IF Comp 2002

Reviews by Jess.  (Who's this?)

As a reviewer, I noticed a few things about this year's Comp.  First, I didn't see any games so flawed that I couldn't play them.  I can remember reading about previous comps, with buggy games and horrible implementations that made it impossible to play every game.  There are a lot of good games in this year's crop, and only one or two that were what I would call "poorly coded."  Hopefully, the overall increase in game quality means that people are starting to figure out which games belong in the comp and which don't. 

And now, the scores and reviews.  Remember, these were done with the Old Scoring System.  For those who are interested, I have re-scored the games with the New Scoring System and listed those scores on a separate page.  Also just for fun is a listing of what the games would have scored if I graded on a curve, found on a separate page.  To sum up before we begin, a list of the games follows ranked from best to, ah, least-best. 

Another Earth, Another Sky  8.4
Not Much Time  8.3
The Temple  8.2
The Moonlit Tower  8.1
Identity Thief  7.9
The Granite Book  7.6
Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me!  7.4
Hell: A Comedy of Errors  7.2
Janitor  7.1
Out of the Study  7.1
MythTale  7.0
Color and Number  6.9
Unraveling God  6.8
Constraints  6.7
Fort Aegea  6.6
Scary House Amulet  6.6
A Party To Murder  6.4
Eric's Gift  6.4
The Case of Samuel Gregor  6.2
Sun and Moon  6.2
Jane  6.1
Moonbase  6.0
When Help Collides  5.9
coffee quest II  5.9
Evacuate  5.6
Rent-A-Spy  5.6
Screen  5.4
Four Mile Island  5.2
Terrible Lizards  5.0
BOFH  4.8
Concrete Paradise  4.8
Augustine  4.6
Koan  4.4
Ramon & Jonathan  4.3
The PK Girl  4.1
etc.
Not Rated:
Blade Sentinel
Photograph (beta-tested)
Tookie's Song (author)

Games are reviewed here in the order that I played them.  Random order generation thanks to Comp02.z5, by Lucian P. Smith.

Sun and Moon

David Brain, Web

What a good one to start off with!  Sun and Moon is a web-based game in which you play, well, you.  Except for the introduction and epilogue, which are more traditional blocks of text, the action in this game consists, literally, of trying to find information, piece together a story, and even stop the Bad Guys, all completely online. And it worked surprisingly well.  There are a lot of things to like about this game and how it was written.  First of all, I actually liked the fact that you don’t know the whole story when you finish the game.  Let me point out that the ONLY reason I liked that was because the author has explained the whole thing on a separate page, which you can read when you’re done with the game.  It didn’t quite feel right to stop the Bad Guys’ Evil Plan without having real proof that Something Bad was going to happen if I didn’t, but I stopped the Plan anyway because I figured that’s what I was Supposed To Do.  Sure, that increases the feeling of “it’s just a game” but it works to get you to do what you need to do, also.

A second great part of this game was the maze – and what a maze!  Now, I know a lot of people are “tired” of mazes, or they don’t like them, or whatever.  I am not one of those people.  I actually like mazes under a few conditions: the maze can be mapped, it has rules and sticks to them, and is generally consistent as you walk around it.  Plus the interface should be cool.  A maze in a traditional text-only adventure is rather tedious, I agree.  But this maze was on the web, and between the interesting scenery, the colored doors, and my handy map, this maze was an amazing amount of fun.  It is easily solved if you spend enough time on it, which was a little bit of a problem with the two hour time limit (I think I spent forty minutes on just the maze).  Of course, the time spent on the maze was extended a bit because of the apparent bugs – there are two rooms which misstate their exits by a little, as if they were rotated, but once you know that you can work around it.  Still, not quite perfect.

Talking about the maze leads me to the other puzzles in the game.  Sun and Moon’s puzzles are really your basic paper puzzles, translated to a web format: crossword puzzle, maze, cryptogram, and rebus-type word solving.  They are also very difficult and/or time-consuming.  Now, I’m a regular and dedicated crossword-solver, but I like the Washington Post.  The crossword in Sun and Moon is, according to the author, the UK variety, which in Games Magazine (for those of you who follow) are known as “Cryptic Crosswords.”  They are very difficult.  I found the puzzle in Sun and Moon nigh impossible, especially with time running out. 

The major problem with the puzzles was that I didn’t see any reason to solve any of them.  After spending so much time on the maze (which was tremendous fun, by the way), and finally solving it, I didn’t get any new information that I needed to solve the overall problem of the game.  It turned out that there was an oblique reference to one of the three possible solutions to the game, but I missed it.  Because of that, I wasn’t motivated to solve the Name Game (which, it turns out, I wouldn’t have been able to do anyway – too hard), so I missed all the information provided by that puzzle.  Solving the crossword gave the second of the three solutions, and it was one I was able to figure out after reading the hints with all the crossword answers AND going to an external website to do some searching.  But I did get it!

Speaking of external websites, one of the nice touches in Sun and Moon was that the author included links to “real” websites as well as links to other pages in his game.  This was only possible because he included a line at the bottom of all of his pages that said “This page is part of Sun and Moon, etc” so that the player would know whether or not he was looking at reality or fiction.

And is this game fiction?  Unquestionably.  Is it interactive?   Well, yes it is, mostly.  As much as I enjoyed the maze and putting the pieces of the story together, it was not a whole lot more than clicking on the right things in the right order.  But what is a text adventure besides putting the right words in the right order?  I’m not one of those who believe that just because you can only use the mouse to move along, it’s a “no-brainer.”  Sun and Moon definitely wasn’t, and I applaud the use of medium!

Without further ado, let’s begin the scoring process of my first review in my first Comp.  I’m using my standard 10-point, 10-category scoring system.  The average of the ten categories, rounded to the nearest integer, is the composite score for the competition (for more information, see the Scoring System). 

Story: 7.  A little cliché, perhaps, but still effective, maybe as much for the way it was presented in bits and pieces as the actual storyline itself.

Writing: 8.  Effective, solid, a few typos in the text but not distracting.  The author does a good job of writing several styles: company webpage, personal webpage, blogs, not to mention the descriptions of the maze rooms.

Puzzles: 5.  I love the maze, but every other puzzle was far too difficult for me in the time limit.  Actually, I’m not sure I would have been able to solve the others given any amount of time.

Coding: 7.  Don’t think there’s no coding involved in a web-based game; there is and I know it.   The webpages were well done, the Java that was used was just enough and I had no problems with it.  However, I’m afraid I just can’t give full points for skipping the hard-coding involved in using, say, Inform or TADS.

Parser: 4.  My system doesn’t take into account web-based games very well, but we’re working with it.   There really was a limitation in not having a prompt for the player to type at, because she can’t try anything that comes to mind.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  This is almost all from the maze.  There’s not a whole lot of humor in this game in any form.

Participation/Involvement: 3.  It was interesting to be playing “me,” but too often I thought of what I was doing as a game.  This is probably because of the way the puzzles were/weren’t integrated into the story.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  The puzzles were hard, and that was mildly annoying but I’m used to it.   Other than that (and the two rooms in the maze being turned wrong) there was next to no annoyance in game play.

General Idea: 8.  I’d just like to say I enjoyed this format IMMENSELY more than some web-based styles I’ve heard of: drop down menus, choose-your-own-adventure style “clickthroughs,” etc.  This is the future of web-based adventure gaming, and it looks good.

Wildcard: 9.  Did I mention I really liked the maze?  Seriously, this is a game worth playing and reading the hints for the puzzles.  It was fun while it lasted, what more can you say?

Composite Score: 6.2 (Comp Score: 6)

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Fort Aegea

Francesco Bova, Z-code

A game after my own heart in more ways then one: not only do you get to play a near-D&D type Druid, with magical powers and a love of nature, but you get to roam a nicely designed countryside and save the town (not the world, but the town) from the evil monster.  Better still: this is not the old, hackneyed story of gather items and trick/kill the monster, but a new story (at least to me): stay alive and away from the monster for a certain amount of time, and you win. 

It’s a large game, no doubt about that.  If you were to do everything right the first time around, you’d probably finish in two hours.  I am not the type of player who does everything right the first time.  The Prologue was perfect: I had just enough time to visit each area and examine some things before the “action” started.  The arbitration between farmers was a great way of getting me into the part, and there were some subtle hints about what things were for and when to use them throughout.  For instance, when you examine the salt in your hut, it lets you know that the salt is for communicating with other druids.  Aha, that’s useful.  There is an awful lot of useful, but not crucial, information to be found in the extensive reading material.  Maybe that’s why I was rushed at the end: I spent too much time reading through the background information.  I’m still glad I did, because it was fun and besides, I wasn’t going to be able to solve those puzzles myself anyway.

The major problem with the Prologue was trying to get out of Allarah’s place and return to my own hut.   I tried “wake,” since it was a hallucination, I tried “exit,” “return,” “head back” (which was specifically mentioned in the text – “It’s time for you to head back.”), and none of them worked, so I ended up dead in the Prologue.  Whoops.

Anyway, a lot of the “correct path” through this game is intuitive or strongly hinted, which makes it quite a lot of fun to play.  I had time to go to each of the four sections of the game and die once before I had to pull out the walkthrough (please, authors, write hints. I know walkthroughs are easier, but some of us just need hints, and want to try more of it on our own!).  It turned out I was on the right track in each of the four sections, I just couldn’t figure out quite how to finish it off. 

This all points to one obvious (and forgivable) flaw: the game is too large.  There were lots of good hints; the puzzles are clever but gettable, if only I had had more time.  I loved the satisfaction I got when I figured something out on my own, but I really wanted to see the ending before the two hours were up, so I turned to the walkthrough and didn’t get the full enjoyment from the game.  This is unfortunate, but there isn’t a lot I can do about it.   I barely had time to look at the second ending in the walkthrough, which is in my opinion ten times better than the first ending.  It took me twenty full minutes just to use the walkthrough for JUST the first ending!  Serious text.

Anyway, there are a few picky problems with missing commas, “loan” instead of “lone,” extra commas, “it’s” instead of “its,” extra punctuation, a few missing synonyms, and the worst of all:

>REMOVE BREAST PLATE
(first taking the breast plate)
You’ll have to take it off first.

Yipes!  And “breastplate” should be allowed as a synonym.  There were also some missing secondary nouns; for example, one of the villagers is described as wearing a silver necklace.   But when you try to examine the necklace, you can’t see any such thing. 

I really liked the menu-based conversation system when talking to the dragon – I was worried about that before I found out it was multiple choice.  Good choice.  I liked the fact that I didn’t need to make a map at any point.  I especially liked how the “completed” sections of the game were covered with green gas so that I would know they were finished.

Overall, this is a very well-done game that could use a little fleshing out as far as coding is concerned, and a few more evenings over which to play it.  Multiple endings, many ways to die, and a good sense of the Player Character.  Let’s score it, shall we?

Story: 9.  I liked it.  As has been said, it can be more satisfying to save the village than to prevent the Entire Galaxy from Imminent Destruction.  And there were definite touches of realism (i.e., not everyone makes it) in the versions of the story that I saw.  Great touch!  

Writing: 6.  In most places the writing was perfectly serviceable; however, there were lots of grammar and punctuation problems.  Remember folks, you only use an apostrophe in the possessive case (except “its”) or when something is being contracted, not for plurals (lean-to’s). 

Puzzles: 4.  Obviously well thought-out, but too much for me to solve.  And there were no hints.  Many of the little ones I solved on my own, but the ultimate puzzle in each section was beyond me.  Also, who knew that “prop” was going to be an implemented verb?  And if I can “bandage moose with reeds” why can’t I “heal moose with reeds” or “cover moose with reeds?”

