elaborately coded will be relevant, well, you'll
be wrong, because you only need about five moves' worth of interaction
with Bob to finish the game.
Bob is worth noting because he's the rare example of an NPC who is
much more developed than he needs to be; in fact, he's a relatively
ordinary character with an ordinary life which you can even witness in
all its glory. The failure to really fill out Bob's background is a
weakness, yes, but even so, he does such a remarkable amount of things
and reacts to such a remarkable amount of stimuli that one can only
wonder at the amount of code that went into him. It isn't, of course,
unprecedented to have an NPC who plays encyclopedia for the game, but
to have one who does that but also carries on complicated
time-sensitive tasks of his own (which speed up dramatically when you
walk away from him). And I don't recall ever encountering an NPC who
did such a variety of, well, mundane tasks, described in such detail;
it reinforces the idea that living in the wild and carrying out these
chores is something that Mr. van Fossen enjoys, or at least thinks
more people should know about. Bob is noteworthy, in short, because
he's one of very few NPCs that can't be reduced to an obstacle; more
often than not, characters represent puzzles, locked doors upon which
you need to use the right key to get the needed object or bit of
information. There is much more to this one -- the mundanity of it all
makes him feel more real -- and if for nothing else, She's Got a Thing
deserves recognition for the inclusion of Bob. (He's a close second to
Maurice of Zero Sum Game as best NPC of the competition, I think.)
There are several puzzles, as mentioned, one slightly unfair but most
reasonably straightforward. One requires observation, as it happens,
to figure out a pattern, irritating to the impatient IF player but
consistent with the feel of the game (as in, nature is there to be
observed, not simply co-opted to the player's ends). The gameplay is
likewise strong; most verbs and nouns have several synonyms, and there
are multiple substitute syntaxes for most important actions. One
puzzle is a mite peculiar -- you dodge an adversary simply by moving
away, and the adversary disappears and doesn't return (though the
behavior in question is not atypical in real life) -- and the solution
to another is not obvious to those of us who aren't familiar with hot
springs -- but most of the puzzles are passable. As suggested, though,
the appeal of this one lies less in the puzzles than in the scene as a
whole, and though a few elements of it do break the spell -- two elk
lock antlers and stay that way for the _entire game_, several birds
are largely untroubled by your presence -- the game is well-written
enough to make those minor flaws. The descriptions are effective...
The canyon rim trail descends, clinging tightly to the stone
wall, then disappears entirely as the rocks converge. You have
no choice but to wade, the current swift and
powerful. Overhead, a small slice of the sky is visible between
the two cliff faces, covered with ferns that thrive in the dark
moist environment here. The crevice runs northwest to south.
...and restrained; Mr. van Fossen has the sense not to go on about how
beautiful the setting is, certainly a welcome touch. Moreover, the
vocabulary employed is considerable and scenery objects get far more
detailed description than standard IF would give; it is virtually
impossible to find a "That's not something you need to refer to in the
course of this game" in She's Got a Thing... (And there's even some
humor: a book that you find includes short stories about "a bored
diplomat who uses underground means to accomplish his goals", with
other references to the 1996 competition.) And even though things get
resolved oddly at the end -- you learn about a few things involving
your own thoughts and motivations for the first time -- the nature of
it fits the game quite well.
On the whole, then, though She's Got a Thing... might not be the entry
whose playing experience stays with you the longest, it's a polished
work that's consistently enjoyable to play. Though sticking with Bob
is only for the extra-patient, there is much to do in the game
environment, and I gave it an 8 in the competition.
Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough
Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995
NAME: Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
PARSER: Infocom
AUTHOR: Bob Bates PLOT: Very Good
EMAIL: ? ATMOSPHERE: Excellent
AVAILABILITY: LTOI-2 WRITING: Excellent
PUZZLES: Very good. SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
CHARACTERS: Quite good. DIFFICULTY: Standard
In Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, you play the part of
Dr. Watson. Moriarty has stolen Victoria's regalia, leaving a trail of clues
to follow, and Holmes must recover them before the weekend is out. Fearing
that Moriarty would anticipate his own moves and trap him, Holmes puts the
case in your hands to throw Moriarty off the trail.