Coding: 7.  Okay, a few quibbles like the breast plate problem above, but on the whole, this thing is pretty well coded.  There was a lot here to code.

Parser: 9.  High-quality Inform parser. 

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  Not a lot of humor here, as might be expected when your town is under attack from a vicious, poison gas-breathing green dragon.  For some reason I had fun swimming in the ocean, though.  And talking to animals.

Participation/Involvement: 8.  I was definitely thinking like a druid here, as much as possible anyway, and more importantly thinking like THE druid that was the PC.  This might have been strongly influenced by the fact that I read all the background information (not to mention I have an 18^th level druid back home), but it still worked.  

Lack of Annoyance: 5.  Oh, there were annoying parts, sure.  Nothing horrible, just a few problems with what I could do or what I could figure out.  For instance, once you enter the Charcoal Camp and talk to Ned, you are stuck there until you can solve that puzzle.

General Idea: 8.  I like games with druids, especially when they act like the druids I’m used to.  I like games in the forest, and I like games where your only objective is to stay alive (rather than hunt for treasure).

Wildcard: 6.  Enjoyable enough, although I could have hoped for a “happier” ending, or at the very least a way to save the baby.  Maybe I missed it.

Composite Score: 6.6 (Comp Score: 7) 

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Concrete Paradise

Tyson Ibele, TADS2

Boy, I hate to be picky right off the bat, but in the intro text, the line “What’s for breakfast mom?” should really be “What’s for breakfast, Mom?”  See the difference?  The entire introduction/prologue continues in the same way (misspelled words: amounst, excerice, development; missing punctuation), although once we get to the jail proper the spelling and grammar are much improved.  Of course, many other things are sub-par instead: words like “bars” and “walls” are treated as singular, synonyms are missing, and you can’t sit on the toilet. 

But let’s leave the writing aside for the moment.  The game is, as described, an interactive jailbreak.  Of course, before you can break out of prison you have to be sent to it, so the prologue consists of finding some way to get yourself in trouble with the law.  You don’t have any choice but to do so, as there seems to be no other way to end the segment, but there are many and varied ways of getting into mischief, which is fun.

There are not, however, many and varied ways of breaking out of jail.  There seems to be only one way, and it’s annoying, and I’ll tell you why.  SPOILERS AHEAD.  So, you’re in jail and you’ve got a glass bottle with cork, a pen, and a window that looks out over the ocean.  Sounds like the perfect time to write a note, doesn’t it?  If only you had paper.  So you check out the books that are conveniently located on the bookshelf (which, by the way, cannot be called a “bookshelf”).  But “X BOOK” gets you a response like “The book accompanies several others on your shelf.”  Not too exciting, is it?  So you try “TAKE BOOK” which earns you a response of “You don’t really have any use for it, so you leave it where it is.”  That is a dead giveaway that the book is not important, so I can’t get paper from it, right?  Wrong.  Turns out you have to say “READ BOOK” to get the useful stuff out of it.  That is not nice to players.  I had to get that from the walkthrough (since there are no hints).

Also not nice to players is what you have to do once you have a note in the bottle ready to throw it out the window.  I can’t find any way of getting the game to recognize that what I would like to do is put the bottle out the window.  I tried every syntax I could possibly think of, and got “I don’t recognize that sentence” every time.  So I assumed I was missing the right combination of words and turned to the hints/walkthrough.  Aside: authors, I understand not wanting to include hints because “the puzzles are easy enough,” but sometimes some of us just don’t get it!  We need help!  And there are no such things as “unnecessary” hints!  Sure, if I read them before I need them it might detract from my enjoyment of the game, but if I NEED them then it will only HELP me!  That makes them necessary, and it’s a heck of a lot better than heading off to a walkthrough for help.

Okay, anyway, according to the walkthrough I was supposed to put the bottle in the toilet and flush it.  This is the toilet I can’t sit on, by the way.  My point is, even if the window is not the solution to the puzzle, you need to recognize my attempt to use the window, to let me know that it isn’t the right way to go.  Otherwise it’s far too frustrating. 

Looking past the incomplete coding and the annoying puzzle solutions, there are some good things about this game.  The sense of place is pretty real, even if it’s like no prison I’ve ever heard of, and there are some well described objects, like the apple (even though the “worms” weren’t recognized) and the boiler room.  And with the walkthrough in hand it wasn’t too hard to get to the end.  This game has a lot of potential, and with a little bit more thought and effort it could be great.  Let’s see the numbers.  (P.S. I would like to be able to thank the tall stranger!)

Story: 5.  Not exciting, not terrible.  A little contrived.  An innocent accused candy thief killing the guard to escape seems a bit extreme.

Writing: 4.  Countless misspelled words, missing punctuation, but otherwise straightforward and unadorned.

Puzzles: 4.  Some minor puzzles are simple, but I needed the walkthrough more than once, and there were very few “wrong” answers taken into account. 

Coding: 6.  TADS itself counts for a lot, but there were way too many words that it didn’t know.  By the way, I think Inform is a lot nicer when it says “You can’t see any such thing” rather than admitting to the ignorance of TADS with “I don’t know the word ‘noise.’” 

Parser: 8.  TADS has a lot going for it.  A few minor quirks.

Humor/Enjoyment: 5.  So far, the funniest game I’ve played, not that that says a lot.  The most enjoyable part was probably the prologue, where I could find at least six different ways of getting in trouble.

Participation/Involvement: 5.  I wanted to break out of the jail, but it felt so contrived.

Lack of Annoyance: 2.  And that may be generous.  For goodness sakes, why am I not allowed to pick up one of the books off the bookshelf?  Why??

General Idea: 6.  Escaping from jail in a mostly lighthearted way: what can be wrong with that?  Except when you kill a guy even knowing he has a wife and kids, I suppose.

Wildcard: 3. 

Composite Score: 4.8 (Comp Score: 5)

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Constraints

Martin Bays, Z-code

Now this is interesting: three games in one, isolated from one another in story and character, but tied loosely by abstract ideas.  I thought at first that I’d be annoyed by the lack of continuity, but I was quite surprised by just how much the three games/scenes fit together.  A few broad notes about all three before I discuss any in more detail: first, let me thank the author very much for including both hints and a walkthrough for each of the three scenes, even where it seems (and maybe is) completely, 100% superfluous.  I appreciate that.  That said, please don’t insult me when I find that I do need hints.  I hate that.  Second, the writing throughout the game is remarkable.  Here is an author who knows how to use words to their greatest effect. 

The first of the three scenes is called “Falling,” and that is indeed what you do.  This was almost perfect in capturing the feel and panic of falling through blackness without being able to see or stop yourself.  But it isn’t quite perfect, and mainly because of a lack of verbs.  When the game tells me “Breathe. You’ve got to breathe,” well, I’m going to try typing “breathe,” and it’s a tad jarring when it says that isn’t a verb it recognizes.  “Panic” is another one that the game specifically mentions me doing, but isn’t recognized by the game.  Other than that, there isn’t a lot to say about this section.

The second is called “Inanimate,” and that was a lot of fun.  The scene between the two people was interesting, dramatic, and fun to watch.  It was intriguing to see it from the perspective of an inanimate object, as well.  There was a flaw in the walkthrough, though: it said to use “d” to get off the shelf, but that led to a response of “You’ll have to get off your shelf first.”  What you really needed to type was “fall.”  But it was easy enough to see what I needed to do, even though the lack of options was a little limiting (ah, but that was the point – the name of the game is Constraints, after all).

The third scenario, “Something,” was both the most involved and the most interesting.  What makes it so interesting is that the point is to try to find many different possibilities of accomplishing a specific goal.  You don’t actually do any of your possible courses of action, you merely plan them and play through them in your mind, trying to find something that will work.  I was able to find many of these on my own, because they really are straightforward, simple things to do, and that’s good.  This was the section where I needed a hint for a final solution, though, and I didn’t appreciate the “these puzzles are so easy, you shouldn’t need hints” remark.  If they WERE that easy, I wouldn’t be looking at the hints!  Since I am, they are not, Q.E.D.

Because this scene is the most involved, there is the most room for problems.  You should be able to call a glove compartment a “glove box,” and here in the U.S. we call the “head” of a truck the “cab.”  Also, when it says “the tail extends to the west,” I should be able to “examine tail” and get a response, but I get “You can’t see any such thing.”

The changing messages as you go through different plans and discard them, one by one, are quite good.  And the end, when you reach it, is the most thought-provoking part of the whole game, and it too is quite good.  There is one other part of the game worth mentioning, because it’s just too much fun: the Endgame.  I don’t want to spoil too much, but suffice it to say that if you agreed with my review of “Sun and Moon,” you might just enjoy the Endgame of Constraints.  (Although, I’m not sure you ever actually reach the end.  I haven’t, at least at the time of this writing.)

Time for the numbers!

Story: 6.  Although two of the scenes individually have interesting stories, there is nothing cohesive.  The weak (but humorous) attempt of the Endgame to tie them all together only serves to mess up any sense of story we’ve gotten up to that point.

Writing: 10.  No grammatical or spelling errors that I found, plus some really effective phrases and paragraphs!  Over all, very nice stuff.

Puzzles: 5.  I know, some of it was “puzzleless.”  That doesn’t get a 10, and neither does being mean when I ask for help.

Coding: 6.  Some synonyms left out in “Something,” plus some verbs that would have been nice in “Falling.”

Parser: 8.  Your basic Inform parser with some additions and expansions. ’Sgood stuff.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  Not a lot here, since I'm not counting the enjoyment of the good writing.  There are some points for Endgame, but ultimately not very many.

Participation/Involvement: 6.  Yeah, I felt a little bit like an inanimate object, but there was really more reading-along than acting, and that causes detachment.

Lack of Annoyance: 9.  Hardly any annoyance at all: this is the benefit of near-puzzleless IF.

General Idea: 6.  It was interesting to have three different scenes and try to tie them together myself, and I think it sort of worked.

Wildcard: 7.  I like games that make me think, and the fact that I could mull over the “meaningful” parts while plowing through the Endgame was interesting and quite a bit of fun.

Composite score: 6.7 (Comp Score: 7)

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Moonbase

QA Dude, TADS2

Ah, my second TADS2 game of the comp.  With a little spell-checking, a few code clean-ups, and some clearer descriptions, “Moonbase” will be a terrific game for beginners and poor puzzle-solvers like myself.  I found objects at the right moment, and I knew what I needed to do in order to continue.  There were helpful objects, like an equipment manual, to give in-game clues about what to do to get things fixed up.  I love that about this game.  Now, about those spelling and coding problems:

The intro gives us our first problem: “its” instead of “it’s.”  Folks, when you are using a contraction for the two words “it is,” you use the apostrophe.  When you are saying something belongs to “it,” as in “the cat swished its tail,” then you don’t use an apostrophe.  It’s very simple.  We also get some inconsistency on capitalization, for things like the Moon and Moonbase Alpha.

There’s also a quirk with the game’s special commands, like “watch” and “shoot.” If you try to do it to something the game isn’t expecting, for instance “watch gate,” you get “I don’t know how to the transporter gate.”  Some other oddities include trying to sit down in the theater and stand up again:

>sit
(the seats)

>stand
You’re already standing!