Having read all the Conan Doyle Holmes stories, I found Sherlock a
positive delight to play. Both Doyle's writing style, and the atmosphere of
19th century London are approximated extremely well. Unlike Infocom's
earlier mysteries which took place in one house, Sherlock's action takes you
all over London. Numerous little bits of Holmesian minutiae flesh out the
game. The humour is appropriately wry without resorting to the usual
Infocom style of silliness that would not work nearly as well here as in
other games.
Sherlock is remarkably free of save/restore puzzles (i.e. ones that
require death or failure to acquire information that can be used after you
restore the game. You are usually given multiple opportunities to solve ones
that you probably wouldn't get the first time around.
The only place where Sherlock suffers is in its "intangibles". The
concept of the villain laying down a trail to follow is more reminiscent of
Batman's Riddler than Professor Moriarty. Also, the idea of Holmes turning
such a vital case over to a tyro, stretches the imagination a bit, despite
the fact that he personally oversees your activities. The game also suffers
a bit from the "Zork Syndrome", where you as the adventurer go wherever you
want and take whatever isn't nailed down. In the course of the game you must
take or deface items from Scotland yard, Madame Tussaud's, and the Tower of
London, with little consequence or resistance. In e-mail correspondence, Bob
Bates told me that he was aware of this problem when writing the game, and
sought to minimize it as much as possible. To a large extent he succeeded,
but there is a little residual weakness. Finally, it must be remembered that
Moriarty died in the same story that he was introduced (The Adventure of the
Final Problem), and that at that point Watson had never heard of him.
Therefore there is a difficulty in going back and doing a story where
he and Watson meet. To be fair though, Conan Doyle himself made the same
cheat in The Valley of Fear, as did almost all of the movies.
Despite these nits, the game's strong points almost completely
overwhelm them, and Sherlock, Infocom's final all-text game, ranks as one of
their very best.
Solution (Text)
Shogun
From: Preston Landers <planders SP@G sierra.net>
Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995
NAME: Shogun PARSER: Infocom Graphic
AUTHOR: Infocom PLOT: Linear
EMAIL: ??? ATMOSPHERE: Very Well Done
AVAILABILITY: LTOI 2 CD version only. WRITING: Very Good
PUZZLES: Fair SUPPORTS: Infocom Ports
CHARACTERS: Very Good DIFFICULTY: Hard
I forgot that I had a copy of one of Infocom's last releases, Shogun, laying
around over Christmas break. So when I found it, I decided to tackle it
because the novel it was based on, James Clavell's SHOGUN, is one of my
favorites. The parser is Infocom's last, the Graphic style similar to Zork
Zero. There is one graphic puzzle (that can be solved "non-graphically" if
you must.) There are many beautiful illustrations in the style of Japanese
17th century paintings.
The game itself is extremely linear. If this really turns you off, you
won't like the game. You go through a number of "episodes" or scenes, very
closely based on the book. Honestly, I don't think I could have won the
game if I had not read the original novel (or used the built-in hints
extensively.) For instance, you must know where to go and what do to almost
by magic. If you haven't read the book, or you don't plan on using the
hints, then you might not enjoy this game. Those caveats aside, it WAS a
very enjoyable game. It was done by Dave Lebling (I believe.)
The story, in case you haven't seen the mini-series or read the book, casts
you as John Blackthorne, a 17th century English pilot, sailing a Dutch ship
towards the fabled Japans. The game goes quite a bit into the political
intrigue between the various feuding Daiymos (Japanese kings.) Ultimately,
you must become a samurai and help your Daiymo become Shogun, or Supreme
Ruler. There are a few sub-plots, such as your love interest with the
beautiful courtier Mariko (how many games do you get to type 'MAKE LOVE TO
MARIKO' to score 5 points?) but overall, the game flies from one episode to
the next in a very fast-paced, and overall, enjoyable game.