There’s also a rather odd feel to some of the room descriptions that make me wonder about the player character.  For instance, in the first room with the transporter gate, we get this: “The console takes up most of the wall, which is surprising, because it only has two buttons.”  And later, “The foyer has a very high ceiling for some reason.”  This sounds like one of two things: (1) the PC has never been to these locations before, or (2) the author is trying to add flavor to the descriptions and doesn’t have a good reason for giving the foyer a high ceiling, so makes it sound surprising instead.  Nothing major: these sorts of things just make me quirk my head in momentary puzzlement.

Looking over my notes from the game and my review so far, I see that I’m really picking on the problems.  That’s not entirely fair; the puzzles in this game are just my type, and I really do think this game could be quite entertaining and fun for beginners and oldies alike, except for the quirks.  And the quirks are problematic, but I’ll stop listing them en masse and just explain one more problem, representative of the coding in the game.

There’s an exoskeleton, which it is very clear you will have to wear.  When you first come across it, perhaps you try the command “WEAR EXOSKELETON.”  This gives the response, “(First taking the exoskeleton) Taken. Okay, now you’re wearing the exoskeleton.”  But what you didn’t know when you first arrived is that the battery needs to be replaced, which you can’t do while you’re wearing it.  In fact, you need a particular item to do it, and you can’t possibly obtain that item while wearing the exoskeleton.  So, you remove the exoskeleton.  This is all fine and good, until the moment comes later in the game when you try once again to wear the exoskeleton.  Then, no matter what you have in your hands, you get the response, “(First taking the exoskeleton) Your load is too heavy.”  This renders it impossible (as far as I can tell) to put the exoskeleton on more than once in any game, necessitating a restart if you were foolish enough to try to wear the thing the first time you came across it. 

Other than that, there are only a few problems with the game doing things and not quite coming out and telling you what it did; for instance, if you are unsuccessful trying to replace a part, the game will pick the part up and put it in your inventory without letting you know.  That surprised me.  Also the walkthrough included is mistaken about the location of a certain piece of paper.  But I liked the environment, I liked that I found everything in the best possible order (or so it seemed), and I liked that I knew how to manipulate the game objects when I encountered them. 

All in all, this game deserves a post-comp release and said release will deserve a look from the IF community.  Score time!

Story: 5.  You’re sent to explore a base and find out what happened to the missing people.  Okay, fine, but I’ve done this before.

Writing: 6.  Nothing spectacular; the typos and inconsistencies detract from what would be perfectly adequate prose.  The ending could have been more dramatic, were this an ideal universe.

Puzzles: 8.  My kind of stuff.  I actually feel clever when I solve puzzles without hints, and I finished the entire game without hints!  But the walkthrough was still helpful as it told how to get all the points.  I love it!

Coding: 6.  Too many things that don’t work, and some that sure look like bugs. 

Parser: 8.  Good stuff we expect from TADS, but a few problems with syntax.

Humor/Enjoyment: 5.  A few things that were enjoyable, but it didn’t seem like the game was really trying for humor.  If it were, I’d’ve been able to do a lot more with the dead body.

Participation/Involvement: 5.  Nothing to really draw me into the part, although I did want to find out what happened at the base.

Lack of Annoyance: 5.  Some minor annoyances, one or two major.

General Idea: 7.  Strange alien creatures, a mission in peril, generally good stuff.

Wildcard: 5.  Being able to get the puzzles doesn’t really make up for the problems with the implementation.  How can you have a screwdriver in your game and not include the verb “tighten”?

Composite score: 6.0 (Comp score: 6)

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A Party to Murder

David Good, ADRIFT

What a great title.  It works on so many levels.  I’d never played an ADRIFT game before this one, but I’d seen the flame wars on R*IF so I was a little unsure about what to expect.  And I was pleasantly surprised.

Yes, the author’s choice of game language is influential in how good his game is, and yes, how well the parser works is part of the final score.  So, Inform and TADS games get “an advantage” only over games whose parsers suck.  “A Party To Murder” had a parser that did not suck; and as a bonus, the game completed some of my typing for me (more on that later) and had nifty pop-up windows that I liked, and I didn’t have any more problems with syntax, etc, than any other game I’ve played so far.  ADRIFT, we salute you!

Now that the language discussion is out of the way, let’s talk about the game.  It was quite a bit of fun, all in all.  This is a good, old-fashioned murder mystery “plus.”  By that I mean that this is more than just a murder mystery: the player character’s driving force is not to solve the murder but to find out if the lien on his house can be removed.  Between that and the framing (you start off talking to a detective after the fact, and what you do in the game is what you tell him about the night), I already know at the beginning of the “real” game what my character wants and how he might act.  This is wonderful. 

I had a little trouble figuring out some other plot-related things that may have made a difference in how I acted: for instance, I wasn’t sure if I was invited to the party, or just crashing it.  Also, I didn’t know who the people were.  I met Bunny, who is “helping with the food” and “making sure everyone is having a good time,” so I assumed she was the hostess and therefore Tony’s wife.  You can imagine my consternation later when I showed her evidence of Tony’s affair, only to be told she wasn’t interested.  In retrospect, she had no real reason to be, since Tony’s wife is a woman named Susan.  To help with these issues, the game had answers to certain questions, like “Who is Susan?”  But the answer was “Susan is the woman,” which didn’t really tell me a whole lot.  Even less enlightening was the answer to “Who is Tony?”: “Tony is the Tony Ravine.”  But the game’s “Where is” was much more practical: when I wanted to talk to someone, I could find out which room they had wandered to just by asking.  Great touch.

The walkthrough suggests that if you collect evidence without having seen the body, the other guests will get suspicious.  I didn’t see anything different, no matter how much evidence I collected.  Even giving the murderer the evidence that would specifically point to him/her elicits no response.  I do like, however, that if you have no reason to be snooping (i.e., haven’t found the body), then the game will prompt you with a “Don’t you feel funny, pawing through someone else’s belongings?” yet will allow the action if you insist.  This is the perfect way to handle “IF behavior” in a more modern setting.  Of course, once you know murder has happened, you are authorized by the game to do any snooping you wish.

This game has lots of extras: you can play on the computer (and enjoy it!), you can pee, you can flirt with the guests (and more!), you can walk in on a teenage couple gettin’ it on, you can view cheeses like Asiago and Grueyere (although sampling them is more difficult -- and isn't it "Gruyere"?).  And I actually like the framing device better here than in Spider and Web (as much as I enjoyed it there).  In Spider and Web, you act out what you are “telling” the other person, but you might get it wrong and have to redo it.  Here, whatever you act out IS what happened, whether you get the bad guys or not!  It lets the player truly decide what happened in the evening, and that makes it a lot of fun.

Oh, sure, there’s the occasional typo (“flegling” should be “fledgling”), missing punctuation mark (examining the easy chair), and unimplemented verb (like “knock” when confronted with a closed and locked bathroom door).  And sure, some of the syntax is a little tricky, you can’t “show” someone something, the NPCs are a little unresponsive, and you can’t “turn flashlight off,” only “turn off flashlight.”  But I don’t mind.  The puzzles requiring a little authorial omniscience I do mind, but not too much.  I’m used to using walkthroughs, being the poor puzzler that I am, so it doesn’t bother me a lot to find out what you have to do in order to get the keys from Susan.

Two more quick notes before we wrap up this review and get on to the scores.  First of all, the sentence completion thing has its ups and downs.  The ups (if unintended) are that I am aware of many things in the room that I may not have been before.  Just try out some letters and see if anything new pops up in the command line; you may learn something.  The downs are, well, maybe that wasn’t intended.  Also it doesn’t always complete the same combination of letters, which is puzzling. 

Second note: there’s one object in the game I object to.  The post-it note in the hall bath should really, in my opinion, just be taken out of the game completely.  On it, the author intrudes on my gaming experience by leaving a post-it note, a “Memo from the Author,” in the medicine cabinet to do nothing more than tell me why there’s nothing exciting in the medicine cabinet.  Now I know that medicine cabinets are a pain in the rear, because they’re in almost every bathroom and they usually contain all sorts of little, fiddly objects.  But please, I’d rather see a bare cabinet than a note from the author in an otherwise-serious game telling me why he didn’t stock the cabinet.  It isn’t funny, but it does destroy the (otherwise quite interesting) mood you’ve created up to this point.

All right, the score:

Story: 7.  Two parts cliché, one part original, mix well and refrigerate until set.

Writing: 6.  Generally fine, with some typos and missing (or extra) punctuation.

Puzzles: 6.  Passable, some omniscience required to figure out what to do (but not how to do it).

Coding: 7.  Good, some fun actions specially implemented, a few quirks (and not enough NPC responses).

Parser: 8.  I didn’t really miss the verb “show” since so often it’s synonymous with “give” anyways.   This is a high quality parser, for all practical purposes.

Humor/Enjoyment: 6.  Some of the NPCs are quite funny and/or enjoyable at times, if you know what I mean.   But overall, the game isn’t very humorous at all.

Participation: 6.  Not bad, but disturbed by the post-it and by having to serve as a shelving librarian for ten minutes.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  I assume ADRIFT doesn’t list what items are on supporters, generally speaking.  This is somewhat annoying (not to mention misleading).

General Idea: 6. 

Wildcard: 5.  In the end, the game really isn’t that memorable.  It’s worth a play, but probably not disk space.

Composite score: 6.4 (Comp score: 6)

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Janitor

Seebs, Z-code [Peter Seebach and Kevin Lynn]

This is the funniest game so far, no question about it.   It starts out in a cute, different way.   You’re the janitor at a text adventure game creation company, and so your job is to clean up after the designers have all gone home.  But there are so many hilarious touches in the first five or ten minutes that you almost completely forget your setting.  The “rules” are a kick!

The first few scenes, in the Break Room, the Closet, and the Receptionist’s Office, are truly representative of the feel of the rest of the game.  The mood and tone of the game are set, the humor is sharpest, and the good coding (along with the associated bugs) are all there.  For instance, you try to open something (a container, most definitely openable) and you get the response “We’ll just assume you open it when you need it.”   Well, that’s a nice touch, and I always prefer a game automatically open things for me when it would be required for my command (i.e. >N (opening the door first) sort of thing).  However, that isn’t all the authors here have done.  They have specifically disallowed me opening the container whenever I feel like it.  I wanted to see what was in it and mess around with the gunk.  I was not allowed to.  I’m still not sure why.

There are also a few missing synonyms, and an odd “bucket of dirty water (which is empty).”  But there is also a mop that turns on and off (which is way cool!), but also there is a disambiguation problem (“Which do you mean, the tin can of pink jelly or the tin cans?”), but at the same time there is a stack of dirty magazines that you can clean (well, you are a janitor) and you end up with clean magazines!  That’s not only too much like fun, it’s just plain funny!

Then you get into the “real” part of the game, and the same sorts of things are repeated throughout.  Funny bits, right next to coding quirks, with a few missing synonyms/verbs, and what seem to be either “before” or “after routines” returning false instead of true.  You can tell the last one when you get something like (not an exact quotation):

>X BOTTOM SHELF
The bottom shelf is clearly designed as a shrine to the <item> resting on a platform on it.On the bottom shelf is the <item>.

Hm.  Right.  The other supremely annoying bit in the whole game is the mop/bucket problem.  For some reason, the mop was the last item in my inventory, so whenever I tried to pick up more than I could carry (while I had the dirty bucket “rucksack” object), it would try to move the mop to the bucket first, giving me room in my hands to carry whatever it was.  But the mop doesn’t fit in the bucket.  So I got things like:

>TAKE ALL
Item A: (first putting the mop in the bucket) The mop is too big for the bucket.
Item B: (first putting the mop in the bucket) The mop is too big for the bucket.
Item C: ... and so on.