From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #4 -- March 2, 1995
In SHOGUN, you play the role John Blackthorne, an English seaman in
1600, working for the Dutch to open up a trade route to Japan. Based
upon the book of the same name, the story involves your attempts to
learn Japanese native customs while caught in the middle of the power
struggles between Toranaga, and Ishido, two local warlords.
The writing is much grittier than in any other Infocom game; from
the cockroaches swarming over your cabin floor to the frequent violent
killings to the occasional nude bathing scene. Shogun was the only
Infocom game ever to carry a warning label on the box. If it were a
movie, it would probably be a PG-13.
Shogun is also the first of Infocom's three Graphic Interactive
Fiction games. Unlike the other two however, there is no interaction
between text and graphics (except the automap in the maze in Chapter
10), and graphics simply pop up at certain times. Ordinarily in a game
like this, the cartoon-like graphics would positively destroy the
atmosphere, but in a historical novel they resemble what you might see
in an ancient manuscript, and thus add to the atmosphere.
One weakness of the game is in compartmentalization. Rather than
one large game, it is divided into 18 separate chapters. It is rather
like Nord and Bert, except that there are more chapters, and they must
be played in a specific order. This does not work as well here as it
does in Nord and Bert.
Your point total is the only thing that carries over to the next
chapter; the items in your inventory are pre-determined. Admittedly,
this is probably the only way to adapt such a novel to game form, but
the effect is still not entirely satisfactory. Many text games end up
being all puzzles and no story. Shogun is exactly the opposite. Too
often the story just seems to go on around you while you get
meaningless points for smiling, nodding, or bowing at the right times.
The result is rather too many "guess what the author is thinking" type
puzzles, rather than puzzles that can be reasoned out.
Two exceptions to this are Chapter 1 (The Erasmus), and Chapter 16
(The Ninja). Both are outstanding blendings of story and puzzle
solving, and rank with Infocom's best moments.
One nice feature is that the game asks if you want to save at the
end of each chapter. I keep a save file for each chapter on a scratch
disk, so that I can enter the story at any point if I ever feel like
pulling the game off the shelf. Shogun is a very good game to read,
though a bit less satisfying to play. Overall though, a fine effort.
Solution (Text)
Shrapnel
From: Christian Baker <lankro SP@G hotmail.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000
TITLE: Shrapnel
AUTHOR: Adam Cadre
E-MAIL: ac SP@G adamcadre.ac
DATE: 2000
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/shrapnel.z5
Shrapnel is weird. Really weird. I just want to get that out in the
open. Shrapnel seems less like a game, more like an idea that Adam Cadre
had been mulling around. The question on r-g-i-f is, is Adam Cadre a
genius or a madman. I’m settling for genius, but as Andrew Plotkin said
"If he snaps and starts barbecuing the neighbors, of course, we'll have
to pencil in some corrections."
Shrapnel starts off outside the classic Zork White house, but it’s soon
obvious that this is no Zork clone. Or any clone of anything ever made.
You go north, you get eaten by vicious attack dogs. I try to quit,
seeing that this is just another "One room death" game. I start typing
QUIT, and find to my surprise that the game is forcing me to type
RESTART. I go north from the original location, and find that another
location has opened up. And so on. And so forth. I felt like the game
was leading me round the (extremely strange) plot, and it seemed like it
was just a matter of time before I completed it.
But on the brighter side, the writing and room descriptions were
excellent. A good example is:
In the pines
As you proceed along the path, the light trickling in through the
treetops seems to grow brighter, as if it had been sunrise and not
sunset when you began. And the trees... this isn't North Carolina
anymore. This is, what? Maryland? Pennsylvania? You'd think a man
would notice walking two hundred miles, but apparently not.
You hear voices in the distance.
"Hey, Green," says the first one. Even this is enough for you to
pinpoint the accent: Carolina. So you're not caught behind enemy
lines. Good to know.
"Yeah?" says someone, presumably Green. There was a Green in your
regiment, you recall. Common enough name to be coincidence, though.
"Have you been helped?"
The characters are a bit underdeveloped, but what do you expect from a
game you can complete in under 10 minutes? What this game does best is
unsettle you. The whole game has an extremely eerie atmosphere, and half
of that is due to the strange plot (or lack of a plot, I’m not sure
which.) The other half is due to some Adam Cadre writing, and the
strange ignoring of player input. It really adds something to the game,
and gives the feeling of a total lack of control. All in all, the game
is short and pointless, but darn enjoyable for a short while.
From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000
It's science fiction! It's a split-identity story! It's a war story!
It's a parody of Zork! It's a satire! It's Adam Cadre's Shrapnel, the
weirdest bit of IF to come down the pike in quite some time, and there
are enough things going on here to drive several full-length games (this
one takes about 15-20 minutes, though). The ideas are interesting, but
there's not much polish here--mostly, we only get the ideas. Still,
Adam's ideas are better than most, and the game does has its intriguing
moments.
To try to describe the plot of Shrapnel would be a thoroughly futile
endeavor, because the point is that the story doesn't travel in any
discernible path: rather, you come across fragments of story here and
there, and what exactly is going on isn't apparent until the end, when a
character appears and infodumps all over you. Even then, it may not be
fully clear how everything fits together--there are still plenty of hows
and whys left unresolved for those who care about such things. Moreover,
there are quite a few memorable images and surprising moments, meaning
that you might remember and be affected by certain bits of Shrapnel even
if you never tried to put the various story pieces together.
Shrapnel might in fact be remembered more for its meta-IF elements than
its actual story. For one thing, this is the first work of IF to
actually ignore keystrokes--not disregard a command, but actually ignore
that the player is typing something and show something else as the
input. What's shown is 'restart,' no matter what the player types, at
the restore/restart/quit prompt, though restart generally continues the
story from where it left off rather than starting from scratch.
Moreover, pauses are an essential part of the presentation of the text,
again a meta-IF function that may catch the IF veteran off guard.
Similarly innovative is "talk" as a conversation system: you direct your
conversation toward whoever you're paying attention to, usually the
person you last interacted with, and you're given a choice between
accepting or rejecting a proposed rhetorical sally; if you refuse, your
character says something else, something you have no way of predicting.
The fragmentary aspect, the variety of apparently unrelated plotlines,
is reflected in the text itself, which now and again spits out
disjointed words and phrases that have already appeared elsewhere.
All these are intriguing, even subversive takes on IF as we've known it
up to now, but--I know, I know, this is a hangup of mine--they also
reduce the interactivity aspect down to just about zero. In something as
short and disjointed as Shrapnel, the immersion factor is minimal
anyway--by the time the player has figured out what's going on in the
story, the story's over--and when the game commandeers the keyboard, the
player is justified in thinking, well, why do you need me here, tapping
on the keyboard? Why don't you just let everything scroll by me at once?
Certainly, there's interaction of a sort here, even if it's forced:
being powerless to stop the course of the story is an integral part of
the experience, of course (though it's still possible to quit at prompts
other than restart/restore/quit), but, again if you can't figure out
what story is being told, it's hard to get all worked up about not being
able to stop it. The limited control over the conversation system is
similar: if the player's only control over what's said is a veto on one
conversational option, the character may as well just start talking.
(Admittedly, there are several people the player can talk to, but the
choices aren't exclusive--were this rewritten as static fiction and the
conversations simply written out, one character after another, the
effect wouldn't be dramatically different. There are a few effects that
couldn't be reproduced in static fiction: notably, you die repeatedly
over the course of the story, and the place is littered with your own
corpses by the end--but it's questionable how much impact that has on
the story when the player's likely reaction to the deaths is something
on the order of "huh?" It's not that there are no choices to be made in
Shrapnel, but the choices there are affect the outcome so minimally that
the result is closer to F than IF.