Which really got silly, considering all I wanted was to put something ELSE in the bucket instead of the mop.  And I couldn't drop the mop and pick it back up to make it first in my inventory, because you can't drop the mop while you're in the game world.  Having a "rucksack" item would have been a nice touch, but because of the one object that wouldn’t fit it was really a pain.

Let’s leave all the unimplemented nouns and weird coding quirks aside now, and focus on the point of the game.  What a terrific, fabulous idea.  It even makes me (me, the bad puzzler) realize what it is I’m supposed to be doing.  The first few tasks I got around to are well clued enough, and I really know what I’m supposed to do.  I went for a long time without looking at the hints, just exploring the connections between the “game world” and the access hallways, figuring out the quickest way to get places, and putting objects in specific places to make my score go down.   It was great!  Really, really, great!

Unfortunately, and without knowing it, I spent too much time in this stage, trying to do it on my own.  The moment came where I didn’t know what to do next, and I had seen everything there was to see without any hint of a “deeper plot” going on.  I was down to 52 points, but time was running out.  I check the hints (provided cleverly as an html file with selectable text, so that you only see the text you want).  The hints say to ask the mop, and be sure to talk with the receptionist.  I hadn’t been aware that the mop could talk.  So I ask the mop, and I talk with the receptionist, and get diddly squat.  Precious time is leaking away. 

Unfortunately (again), the hints were totally inadequate to the task of actually providing me with useful, practical information.  They were more “how to get past this puzzle” hints, not “what the heck am I supposed to do NOW” hints.  The hints suggest that the crucial dead body was in a completely different place than where I found it; they mention a large snake (I have no idea what they’re talking about), and then it was too late.

I was seriously low on time, in need of a walkthrough, trying to plow through the hint file to get hints about what to do now from what the questions were (what I call “meta-hints”), when suddenly I got physically stuck in a series of several connected rooms without being able to get out.  I finally read through ALL the hints in desperation, discovering that there is some sort of Secret Plot and the treasures were fake (Hm, I did notice that the description of one treasure had turned to “cheap”).  But even putting that aside, the hints mentioned puzzles in the part I had thoroughly explored that I hadn’t seen.  There was the possibility of being locked in a vault?   There was a keypad?  Who knows if I would have been able to figure out the access code, since I never even saw it? 

Even here, there was humor and enjoyment.  It really was fun just trying to figure out the most move-efficient way of moving around, but every second I spent on that was a second less of gameplay, and that’s dangerous when you design a game this big.  

So, as my two hours ran out, I couldn’t get out of where I was stuck in.  The hints had hinted at a plot, but I never really saw it myself because all of the access doors disappeared (I still don’t know why: something I did?  Just that time?  Someone trying to kill me?).  Needless to say, the last half hour of playtime was not the most enjoyable.  The setting and the humor were still there, but after so much trying to wrap my head around the puzzles in time, I ended more frustrated than anything.

A final word:

Authors, please consider NOT insulting the player who looks for hints.  You want people to play your game, right?  You want people to see all your cool stuff, your neat ending, your funny bits, right?   My advice: don’t discourage players by insulting them, and DO include plenty of thorough hints so that players who are completely, totally lost can still find their way through your game.   Even comments like “all of our beta-testers were able to beat the game” are insulting, although not as much as “these puzzles are so easy, you shouldn’t need hints.”  Did your beta-testers try to do it for the first time in only two hours?  Consider the poor puzzler!  There are more of us out here than you may realize!

Story: 6.  Undoubtedly this would have been higher if I had finished the game and seen that there was more to the story than it seemed at first.  Casualty of the time limit.

Writing: 8.  Solid, descriptive, occasionally leaving something out but generally good.

Puzzles: 7.  Fun, easy to start and progressively harder, clever, obviously part of the story and well motivated for the PC.  However, some were too hard for me and/or required some omniscience.  Also, the hints cause a small reduction.

Coding: 7.  Rather than just mediocre all the way around, Janitor has a heavy mix of great touches and coding quirks, missing synonyms and really cool coding tricks.

Parser: 9.  Good stuff, some extras.

Humor/Enjoyment: 9.  This had me laughing out loud.  I still chuckle when I remember some of the stuff, although I seem to recall that the best stuff is at the beginning.

Participation/Involvement: 6.  Some, occasional involvement in the character, but generally I (as the player) was left to my own devices.

Lack of Annoyance: 4.  This, too, would probably be higher if the hints were better and/or I was able to finish the game and see the ending.

General Idea: 9.  What a clever, original way to play!  To be the janitor, putting everyone’s toys away.  (I know, similar has been done but this felt so new and so much better!)  I loved it.

Wildcard: 6.  Probably higher if I had finished, but how can you not like a game with fifteen kinds of butter substitute?  And the lovable bird?

Composite score: 7.1 (Comp score: 7)

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The Moonlit Tower

Yoon Ha Lee, Z-code

I don’t remember the last time I reviewed a game that was as, well, as GOOD as the Moonlit Tower.  This is a fantastic game, even without any real humor like the last one.   In fact, if I had been able to finish Janitor, it would be a very close call at this point as to which one was at the top of my list for games so far.  As it is, there is no question.

I will be the first to admit, the game starts off pretty thick in the prose.  The introduction is fine, but the description of the first room is this:  “Moonlight diffuses through the walls, tracing out unreadable sigils in calligraphies of light and dark.  Stairs adorned with bas-relief motifs spiral downward.”   Whoa, I thought to myself, lay off the verbage a little!  But now I see that I only felt that way because I wasn’t yet caught up in the prose (and this passage is probably the oddest-sounding).  I’d tone it down a bit in that first room, but the rest of it is beautiful.

After a few minutes, I was in the world and had forgotten about the odd verbage that started it off.  The description of the garden worked perfectly for me.  I actually touched my own face at more than one point, if that tells you who’ve played it anything.  I did some wonderful (and successful) exploring on my own, revealing choice bits of the story at the right moments.  The story is fantastic, if you like this sort of thing, and I do, immensely.  Hm, how to describe it better without giving anything away?  Maybe the question should be, did you like Photopia?  Add interaction and puzzles.  Not that the story is anything like Photopia, but perhaps some of the feeling is the same. 

All right, I’ll stop waxing mushy about the story and talk more about the nuts and bolts.  It’s a wonderful story, btw.  Anyway, there are some way-cool puzzles very well clued (or at least intuitive), and one very non-intuitive puzzle that was also hinted at in the game.  I just missed the hints.  The hints included in the game are somewhat sparse, and I ended up figuring out what to do next only by looking at what the hint questions were (what I refer to as meta-hinting).

We also have some missing synonyms (though not many), “folding screens” should be a pluralname object, and there is an object which is mentioned in a long passage after I do something, but I can’t find the object anywhere after I’m done.  I have a feeling (thanks to the hints) I know what that item was, but I would still like to see it.  And bonus points for proper use of the word “jessed!”

I ended up going to the hints rather quickly in this game because I so wanted to keep the story moving along and find out “what happens next.”  Little bits of information could be revealed at any time, and I wanted all of them.  Wild speculation was rampant.  Hm, I’m back to talking about the story again.

What else?  There were two items with tassels, and one of the tassel could be referred to independently and one could not, which led to some difficulty.  There was a little bit of “oh, I was supposed to do THAT?” right near the end, and saying “0 out of 0” points is a little bit of a faux pas in a game otherwise so sophisticated.  See Andrew Plotkin’s help on that particular quirk.

The best parts of The Moonlit Tower were the story and the writing.  Oh, and the fact that I didn’t realize some things were puzzles because I did the right thing automatically and intuitively.  I also didn’t get a chance to play through for any other endings, but the one that I got was fantastic.  While not perfect, this game had so many strengths and small touches (not to mention the story – have I mentioned the story?) that I could see it winning the tournament.   Of course, I’m well aware that I say this after only playing eight games. 

Story: 10.  I loved it.

Writing: 9.  Really great stuff, although a bit thick at first. 

Puzzles: 7.  These were really excellent to begin with, although much less intuitive as the game went on.  The hints were not as clear as they may have been.

Coding: 7.  A great job, although some missing synonyms and the occasional extra line.  Also the verb “fan” should have been a “must” in my opinion.

Parser: 9.  High quality, Inform Plus. 

Humor/Enjoyment: 6.  Although not too much on the laugh-out-loud side, The Moonlit Tower was enjoyable enough in other ways to get good points.

Participation/Involvement: 9.  Wow.   I was really immersed in the character.   Did I mention I actually put my hand to my face in reaction to one of the game’s responses?

Lack of Annoyance: 8.  Mostly free of annoyance, although there was an occasional “erg” moment.

General Idea: 8.  The act of discovery by exploration is implemented so effectively here that I couldn’t help but be completely taken by it.

Wildcard: 8.  Great stuff.

Composite score: 8.1 (Comp score: 8)

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Augustine

Terrence V. Koch, TADS2

An interesting and imaginative story horribly crippled by poor implementation.

I wanted to like this game.  I really did.  I've been to St. Augustine, and although there were some other things going on that day, it shines in my memory as a busy, bright, and fascinating location.  The introduction to the game (as read in the author's notes, a separate file) sparks the imagination, and also avows that while the story might share some aspects with a certain movie (Highlander), it was an idea he had before the movie was released, which is neat.  But the actual programming of the game is barely enough to allow you to finish the game with a walkthrough, much less trying to explore and learn about the rich culture of St. Augustine. 

In the first section, you are a young boy in Wales, 1400 A.D.  After being introduced to your mother and sister, you are asked to take the lunch to your father.  Well, the setting wasn't so captivating that I didn't want to break the illusion of immersion, so I tried eating the lunch.  But the lunch didn't appear appetizing (poor Pop, you think).  So I set out to explore the area.  The most interesting site is a clump of bushes.  "Examine bushes" yields "The bushes are thick with leaves."  Okay, "examine leaves."  That gives the response, "I don't know the word leaves."  Folks, by the time I got through with the game I was convinced that my six-year-old niece knows twice as many words as this game does.  May I say at this point that I have always preferred Inform's "You can't see any such thing" to "I don't know the word <item>" that TADS gives?  Much better to be a little bit vague rather than coming right out and saying that the parser doesn't even know the word.  It's quite discouraging.  Also, in Inform you can ask an NPC about any topic, which is any word or set of words.  In TADS, the parser has to know the word before you can ask anyone about it.

Let me give you the ultimate example from the game, in the first "present-day" scene, after which I resigned myself to never being able to examine anything interesting at all, even the items which were specifically mentioned and pointed out by the text.  You are being led on a walking tour of the city by a young female tour guide.  So you look at her:

>x tour guid
I don't know the word guid.

>o guide
   The young woman is dressed in period clothes. Her long raven hair is tucked up under a flowered hat.

>x woman
I don't see any woman here.

>x clothes
I don't know the word "clothes".

>x hair
I don't know the word "hair".

>x hat
I don't know the word "hat".

>x flower
I don't know the word "flower".

>x flowered hat
I don't know the word "flowered".

Gr!  The woman is absolutely vital to the story, and the hat is made a very big deal of just a few scenes later, when she fiddles with it and fiddles with it and finally takes it off, remarking on the trouble she's had with it.  And I can't even look at the thing!  This is only one example of the crippling implementation I'm talking about.  Two minutes later, I had the same trouble with "A lady stands under the umbrella next to the table."  But you can't "x lady," or "x woman," or "x table," or "x umbrella"!  The tourists are carrying tour books, cameras, and shopping bags filled with souvenirs, and you can't look at any of it.  This kind of depth is critical in creating a world for your player to explore and get to know. 