Still, in its own way, this is pretty good F; the effect may be that of
an early draft of a novel, with ideas, themes, and character development
all fighting for space, but it looks like it would be a fascinating
novel. Notably, the protagonist is split between two separate
identities, and piecing together the way those identities is an
intriguing challenge. (Of course, given the rampant confusion, the
player isn't likely to make much headway in separating out those
identities by the end of the story, but there's definite replay
potential.) On the figurative level, the numerous violent deaths you
experience are a precursor to the pain that your character inflicts, and
you could even say that you're desensitized to the violence sufficiently
that it doesn't have much effect on you, the player, after a while. (A
similar process seems to have gone on with the character himself.) The
Zork parody element--Shrapnel is set in and around a white house, and
the living room has a rug with a trap door under it--brings out the
ho-hum-more-violent-deaths aspect, since one hallmark of traditional
fantasy IF is dying violently so many times that *You have died* has
zero emotional impact. The core of the story, involving a dysfunctional
family and abuse, is vividly and disturbingly rendered: the abuse is
sufficiently distanced from you (you hear accounts of it rather than
actually seeing it--that your sense of culpability is minimized, which
is exactly the effect that the character himself has achieved. The way
you seem to find horrific violence around every corner is a direct
reflection of the nature of the story: the events that have already
transpired have left unsightly secrets everywhere. The science-fiction
aspect that appears at the end of the story, in an apparent attempt to
make a bit of sense of the demented structure of the story, feels a bit
tacked on, but it doesn't diminish the impact of what's come before.
In its own way, then, Shrapnel is quite a story, and that it's less
interactive fiction than a forced march isn't a major drawback, in the
end. It's certainly not easy to make sense of what goes on, nor is it
particularly pleasant, but it's still an impres precursor to the
paindown to just about zerooff guardfragmentary aspectdemented
structureseems to have gone onho-humrhetorical sallytacked onrampantbits
of Shrapneldisregard a commandscratchdiscernible pathculpability*you
have died* [Hit any key to exit.]
Inform .z5 file
Brief notes on the game, by the author
PC Executable
A Simple Theft
From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
Review appeared in SPAG #20 -- March 15, 2000
TITLE: A Simple Theft
AUTHOR: Mark Musante
E-MAIL: olorin SP@G world.std.com
DATE: 2000
PARSER: TADS standard
SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/quick.zip
VERSION: Release 1
Mark Musante's A Simple Theft is indeed simple: you're apprenticed to a
fellow who wants to retrieve a jewel from a castle, and you're sent in
to do the deed--but it's a nice small game nonetheless, with just a few
puzzles and a fairly thoroughly done backstory. The setting is fantasy,
but magic at this point is not under control--your master is hoping to
find something that would help in control it--and the incursion of magic
at an entirely unexpected point in the story, and your discovery that a
certain object has magical properties, therefore fit the plot nicely:
you have no special insight into or control over magic, so you're not
expecting it when it appears.
The technical aspect, while mostly good, isn't flawless: one puzzle is
marred by what I consider a major design flaw (it turns on using an
object that you're told you can't pick up), and a key object is rather
confusingly described. Still, in a game this small, there's only so much
that can go radically wrong, and on the whole the coding is fairly
solid. Likewise, the writing is more than good enough to tell the story,
and it's pretty funny in spots as well.
A Simple Theft feels like an introduction to a longer game--in
particular, your boss, who's barely a character in this one, is an
intriguing character who deserves more development in a longer, more
in-depth game. Indeed, the ending text suggests that there's more to
come: the story doesn't feel at all complete. For one thing, most of the
names dropped in the introduction remain dropped--they're not explained
anywhere--suggesting that the author intends to make something more of
the world introduced here. The PC is worth fleshing out as well--it's
intimated that you're a thief, but you don't learn anything about how
you learned your trade or how you came to be apprenticed to your boss.
In short, A Simple Theft is a nice preview of what could be an
intriguing full-length game. Should there be a followup, it'll certainly
be worth a look.
TADS .gam file
Sins Against Mimesis
From: Paul O'Brian <obrian SP@G colorado.edu>
Review appeared in SPAG #13 -- February 5, 1998
NAME: Sins Against Mimesis
AUTHOR: Adam Thornton
E-MAIL: adam SP@G princeton.edu
DATE: 1997
PARSER: Inform standard
SUPPORTS: Inform interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/inform/mimesis/mimesis.z5
VERSION: Release 1 (1997 competition release)
Few things are more unfunny than an in-joke that you're not in on. On
the other hand, an in-joke that you *are* in on can be hysterical, as
it provides not just the pleasure of humor but also the feeling of
community that comes from shared experience. Sins Against Mimesis is
definitely a very in-jokey game, and consequently not for
everyone. However, having been a longtime (since 1994) lurker and
sometime participant in the rec.*.int-fiction newsgroups, I was part
of the audience at which the game was aimed, and I have to admit that
I found a lot of the in-jokes really funny. In fact, one of the most
fun parts of the game was to play name-that-reference -- kind of the
IF equivalent of listening to a World Party album or a Dennis Miller
routine. Of course, the nature of the game (and the fact that it was
written pseudonymously) also invited us to play guess-the-author. My
guess was for Russ Bryan, but as it turns out the game was written by
Adam Thornton, a relatively new author.
If you haven't played much IF, and in fact even if you haven't spent
much time on the IF newsgroups, most of this game is going to mean
very little to you. Even its title is an allusion: to "Crimes Against
Mimesis," a well-crafted series of articles posted to the newsgroups
by Roger Giner-Sorolla (whatever happened to him, anyway?) a year or
so ago. The rest of the game continues in that vein. The opening
paragraph alludes to Jigsaw. The score of the initial part of the game
is kept in IF disks which magically pop into the player's inventory
every time a correct move is made. In some ways, this familiar, almost
conspiratorial approach is a weakness. Certainly in the context of the
competition it won't endear Sins to any judge who stands on the
outside of the privileged circle at which the game aims itself. Even
for an insider, the constant barrage of "if you're one of us, you'll
know what I mean" references can start to feel a little
cloying. However, the game is cleanly coded and competently written,
and on the first time through I found it quite entertaining.
There aren't many games which I would highly recommend to one group of
people and discourage others from playing, but Sins is one of them. If
you're an raif and rgif regular, I think you'll find Sins quite funny
and entertaining. If not, forget it. It's bound to be more baffling
and irritating than anything else.
Prose: The prose is generally somewhere between functionally good and
rather well done, with occasional moments of brilliant hilarity.
Plot: The plot is based around several clever tricks which are quite
funny at the time, but aren't worth repeating. If you've already
played, you know what they are, and if you haven't played yet I won't
give away the jokes. Like the rest of Sins, the plot is funny the
first time through but won't wear well.
Puzzles: Actually, this was the weakest part of the game. Many of the
puzzles can be solved by performing extremely basic actions, which of
course hardly makes them puzzles at all. Others, however, depend
either on extremely specific (and not well-clued) actions or on
deducing something about the surroundings which is not included in
object or room descriptions. For a game so adamantly self-aware, it's
ironic that Sins falls into some of the most basic blunders of puzzle
design.
Technical:
writing -- I found no mechanical errors in Sins' writing.
coding -- I found no bugs either.
Inform file (.z5) (updated version)
Inform file (.z5) (competition version)
Inform source code and makefile (.zip) (updated version)
GUEmap format map (.gmp)
Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla
From: Donna Mccreary Rodriguez <donnar SP@G ix.netcom.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #6 -- July 26, 1995
NAME: Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla
PARSER: AGT
AUTHOR: Gil Williamson PLOT: Slightly linear
EMAIL: ??? ATMOSPHERE: Whimisical
AVAILABILITY: IF Archive (hobbs.zip), F WRITING: Good
PUZZLES: Clever; logical SUPPORTS: AGT ports
CHARACTERS: Whimsical; "punny" names DIFFICULTY: Easy
You, the main character, are Sir Ramic Hobbs, Knight Errant. You have
made a pledge to rescue Princess Anne de Pea from the clutches of the
High Level Gorilla, who resides in the Pleasure Dome of the kingdom of
Trassch Khan. Corny, yes......but really a light, fun little game with no
pretenses except to entertain the player and present some interesting
puzzles. Gil Williamson, the author, says that---having spent days lost in
the caverns of Zork--he wants to make no unfair demands on the player, and he
is true to his word. In case you get stuck, there is a solution file zipped
in.