Another major problem was with Kasil, the arch-enemy of the player character.  This is the most important NPC in the game, and his coding is seriously flawed.  I can't even count how many times I got the response, "You can't see any kasil here," even when the text of the game SAID he was there (and talking to me, no less).  This is also the cause of the worst diambiguation problem I've seen in a long time.  You're in the middle of a heated battle with your foe, and you get things like this:

>thrust at Kasil
Which do you mean, the kasil or the kasil?

What?  There are two of them?  It seems that the author of the game has implemented the enemy with more than one object and they are both present at the same time.  This (perhaps obviously) is a problem.

I could go on and on (and on) about some of these things, but really the only other point worth mentioning in this forum is that at one point near the end of the game, actions that aren't what you are supposed to do give absolutely no response.  This makes it completely impossible to win without the walkthrough (and quite difficult even with it).

Some other quick points: the verb "draw" as in drawing a sword would have been nice, extra spaces and punctuation at times, "fellow adventure's" should be "adventurers", "Kasil isn't important" should not be told to the player (especially when trying to attack him), some sentence fragments, "your are" should be "you are", and putting actions into room descriptions is generally a bad idea, even if you think that once a player gets in, there's no possible way for them to exit and re-enter.  The problem is that when you "undo" in TADS, the room description is printed, which means I saw certain actions more than once that I shouldn't have.

Even with all of that, once you resign yourself to just going through the motions and reading the text, the story is actually pretty good.  You don't have a lot of say in the way the story goes, since you can only either win, or fail to fulfill your history, but the story isn't bad.  Especially if you like pirates, or swordfighting, or fantastical happenings, and I do. 

So there are two ways to make this game a ton better: implement all of the missing nouns, verbs, and actions; or make it a static short story.  Either option would vastly improve what we have now.  Here's the scoring breakdown:

Story: 7.  Original, interesting if not compelling.

Writing: 7.  Mostly, the writing was actually pretty good, but there were plenty of distracting typos and noun-verb disagreements.

Puzzles: 4.  There were some interesting things to do, but not many, and the "puzzles" sometimes consisted of figuring out which of the three attack verbs to use to avoid dying.

Coding: 2.  Serious problems, very poor implementation, from the verbs to the nouns to the NPCs.  After slaying eight of the rebels, I can ask the rebels about Kasil and get their default "I don't know much about that."  Gr.

Parser: 7.  TADS has a lot going for it, but nothing was added.

Humor/Enjoyment: 3.  Really not much to recommend this one in the enjoyment category.

Participation/Involvement: 2.  There was next to nothing to connect the player to the player character.

Lack of Annoyance: 1.  This game is as annoying as they come.  There could not be a more annoying game.

General Idea: 8.  Playing through present-day scenes and flashbacks would have been pretty cool, and the fact that the final showdown was on a ship would have been neat.

Wildcard: 5.  After all, there was a lot of work put into it, and I can see that and be thankful.  At the same time, there were enough problems to make me overall ambivalent to the game.

Composite score: 4.6 (Comp score: 5)

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The Temple

Johan Berntsson, Z-code

A great one.  I loved this game.  I didn't like the fact that I couldn't transcript, but other than that there was an awful lot that worked.  The writing sets up a terrific setting and mood, the main NPC, Charles, is quiet enough to not be distracting while saying the appropriate things when you ask, and the story is spooky at just the right moments, downright scary at some, and gripping enough to compel you to play through to the end of the game. 

There were only a few minor problems and I'll mention them first before talking about the good stuff.  It's a little bit annoying as an IF player to have to do something twice before "noticing" something, since there isn't any hint that I would need to do it twice.  A few phrases in the introduction are awkward, like the "nightly nightmare," or later the "irregular-sized blocks of irregular size," but it's nothing major.  There was the very occasional missing noun, and I had a bit of trouble with the wording for one of the later puzzles in the game.  Now, on to the good stuff!  (You'll notice an important distinction between my discussion of this game and that of, say, Augustine: there, I focused mainly on the problems because they so overwhelmed the story, and here, the game is good enough that I don't have too much to say about the problems.)

First, the puzzles were really great.  My very first try at doing something that was rather tricky worked perfectly; I can only assume that the author went to a great deal of trouble to make many possible phrasings for what amounts to basically the same action.  For that, I salute you.  I have in my notes: ha-HA!  It worked!  And the hints were wonderful.  They were even adaptive, which is impressive.  And they were helpful!  That's the best part.  Also, I knew what I needed to do at almost all points.  When I needed to explore, I knew that.  After exploring, I knew what piece of information I needed to find.  It was after I explored the underground that I was a little unsure about what was supposed to happen next, but the hints gave it to me perfectly: if you haven't dealt with the vials yet, do that.  Yes!  Perfect! 

As to the mood... I've never read anything of Lovecraft so I won't do any comparisons.  I'll just talk about what I know, and what I know is that The Temple is rather spooky.  Not, what's-going-to-jump-out-from-behind-these-curtains-spooky, but how-is-this-connected-spooky, with the occasional meaninful "Ohhh..." and the singular, but shocking, "AAAAAHHHH!!!"  Yes, I actually wrote in my notes: "AAAAAHHHH!!!" because the timing worked just perfectly.  It was almost like it was scripted in a movie, I fell into it so well.  I mean, wow.  Okay, I'll tell you since it all sounds so vague.  If you're a stickler for spoilers, skip to the next paragraph.  You meet Charles early on in the game, and he is described as wearing clothes "at least eighty years out of fashion."  Okay, noted.  You continue the game.  After squeezing through a crack in the wall of a sealed building, you come upon a library which is mostly empty.  But Charles (who's been following you along) stumbles upon a skeleton in a remote corner.  (Cool, by the way, to have the NPC doing the discovering.  Makes it feel like he's really a partner in this.)  Anyway, you "x skeleton" as a matter of course, and get a response saying something like, the remains lie face down, still covered by torn clothing.  Hm.  "X torn clothing."  You get: "The skeleton is dressed in the torn remains of a tweed jacket and cotton trousers."  Uh, that doesn't sound too good.  You don't suppose... "X Charles' clothing," and you are told "Charles is dressed in a tweed jacket, and cotton trousers."  AAAAAHHHH!!! is really the only response to that.  That or bolting from the room in a panic.

Anyhow, there are also great in-game hints to clue you in to what you're supposed to do next, which is fantastic.  The only problem I had with the puzzles was when I needed to paint a symbol on myself, and I tried "paint me."  That gave the slightly misleading response of, "You prefer to keep neat and clean."  Okay, but at that moment I didn't want to stay neat and clean, I really needed to paint on myself.  But other than that everything was fantastic.

There is a great response to "chant" when you're in the temple itself, which would have been easy to overlook, and that really represents the way the whole game went.  An awful lot was put in here that would have been easy for the author to forget about or leave out.  It either says a lot for the author, or tells us that a lot of beta-testing went on.  Then again, an author who puts his game through a lot of beta-testing says a lot for the author as well.  Any way you slice it, this is a game worth playing.

Let's see the numbers.

Story: 9.  Excellent.  I liked it.

Writing: 8.  Effective, with the rare typo or awkward phrase.

Puzzles: 10.  This is what I like.  Well clued puzzles with simple, yet clever, solutions, and a terrific hint system that gives you what you need to know.

Coding: 9.  Lots of extras, very few missing synonyms.  Good NPC.

Parser: 9.  Inform Plus. 

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  I know it's hard to mix some humor in with the scary stuff.  It's also hard to get a perfect 10 points in my scale, but it works.

Participation/Involvement: 9.  I was pretty well sucked into this one, and that's a good thing.  The beginning dreamlike stuff had a good bit to do with that; it was more involving than if the player character had been given, well, more character.

Lack of Annoyance: 8.  Having to do certain things twice, and a little confusion with the vials (due to a save/restore) detracted slightly from an annoyance-free gaming experience.

General Idea: 8.  Good stuff: exploring the mysterious city and helping out with the problem that was obviously bigger than any of us.

Wildcard: 8.  This was more than just a great story told effectively through exploring a rich setting.  This was a great game with a good story told well through the actions of me and my character.  Well done!

Composite score: 8.3 (Comp score: 8)

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Eric's Gift

Joao Mendes, TADS3

For a game whose main method of story-telling is conversation, Eric's Gift has some really odd quirks in the way conversation is handled.  Most of the oddity comes from summarizing the conversation for the player, rather than explicitly spelling out every single word.  This ranges from exchanges like

>tell Cappella about synthcaf
Cappella agrees with you that this is some of the best coffee in town.

to things like

>tell woman about jb
"I'm looking for Jack Brown," you say, hesitantly.
<snip some conversation, ending with the woman saying:>
"Please!  Come in, you look tired."

You are unable to refuse.

Living Room
<snip description of living room>
The woman who now lives in JB's old apartment is idly chatting with you, her eyes shining as brightly as ever.

As she takes your coat and hat, she starts to tell you about how she and...<snip> Finally, you manage to interrupt her, as she sits on the sofa.

>

Whoa!  What am I supposed to do with that blank prompt?  It's like everyone in the story knows their lines except me.  By merely asking about JB, I am ushered into her apartment, I "chat idly" with her, and she gives me half her life story before I "manage to interrupt her."  Well, if the game is so kind as to tell me that I'm interrupting, perhaps it would be so kind as to tell me what to say.

I don't mean to sound harsh.  There's a very interesting story behind the action in this game, and I have always liked games that interpret my "ask NPC about object" as real words, and then tell me what those real words are.  Er, at least, I thought I did until I played this one.  I still like it when "ask NPC about object" gives "So, NPC, what can you tell me about the object?" before the NPC's response, but I don't like when the conversation goes in a direction I didn't mean for it to go.  For instance, I type "tell Mrs. Chandler about me."  I get: "'So you do remember me, Mrs. Chandler.  I was wondering if you would,' you say."  But I suppose that's what fits into the story.

On the same line, I would have thought a nice way to get around NPCs repeating themselves when asked about the same topic was to summarize for the player what they learned last time they asked.  That's what Eric's Gift does, and it sounds okay, it just sort of makes me feel silly for asking again.  Like a pat on the head and a reminder to drink my milk before I go outside to play.  That sort of thing is the cause of the first example above, by the way, about the synthcaf.  I'd already asked her about the synthcaf, but I was totally stuck and was repeating things.

I managed to get stuck a number of times, even though it's a relatively puzzle-light, story-heavy game.  Part of that was because only certain actions triggered flashbacks or other events, and if you didn't do that action, you were left sitting in the scene, not being able to go anywhere or do anything (seemingly).  Another part of it was because I sometimes skip things in room descriptions that I shouldn't.  But in general, the hints were helpful, and using them when I was stuck got me moving again.  The hints weren't enough when I was stuck in the Chandlers' living room, though, with no way out and nothing else to do.  It didn't help that the status bar said "Exits: none" and "x door" gave me "You see no door here."  Alternate universe?  Maybe.  I certainly came in a door.  (As an aside, I thought it pretty amusing when Cappella said she sold clothes, I asked her about clothes, and got the response, "You see no clothes here."  Apparently we were all naked ;-). )

I liked that when I mistyped something, the game said "The word 'foobar' is not necessary in this story."  (Much much better than "I don't know the word 'foobar.'")  But I really liked that the first time I did it, I got an explanatory paragraph: "(If this was an accidental misspelling, etc." telling me how to use the command OOPS.  Very helpful.  I also noticed that I can now use "examine" with multiple objects.  Kind of weird, but only because I'm so used to the response "You can't use multiple objects with that verb."  These might common to all TADS3 games, but even so, they work well in this one.

A quick word on the story, and then the numbers.  The author says that some of it is based on dreams that he had, and indeed, some of the scenes have a very dream-like, surreal quality.  But one of the problems with basing fiction on dreams is the tendency to leave things unresolved, and not quite fully fleshed out.  However, the parts that work work very well.  I really like the idea that Eric has this gift, and how it works, etc.  But the rest of the story, notably the interaction between the PC and Mrs. Chandler, is odd and unnatural, and a little distracting.  Then I was quite startled by the epilogue.  I thought it a bit depressing: here are two people who have a sort of common tragedy between them, and they meet a second night after years apart, and then they get married?  The PC says "we were never really in love with each other."  What's wrong with these people?  Why is this woman marrying the PC if she doesn't love him?  Insecure?  And why can't our PC find someone of his own to love?  And whatever happened to the elusive Jack Brown?  The world may never know.

Story: 7.  I liked it, mostly.  Some great ideas, but also some odd spots.

Writing: 7.  Mostly good, if a bit stiff, and only a few typos.

Puzzles: 4.  The "puzzles" weren't much like normal puzzles, but I was still stuck in several places and had to turn to the walkthrough to find out what action would allow me to continue the story.  (I.e., what specific part of a specific item I had to examine in order to trigger someone else's unrelated action.)

Coding: 7.  Seems fine, although a number of objects specifically referenced in the text aren't implemented.

Parser: 9.  What is this category for again?  I need to rethink my scoring system.  Anyway, TADS3 seems just like TADS2, although some of the error messages that showed up the first time only were cool.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  Not a lot here.

Participation/Involvement: 4.  This may be the category with the greatest potential for improvement, although I don't know how it would be done.  The story does seem to lend itself toward player immersion, though.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  Mostly unannoying, but being stuck just because I hadn't examined second-level nouns was a pain.

General Idea: 9.  Kewl.

Wildcard: 6.  I like a game that contains both hints and a walkthrough, and there was cool stuff going on in this game, although I'm left a little unmoved by what could have been very moving.  These people just weren't important to me.  Plus, the epilogue kind of soured it for me.

Composite score: 6.4 (Comp score: 6)

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Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me!

Mike Sousa & Jon Ingold, TADS2

Heh.  Great title.  One of the neatest things about this game is the way the TADS is made to look like Inform, the way it used to look on my old interpreter no less.  This is indeed very kewl.  But on to the game!

You play a scientist at some unspecified point in the future with a nifty device that allows people to transfer their consciousness to other people's bodies, apparently for a short time.  You are going to use the device to vacation on the surface for a while (oh, you and your fellow scientists are at an underwater base, did I mention?) when something goes horribly wrong.  The scene where something goes horribly wrong is actually sort of funny, and well-coded, and in general fun.  For instance, there's an emergency switch to open the door and get out.  If you try to pull it first, the game says "It's a push switch," and if you try to push it first, it says "It's a pull switch," just to make you take that extra turn.  This is great.  Normally, this sort of artificial time-wasting is not great, it's just annoying, but it works here because the game doesn't start until after you don't make it out of the first scene.  Clear?

Ah, there are some great moments in this game.  The first two puzzles, involving getting out of where you wake up, are terrific and clever (and I solved them without hints).  By the way, the hints come in three different levels of helpfulness, and are location-dependent, so that when you are in a certain room you get the hint for the puzzle it thinks you're working on.  Not always the right one, but it does take into account what you have in your inventory, or at least it sure seems to.  It's very cool, although (as I said) problematic.  Come to think of it, I solved the next puzzle or two on my own also.  Very well done.

What's also fun about the game is that you, as the player, actually know more about your situation in some ways than the PC does.  Then again, the PC knows what the machine was supposed to do and you, the player, do not.  So it's kind of a trade-off.  Still, the quirkiness and, well, I almost want to say naiveté of the PC are really very humorous.  I lose the humor a bit when I suspect that the PC knows things about how the computer works that he isn't sharing, but with a few hints you can get by.  The password and key puzzle from the latter section of the game is very very tricky, but quite novel and very good.  By the way, when I was halfway through the puzzle I thought, "All right!  What's 'dog' in French?" and typed "chien" without thinking much about it.  When that didn't work, I spent five minutes trying to remember how on Earth you say "dog" in French (since I had it wrong).  But as I said, the actual solution was terrific.

Where does the game miss out?  Well, there was the frustration of not being able to do something and not finding any hints, because I was going about the solution in the wrong way.  I assumed I needed to re-enter a room to get something, when actually I needed to be in a different location to get what was in the room (thus the problem with location-based hints).  And there are some spelling mistakes and punctuation quirks.  At one point, the status line lists you as being "on on the trolley."  And an item is "far to heavy" to pick up.  There are also a few missing synonyms, like using "Rosalind" after she's in pieces.  And it's tough, I know it's tough, to implement being in a location within a room by implementing it as a separate location (which is what seems to have happened with the metal drawers).  It's tricky because there are basic things in the larger room that you want to be able to refer to from the smaller section of room.  Let me clear things up:  You are on a large drawer, pulled out from a wall of drawers, and the room description mentions both metal drawers and a ceiling.  But from where you are you "don't see any ceiling here," nor the metal drawers.  It's a bit misleading, but very forgivable.

Also, when the bomb won't blow up it says "Personal within blast radius."  Is that supposed to be "personnel?"  That would make a bit more sense, but I'm not entirely sure.

Anyway!  For most of the game, the writing is either effective but not attention-getting, or startlingly funny.  For instance, a metal plate sticks up from the ground "like a wafer in an ice cream," and later a particular item is sticking up "like a cocktail stick from a sausage."  Those are attention-getting phrases, and while not smooth or sweet, they do bring a chuckle.  I did feel pretty involved in the story, even if I didn't realize it until I was racing down the corridor on a metal gurney, being pursued by God knows what, and it occurred to me that I was pretty caught up in it.  The best part was, I wasn't anxious or worried about being caught by the thing because of the overall light and amusing tone.  Very impressive.

There was one programming trick which, while I liked it at the time, caused me some puzzle-solving problems.  If there was one particular object that the game wanted to draw your attention to, it would prevent you from examining other things by saying "Your eyes slide back to the <item>."  That's pretty slick, and also effective because the player looks at whatever the thing is.  The problem is, a line like that at the bottom of a room description makes me skim the room description faster, which means I missed critical objects that were listed and had no idea (for instance) that there was a hand scanner in the control room. 

My only other complaint would be that the ending is somewhat anticlimactic.  I always like a good long ending that really wraps up all the loose ends, or just hits you over the head with them, and I wasn't really sure that the ending I got with Monk-Fish was the best one.  I don't see what I could have done differently, but I still wonder. 

Overall, a very strong work with excellent writing and clever puzzles.  Great job all around!

Story: 7.  Great pieces of science fiction, but there did seem to be a few logical (or maybe I should say "sequential") problems with the plot.

Writing: 8.  Solid.  A few especially nice bits, but some punctuation or spelling errors.

Puzzles: 6.  Some clever bits, but unfortunately too clever for me.  Plus the hints were iffy.

Coding: 8.  Pretty good stuff, and there was hardly anything I couldn't examine.

Parser: 8.  I don't have any notes about a verb that I would have liked but that wasn't implemented.  That's good.

Humor/Enjoyment: 7.  The funniest game so far except for Janitor.  Great job!  I love humor!

Participation/Involvement: 7.  The moments being chased down the hall clinched it for me, but it was there all along anyways.

Lack of Annoyance: 8.  Surprisingly unannoying.  Quite a welcome change!

General Idea: 7.  Underwater, futuristic, science, and other fun schtuff.

Wildcard: 8.  There was a squid, after all.

Composite score: 7.4 (Comp score: 7)

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Hell: A Comedy of Errors

John Evans, Z-code

Now this is a wonderful idea, and it's done very well.  Be forewarned that this game will not appeal to all types of players, and is not in fact your typical IF game in any way.  You play a demon, assigned to a certain portion of Hell to torture various souls as they come to you.  The key that makes the whole thing a gem is this: you get to do it any way you want.  You get to design and decorate your own hell!  It's fantastic! 

I'll admit, before I had quite figured out what the point of the game was going to be, I was a little disappointed with the lack of nouns and the unclearness of the directions at the beginning (oh, I have to look in the pool more than once?).  For instance, I go down the stairs (the only place to go) and the only thing in the room is light.  But you can't "examine light."  I thought at that point it was going to be another frustratingly implemented game, but just a few minutes after that I didn't care at all. 

There's a bit of reading to be done when you first get going (after customizing your devil self!!) but it's quite useful and interesting.  The methods of torturing the souls and building new rooms in your hell are simplified and made easy to use, so that when you buy a torture device (such as a flock of carnivorous penguins, or a documentary crew) you "put <the soul> into <the torture>" to make it work.  That's perfect syntax, as long as the author tells us how to do it ahead of time (and he does!).  It wasn't until my second play-through that I realized that different gems build different kinds of rooms.  That was cool.

My notes on this game pretty much stop after my first trip back to the Sphere Room, where I got my first soul to torture.  I wrote down "MWAHAHA!!" and then just some names for a while.  The next thing I wrote down was that there were a few extra spaces (in the text), but who cares?  And I didn't care.  It was so much fun to build rooms and toss the souls into them, not to mention interacting with my fellow devils, and buying cool torture devices and getting crazy tattoos in weird spots. 

But, for completeness' sake: "conscioussness" is incorrect, you can't call the access gateway a "gateway," there are some extra quotation marks with the peddler and the tattoo artist, and for some reason I can factor 9999 but not 9997.  What's with the factoring anyway?  If it's just for its own sake, I can understand that and in fact I think it's pretty cool.  If there's something else to it that I'm not getting, well, then I don't get it.  In the meantime, though, I think it's cool.

I thought at first there wasn't an ending, that you just built your rooms and tortured your souls until you got tired of it.  But then I really applied myself, and it turned out there was an ending!  It was a pretty good one, too.  The only thing I could have asked to be improved in the whole game was some better indication of how much Penance you were getting out of a particular soul.  When I get a message like "Now THIS is old-school!" I assume that the soul is being tortured to the max.  That wasn't always the case, and it made for the occasional tedious "pick up, move over one room, drop" routine to try and get the max out of a soul.  But that's part of the game, and I see that. 

Overall, I really had a good time with this game.  Some people might not, but if you like it, I think you'll like it a lot. 

Story: 3.  There really isn't much of a story, much less characterization, but what's there is interesting.

Writing: 7.  Some good stuff, with a few extra lines and spelling errors.  Come to think of it, the descriptions of some of the hellish rooms could have been more ominous.

Puzzles: 7.  Figuring out how to torture souls, how to buy stuff, and how to dig out the rooms has a good learning curve, and can be done with some work.  The overall puzzle of torturing the souls is great, too.

Coding: 8.  There's a lot of stuff that is original and unlike any other game I've seen.  It works well.

Parser: 8.  High-quality Inform parser.

Humor/Enjoyment: 7.  There wasn't a lot of laugh-out-loud funniness, but the enjoyment factor was high.

Participation/Involvement: 7.  I wanted to torture those souls!  I wanted to find the worst possible hell for Pete Boise, and it was irritating when I had to accommodate some especially tough soul.  And when I didn't know what to do next, I wandered from room to room, admiring my handiwork and the handiwork of my devil subordinates.  It was great.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  A few bits of annoyance from time to time, but mostly irritation-free.