Try this one. In my download from GMD there was no information about
registering the game and no contact info on the author, so I suppose
it's a gift.
AGT files with PC Executable runtime (.zip)
AGT Source code(.zip)
Sir Ramic Hobbs and the Oriental Walk
From: "John Wood" <john SP@G elvw.demon.co.uk>
Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997
NAME: Sir Ramic Hobbs and the Oriental Walk
AUTHOR: Gil Williamson
EMAIL: Gil.Williamson SP@G syntegra.bt.co.uk
DATE: October, 1996
PARSER: AGT
SUPPORTS: MS-DOS (runtime included), AGiliTy
AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/wok
Not a popular choice, this was my second-favourite game of the
competition and my favourite AGT game to date by far. You play a
drunken knight the "morning after" who has to get the castle deeds back
from an evil wizard - not the most original of plots. However, the
amusing responses from the game's narrator and the situations you find
yourself in more than make up for this.
I only used one hint during the two hours, and this was the second game
I went on to finish before the end of the competition. The ending is
unfortunately weaker than the rest of the game, which would have lowered
the score I gave it slightly, but it still remains great fun.
From: "Christopher E. Forman" <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997
First off, will someone please tell me whether the last word of this
game's title is "walk" or "wok"? The game says "walk," the filenames
say "wok." Also, is it "Sir Ramic Hobbs" or "Sir Ramric Hobbs"? The
other game starring this character says "Sir Ramric." I'm bumfuzzled.
Having never played the other Sir Ramic (Ramric?) Hobbs game, "Sir Ramic
Hobbs and the High-Level Gorilla," I can't comment on how this game
stacks up to its predecessor. I can say, however, that it explores both
extremes of enjoyability. The ability to shapeshift into different
animals was a lot of fun, and brought back fond memories of Infocom's
"Arthur." It's funny, with clever object descriptions and commentary by
the game's parser, which assumes the persona of a wizard who follows you
about. His comments are frequently witty taunting, but it's done good-
naturedly, unlike "Stalker." This is much more entertaining than the
nameless, faceless entity that most adventure game parsers never rise
above (though "Lost New York" does come close). The method of travel
(via armchair) is amusing. Also, it's impossible to make the game
unsolvable.
My score was dragged down, however, by a great deal of typical AGT fare:
Incongruities, a lack of apparent plot until the very end, obscure
puzzles, a maze where one wasn't necessary, odd results when the author
didn't anticipate something (entering the library when invisible, for
instance, still gets you stopped by the librarian), and of course the
almanac puzzle. Ohhhh, do not even get me STARTED on the almanac
puzzle. After nearly an hour of wandering about, squinting in vain at
the teeny tiny letters on my screen, trying to deduce a compass
direction from them, then finding I'd made a wrong turn when I followed
the directions I DID find... blur-r-r-r-gh!
Half good, half bad, which means...
From: "Magnus Olsson" <zebulon SP@G pobox.com>
Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997
[ Note: There appears to be some confusion about the title of this
game: is it the "Oriental Walk," as the title screen says, or the
"Oriental Wok," as it's called in some of the docs? "Walk" probably,
since there _is_ an "Oriental Walk" in the game, but no wok even in
the kitchen :-). I suppose the "wok" is intended as a pun... ]
One topic that has been the subject of much heated discussion on
rec.arts.int-fiction is that of player characterization. How can you
cast the player as a set character, perhaps totally unlike the
player's ordinary character, and make him or her feel and act like
this character? The prevalent view seems to be that most players hate
when the game tells them what they feel and think, and that few things
are as irritating as being told that your, perfectly reasonable,
action is out of character.