General Idea: 9.  Very appealing game idea.

Wildcard: 9.  It was just so much fun!  I liked being able to choose what kind of devil I was, and what I looked like, and I had a great time designing my own floorplan for Hell.

Composite score: 7.2 (Comp score: 7)

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Screen

Edward Floren, Z-code

When I read the introduction to Screen, I almost got chills.  It just sounded so cool.  Especially the final line, which hinted at important discoveries to be made, and fantastical happenings to learn about:  "Mr. Field died that October.  Until recently, I never knew."  Wow, never knew what?  There was something secret going on in the basement?  Mr. Field had magical powers that were sustained by sucking the life out of small children?  Er, no, as it turns out, it apparently only means that "until recently, I was not aware that Mr. Field died."  If the emotion present in the introduction had been sustained throughout, it would have been pretty cool, but it just wasn't there once I started typing in commands.  I guess it doesn't help that the introduction was written in first-person past tense, while the rest of the game was in traditional second-person present tense. 

After the great prose in the intro, and the focus on this one tree on Mr. Field's property, I was expecting quite a bit from the tree's description, but all I got was a single line: "It is magnificent, clad in crimson to match the autumn air."  Hm.  Well, at least you could examine the branches, the trunk, and the leaves individually.  While I was looking at those, something flitted into some nearby shrubbery before I could see what it was, but I couldn't see any such thing as shrubbery, or the driveway.

The flashbacks were back in the past tense, although in third person this time, and it wasn't too hard to figure out that I was supposed to be Jordon.  But it didn't help me to identify with the character at all.  And any sense of involvement was pretty well shaken when the girl that Jordon brought to the treehouse was described as being "so sweat."  Yuck.  I did like the fact that there was at least one such flashback scene that was optional, but added something to the story.

Anyhow, stumbling through the "present day" scenes was easy enough, and the interactive flashbacks were mildly interesting even if the Boy Wonder puzzle was really difficult to guess.  And there aren't any hints, just a walkthrough, but at least there was that.  It was quite disconcerting to find myself described as "Little Buddy" walking through a wooded scene.  But discovering where I was and who I was was actually a lot of fun.  And I think I've seen that episode before, so it was pretty cool.  But you can't do a lot with any of the NPCs (such as they are) no matter what you try. 

This game wasn't a standout in any real way.  I don't like the "0 out of a possible 0" score bit; see Andrew Plotkin's help page on that.  The game quit on me without telling me that I won, and I don't like that either.  I did like this: "The Boy Wonder must have taken a few shots."  What, like kamikaze shots, or just tequila?  :-)

Just for completeness' sake, I'll go ahead and say that there were several missing nouns, inconsistent double spacing (which should be eliminated completely), missing space before a parenthesis, and of course the unfortunate "sweat" where I believe "sweet" was meant.  Other than that I didn't see any misspelled words, though.

All right, let's end this pathetic review of an okay game and get the numbers:

Story: 5.  Nothing exciting or original sounding here.

Writing: 8.  Actually good in spots, with a few formatting problems (and "sweat").

Puzzles: 5.  Come on, "dip putty in acid?"  And no hints at all.

Coding: 7.  Good but nothing outstanding, and some nouns missing.

Parser: 8.  Fine.  Inform regular.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  There was a moment as "Little Buddy" that was almost fun, but otherwise not a lot here.

Participation/Involvement: 2.  Pretty darn low.

Lack of Annoyance: 8.  Not really annoying, so that's a plus.

General Idea: 6.  I thought it might have been going somewhere after the intro, but it turned out to be a rather uninteresting and meaningless stroll through this tree and the house.  I suppose there was some sort of moral about the influence of television on children, but it was not very clear.

Wildcard: 1.  Nothing at all to like, and on top of that, it ended without telling me I won.  Blechh.  And no extras at all, like credits, about the author, anything.

Composite score: 5.4 (Comp score: 5)

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coffee quest II

Anonymous, TADS2

Hm.  So many mixed feelings about this game.  I like the idea of searching for coffee; it's something I can identify with, being addicted to caffeine myself.  Although I don't like coffee.  But anyway, the major problem was that I had no idea that coffee could be found to the north past my supervisor's office.  There were lots of in-game hints about how to do certain things, even if none of it made much sense.  For example, I knew I would have to deal with Tracey somehow in order to get into the office supply cabinet.  I knew that I would need ear plugs to go east past my supervisor's office, and something to mail to go north past it.  But why I would want to do any of these things was rather vague.

Also, there was no reason to think that certain NPCs would give me certain items for helping them out.  For instance, when you do a favor for Maureen, she gives you something that will get you past another problem spot.  Why?  Who knows. 

There are quite a number of what appear to be coding problems.  For instance, when talking to the techy, I almost always got more than one sentence from him.  For instance:

>ask techy about techy
The techy seems unable to grasp the concept of .

>ask techy about cdrom
'It ate my disk' complains the techyThe techy is scared that it may be his
round.That's far too technical for him.That's far too technical and executive
for him.The techy seems unable to grasp the concept of .

>ask techy about paperclip
The techy appears confused at the thought of such a high tech appliance.The
techy cannot remember them.The techy is worried that the plant may be after his
job.The techy says he could do him in a fight.'It ate my disk' complains the
techyThe techy is scared that it may be his round.That's far too technical for
him.That's far too technical and executive for him.The techy seems unable to
grasp the concept of .

See what I mean?  It looks like I'm falling through a switch statement of some sort.  In C++ you have to return or break out of a switch statement to avoid falling through; it may be the same in TADS2.  I know in Inform there are automatic breaks, so maybe our anonymous author is someone more familiar with Inform.  Anyway, it looks pretty bad (although quite humorous).  There is also a rash of incorrect punctuation and missing words, along the lines of "The techy seems unable to grasp the concept of ."

Ignoring these coding problems and the missing synonyms, and the misuse of "it's purpose" where it was supposed to be "its," and calling a person "The Tracey," and adding gratuitous apostrophes to verbs conjugated in the present tense (house's)... as I said, ignoring all of these, the puzzles were both fabulous and tricky.

Fabulous puzzles are puzzles I can solve that aren't so ridiculously easy that they solve themselves.  Tricky puzzles are puzzles that I have to look at the hints or walkthrough.  Since there weren't any hints, I was forced to use the walkthrough in some spots, but I actually solved some of the problems on my own.  Yay!  And here is the best part: there were GOOD RESPONSES for "wrong" attempts to solve puzzles.  Let me illustrate:  You are crawling through a ventilation shaft and come to a grille, through which you would like to pass.  Hm, says I, "take grille."  Nope, you can't have the grille.  Okay, says I, I have a screwdriver.  "Unscrew grille."  Unlikely! the game says.  The screws are on the other side.  Ahh, says I, then I need to muscle through.  "Push grille."  One firm kick and the grille drops out of view.  Ha-HA!  Take that!  And my score increased!  But that second response, rather than a plain "I don't know how to unscrew the grille," was immensely helpful and very much appreciated.

More of the same would have been appreciated: especially with trying to wrap up different items to make them into a mailable package.  After fiddling with a bunch of syntax, getting "I don't know how to wrap the <item>" doesn't give much help in figuring out what I SHOULD be wrapping.

And so many times I knew exactly what to do with an item when I found it!  I knew, just knew, when I spotted the scissors that I had to have them and why.  I had tried asking other people about scissors earlier, not realizing that if I just jumped through the right hoops they would be given to me in such a nonsensical place.  But then, the nonsense was a critical part of this game: at one point you enter a wardrobe and come out in a snowy forest, complete with lamp-post.  Heh.

There are a few things that aren't always clear from the description; for example, the door leading west from the coffee lounge is mentioned in the room description as just "a door to the West" (which needn't be capitalized, by the way).  It is only when you "x door" that you find out it's the executive bathroom door, and it has a keypad on it.  That would have been nice to notice earlier.

Also, something rather critical seems to be completely left out of the text printed late in the game.  When you enter a certain room at a certain time, a sort of secret passage is opened up in the wall.  You need to wedge something in the door to keep it from closing immediately.  Only problem is, there is no mention of the opening in the room description or upon a "look" action.  Plus, after the wall has already closed, you can "wedge wall" and still get points (although you can't go through the opening, since it has already closed).  A bit of a problem.

Anyhow, the scoring was great.  I love being told that my score increased, especially for actions that I did without needing to look in the walkthrough to figure out (waking the guard, knocking on the stall door, etc).

I got stuck pretty quickly in Coffee Quest II, mainly because I didn't look in every person's desk (plus, "open desk" and "open drawer" were two different actions, although both doable).  That and I had no idea I could pick locks.  Perhaps that could have been mentioned in the intro somewhere.

Two final bits: what's the deal with the tiredness code?  If you don't finish the game in a certain amount of time you get very tired and have to sleep somewhere uncomfortable.  I guess it has to do with not getting the caffeine you need.  And finally, why on earth would I have poured the coffee on the plant?  The only reason would have been if I had known what was going to happen to the plant as a result.  This is the very definition of a puzzle requiring authorial mindreading.  But in general the puzzles were great.

Let's see the numbers:

Story: 4.  Really not much of one.  The PC needs coffee, and works in an office.

Writing: 6.  Fair writing, usually, with a sizeable number of typos and missing/incorrect punctuation.  Also, I don't think "qualititous" is a word.

Puzzles: 8.  I like these puzzles.  Even with the seeming randomness of "do this to get that, and never you mind the reason," the puzzles are fun and rewarding when you do get them.  Could use a hint system, though.

Coding: 7.  Some problems, mentioned above, but a lot of stuff taken into account.

Parser: 8.  Your normal competent TADS2 parser.

Humor/Enjoyment: 6.  This could have been higher, but there weren't very many actually funny bits.  And I'm not sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there are in-jokes that I'm not getting.  I hate that.

Participation/Involvement: 3.  Pretty low.  I felt more like I was wandering around someone else's office, rather than my own.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  There was a bit, at times, but for the most part (and with a walkthrough in hand) the game was annoyance-lite.

General Idea: 6.  I don't have many problems with searching for caffeine, and exploring the office was sorta fun.  But still, nothing very outstanding.

Wildcard: 4.  Sure, there were some good parts, but overall I'm left with almost a bad taste in my mouth.  Maybe it's all the talk about coffee.  I need a soda.

Composite score: 5.9 (Comp score: 6)

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Out Of The Study

Anssi Raisanen, ALAN

The comp's requisite one-room game is, this year, a terrific one.  You play a burglar hired to filch some papers from a scientist's office, and that's easy enough to do.  But then you try to leave, and find the door has locked itself behind you, and you don't know the pass code!  Sure, you could just try all hundred thousand combinations, but a better idea might be to take a look around the room and try to figure out the professor's code.  I think there was the added impetus for exploring that you hadn't quite picked up the necessary "important papers" yet, so you have to do that before you leave also.

I started this game in the order of my master list, but got totally stuck and there wasn't a hint or a walkthrough, so I had to put it aside until my sister had a chance to get to it so I could bug her for hints (plus, the World Series was on, and my team was playing).  So, I played a lot of other games in the meantime.  But I went back to it, after Jen said there actually WAS something you could examine through the binoculars, and surprised myself by solving it in another half hour.  This is a fun game to solve, folks.