It is interesting to see that one of the less sophisticated games of
the competition not only tries to do this, but succeeds at it. And,
perhaps surprisingly, it does so by casting you in a far from
flattering role: that of Sir Ramic Hobbs, an antihero in every sense
of the word - or, to be frank, a bumbling, drunken buffoon.
Or perhaps this is just why it manages to pull it off. For "Wok" is a
farce, and you are the butt of the jokes. Not just you, Sir Ramic,
but you, the player. Much of the humour lies in the player being
misled, and the game pretending to misunderstand the player's
confusion as Sir Ramic's stupidity. In some cases (such as the sudden
darkness), the game leads the player completely up the garden path,
thereby forcing him to act in character.
As the reader may have guessed, "Wok" is a game that talks back to
you. It even makes an attempt to explain who is doing the talking by
giving a name to the "narrator": Prang, a disembodied wizard who takes
orders from the player and guides him along. As a moderately
experienced IF player, I found this slightly annoying at first, and
then I forgot all about it. However, the documentation says that the
game is aimed at beginners, who maybe will find this a help.
Despite the fact that the game talks back to you, commenting on your
every action, and making fun of many of the mistakes you're making, it
is all very good natured (as opposed to a certain other competition
game, that apparently made some people feel quite insulted). I never
had the feeling that the author was making fun of me, but rather that
we were sharing a joke. And Sir Ramic may be a buffoon, but he's quite
a lovable buffoon.
This is all very skillfully done. Apart from the writing, however, the
game is quite unsophisticated. To start with, it has a rather
primitive look-and-feel. To avoid fanning the ongoning religious wars,
I won't speculate whether this is due to the game being written in
AGT; it does have, however, the feel of a "typical, mid 80's, AGT
game" - garish colours, rather minimalistic room descriptions, a
simple parser, rather underdeveloped atmosphere, NPC's that are just
animated obstacles.
To be fair, however, these aren't very serious flaws. The parser, for
example, is quite adequate (there is one glaring "guess the word"
problem, but a better parser couldn't have remedied a lack of
synonyms), one of the NPC's (the dog) is at least a bit more
developed, and this is not the kind of game one plays for the joy of
exploring a detailed fantasy world.
The puzzles are fairly standard, but there are some interesting twists
(and the series of transformations at the end is quite clever and
entertaining). The obligatory maze adds nothing to the game and could
have been advantageously removed. The eponymous puzzle, the "oriental
walk," is clever, but far too tedious - and this is aggravated by the
fact that saving is disallowed while solving the puzzle. Disabling
saving is probably a way to prevent solutions by trial-and-error, but
an unfortunate consequence of this is that a single mistake means
having to start the puzzle all over again, with all the directions
randomized.
The online hints can be somewhat infuriating, since there is only one
hint per room, but fortunately a walkthrough is provided.
Unfortunately, the walkthrough is of no help in the "walk" - you'll
just have to sweat it through (the endgame is worth it!).
In conclusion, "Wok" is a game that lives by its wit and humour, which
are more than enough to outweigh its shortcomings in other areas. In
fact, I found it one of the funniest games I've played.
Directory With AGT Files
Six Stories
From: Suzanne Britton <tril SP@G host.ott.igs.net>
Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000
TITLE: Six Stories
AUTHOR: Neil K. Guy
E-MAIL: tela SP@G tela.bc.ca
DATE: 1999
PARSER: TADS standard
SUPPORTS: TADS interpreters
AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/tads/six/six.gam
VERSION: 1.0
"Six Stories" is the first full-blown use of HTML TADS I've seen,
complete with high-quality graphics (well, "illustrations" feels like a
better term), sound effects, and speech. However, these multimedia
aspects are used differently than they are in most commercial games. A
combination of effects, including subtle background textures that look
like aged paper, are used to give you the impression of being inside a
storybook. There is your own story, which you are playing out, and five
others nestled inside that, each recounted with pictures and a quiet
voice like a parent reading at a child's bedside. All come together to
contribute to the one puzzle of note (which, though it is arguably an
"old chestnut", I quite enjoyed solving).
I found the experience, though all too brief, to be thoroughl