What I liked about the overall solution to the puzzle was that there were so many red herrings.  The level of detail built into the room is quite astonishing.  Sometimes in reviewing a game I refer to "second-level" nouns.  These are nouns that are only mentioned when you examine something explicitly mentioned in the room description.  For example, in Out of the Study, the room description tells you that there is a desk, a fireplace, a window, a bookcase, and a coconut palm (in addition the door, of course).  So when you "x desk" and get discover that on the desk are a map, a calendar, a family photo, an ashtray, and a pen holder, those are all second-level nouns.  This game goes way beyond second level nouns.  More like fifth- and sixth-level nouns.  And all of it, absolutely all of it is visible from where you stand in the middle of the room.  Well, conceptually it's the middle of the room. 

As you might imagine, this level of detail leads to a lot of red herrings.  Of course, you don't know which clues are red herrings until the end, but it makes for a lot of fun anyways.  Your whole objective here is to figure out which five digits are in the professor's code, so that you can get out of the room.  If you "x window" you discover a small fly buzzing about right next to the window.  "X fly" tells you that it keeps repeating the same pattern, like it was trapped there.  That in itself would be cool enough, but if you say "x pattern" you get "Peering even closer at the fly..." and the discovery that it's actually tracing out a figure eight.  A-ha! says I.  A figure eight!  That must be one of the digits in the professor's code!

I don't want to give too much away, but let me just say that I assumed there would be five such discoveries and then I would just need to figure out the order of the digits to get out.  So, when I discovered a question whose answer was "6" and a feature called "The Nine Widows," I assumed I had two more digits.  Then, thanks to my sister Jen, I discovered a clue which read "How many insects can you hear ?"  Hm... I thought.  Does it mean right now, or in general?  "Listen."  "You hear nothing unexpected."  Well, lots of insects make noise of some sort or another, but that doesn't help me get any more of the five digits.

There was something of a bug with the bookcase: even when I was holding one of the books from the bookshelf, "x bookcase" still told me that the book (which was in my inventory) stuck out a bit from the other books.  This was true of either book I took.  Plus, after taking the painting off the wall, I still got the same "you notice a painting on the wall" when looking behind <the item you have to look behind to find the painting>.  That was my weak attempt to avoid spoilage.  Anyway, these quibbles aside, it seemed a very well coded work.  I couldn't "uncrumple" the paper, but that was fine.  I did like how polite the parser was:

>x keypad
'keypad'?  [That word is not recognised.]

Story: 6.  Not a lot of a story; just a burglar needing to get out.  Although, the ending did make me wonder.

Writing: 7.  Pretty good.  It's the kind of unobtrusive writing that you don't notice because it seems so natural.  There were a few missing or extra commas and a rare typo.

Puzzles: 8.  As is typical in the best one-room games, there were a whole bunch of puzzle-like situations open to the player at once, rather than a series of hoops to jump through.  And I solved it myself (with a nudge from Jen to examine one item more closely)!  These are bright, fun, puzzles.

Coding: 8.  Even with the great level of detail supplied, there were some missing nouns and a synonym or two that could have been added.

Parser: 8. 

Humor/Enjoyment: 5.  Even though nothing was actually funny in the game, when I look back at my playing experience I remember a sort of omnipresent, subtle sense of humor throughout.

Participation/Involvement: 7.  I felt pretty much "into it," and wanted out.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  I liked that the game told me I can find everything I need with examine, look under, and look behind.  That helped.  But I still needed to examine every little thing, and I found the binoculars tricky to use.

General Idea: 8.  I like the one-room mystery thing!

Wildcard: 7.  Pretty fun! 

Composite score: 7.1 (Comp score: 7)

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Evacuate

Jeff Rissman, TADS2

Sigh.  Have you played Starship Titanic, the graphic adventure type game written by Douglas Adams?  If so, you might find your every step during the game plagued by mental images from Starship Titanic, and memories of its quirky humor, and longing for its spacious passageways with a real sense of the enormity of the ship.  If not, you might actually like Evacuate. 

It's not that Evacuate is a bad game, not at all.  It just suffers in comparison to such an epic adventure, and the mind cannot help but compare it.  You are a passenger in a luxury space cruise liner in the future, and the ship has come under attack.  You are knocked out, and when you recover everyone else has left (but the enemy attackers have not yet boarded).  The question is, what do you do now?  Well, you might think that you could just head for the escape hatch, following the little red lights in the hallway, but apparently they don't lead anywhere.  This raises the interesting question of what happened to all the other passengers.  Surely they must have gone somewhere, right?  But there's no sign of how they got out.

I would say "putting that aside, let's move on to other topics," but there's more to it than that.  The absolute lack of any clear idea of what to do next is the biggest problem with the entire game.  You're in your cabin, and you can make your way down to a pile of rubble with a anti-grav speeder, but you can't enter the speeder.  That is made pretty clear.  Okay, so then what?  There's a locked door upstairs that I couldn't go through, perhaps I should putz around until I figure out how to get through it.  This is an odd thing to do when the enemy could be boarding the ship at this very moment, and yet it's what I have to do.  Moreover, I have to do it by distracting the desk robot in the lobby area.  (Yes, there's a slightly quirky, polite desk robot.  Don't think of Starship Titanic.  Just don't.)

So after fifteen minutes, I picked up the walkthrough (there are no hints).  Oh.  There was an item in my room that I never noticed.  Then I was supposed to ask the desk robot about a code -- what code?  This was the first I'd heard about any code!  I'd figured out that it would be a good idea to give the desk robot the other passenger's ticket rather than my own, but I had no idea that any kind of code was needed anywhere.  

Anyway, five minutes later I had twenty points, a screwdriver, and no idea at all as to what to do next.  I'd gone through the locked doors and still had no idea.  There didn't seem to be any more locked doors. 

It all boils down to not enough information being given to the player.  I had no idea that I could turn the screwdriver on, even after looking at it closely.  The keypad to enter the code with was left out of the room description, and even though I was told it would be impossible to enter the speeder, that's exactly what I needed to do to win the game.  And worst of all, in the operations booth, there is absolutely no mention whatsoever of the crucial levers and buttons that I had to precisely manipulate in order to continue with the game. 

The maze was clever, and looked like a pain to code, but it was also very difficult to get through even with the map and the compass.  The map in the walkthrough is less than perfect, but without it I would have been in serious trouble.  The robot's greeting was listed in the room description, so that it did it again every time I typed "look."  There was an annoying inventory problem, with not being able to carry enough (well, I wanted to take all those paintings with me!).  A few typos and missing punctuation marks, and it would have been nice if I could have used "look out window." 

Several of the puzzles would have been quite a pain to figure out on my own, so I'm very glad that a walkthrough was included.  I ended up using it extensively, both to figure out what needed to be done next as much as how to do it.  My only hope was when I finally finished the game, that there would be a ton of amusing things to do.  But there was absolutely nothing.  Sigh.

Story: 6.  Actually a bit interesting.  But why weren't the attackers already on board? 

Writing: 7.  A rare typo here and there, plus missing end quotation marks.  But even without problems, there is no feeling behind the writing, nothing communicated beyond the bare "you see this and that" feel.  Also, if you're in a room with a flat floor, it's not a sphere.  Maybe the author meant "cylinder."

Puzzles: 4.  Too many times it was a guessing game just to figure out which direction to go next.  And more than one puzzle would have been tedium squared to sit through and try to figure out.  Plus, there were no hints.

Coding: 7.  I can push the pipe with the scarf while it's being worn.  Generally, though, pretty good coding level.  The desk robot especially had an awful lot of responses, which I appreciate.

Parser: 8.  Good TADS stuff.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  I feel like there could have been some humor, but it was just left out.  Dealing with the deskbot -- excuse me, I mean desk robot -- was probably the most enjoyable part of the game.  That and collecting the paintings, which turned out to be totally irrelevant.

Participation/Involvement: 4.  It's very telling that in the middle of an intense evacuation from the ship, with enemy attackers about to board the ship, I stopped to read a newspaper I found lying about.

Lack of Annoyance: 5.  There were definitely some very annoying parts, but a lot of it was muted by my dependence on the walkthrough. 

General Idea: 6.  I like the idea of escaping from this luxury space liner, although there was hardly any futuristic looking stuff around.  I almost thought at one point that I was a robot myself, which would have been cool, but apparently I was wrong.

Wildcard: 5.  I really liked the sandwich.

Composite score: 5.6 (Comp score: 6)

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The Granite Book

James Mitchelhill, TADS2

The Granite Book uses the HTML part of HTML TADS quite well.  The game starts with a very cool and eerie scene, and it uses "us" and "we" which has always been great in IF for drawing the player into the game.  Oh yeah, it was past tense also, but that doesn't bother me at all the way it does some people.  I thought it was done very well here.

So there we are, in the mist, on rocks, and then weird cool stuff starts happening.  Try examining the rocks a couple of times.  You get a slightly randomized response, saying that you see shapes in the rocks: spears, hooks, swords, churches, and faces.  Always faces.  Eerie.  And the way we are drawn into discovering the body is also disturbing and cool, and it works so well!  This continues throughout the game, although nowhere is it quite as cool as at the very beginning.

The hardest part of any short story or work of IF that starts off in such a new, weird, and disturbing way is ending it satisfactorily.  It's very hard to do, and I know that.  The ending of The Granite Book doesn't entirely fulfill the promise of coolness and weirdness from the beginning, but it isn't too far off either.  A great game.

Now, on to more game-related issues. I needed the hints in the first section, only because I was weirded out after reading the book the first time.  After all, the response ended with us "turning our eyes away, slamming the covers together."  Why would I want to read it again?  But I needed to.  When I did, of course, it was very cool, and moved me on to the next part of the game.

Here I needed hints again, but at this point I began to appreciate the the hints more fully.  The formatting was a little off, as highlighting alone did not work the way the author seemed to intend, and with Microsoft Word, any grammatical problems were underlined with the wavy green line (in the middle of an otherwise blank-appearing page).  But they were separated well, especially from page to page, and gave exactly what I needed at different times. 

Once "we" were in the caves, there seemed to be two voices in my head.  They were distinguished by normal text versus text in italics.  It suggests that someone else has entered "our" head and joined in the adventure.  The two voices from this point on actually have different takes on the scenes around them: the newer, italic voice seems to be more civilized and curious, while the original normal-text voice considers what can or can't be eaten, what is or isn't a threat, and how to get out of this place. 

There was a single typo that I could find: "how could be blame her?"  I think it should be "we," although maybe "he" would work also.  There's also a slight vagueness about the pool of water and the pedestal (okay, I'm just dense, so I missed it).  The pool is actually on the ceiling somehow.  This led to difficulty when I thought the pedestal was in the middle of the pool.  I tried to enter the pool, but it was out of reach, so I assumed the pedestal was also.  That was not the case.

There's also some syntax problems with directing the girl around.  I tried "girl, get on <item>" and "girl, enter <item>," but neither worked.  I needed "girl, lie on <item>."  And even that gave a response that described me as "pointing at the <item>" and the girl understood.  But "point" isn't a verb the game understands.

This is a good point: the error messages, nonproductive commands, and words not understood by the game are all pointed out to the player in brackets, in a different color from the rest of the text, and still in the plural second- person past tense.  As in:

>touch me
[Touching we seemed to have no effect.]

>walk
[We could not understand the word "walk".]

>yell
[We had no wish to draw attention to ourselves.]

>sit
[Assuming "the rocks"]
So we paused on a rock to rest...

I liked that effect; it made it very easy to see what was important and what was not, without breaking the cool "we" voice in the past tense that was going on.  A great move.

Oh, I should mention that there are some formatting problems with the error messages, mostly inserting a new line where there's no need.  But I can easily overlook that.  Mostly it was a lot of fun to figure out how to get stuff done, and the hints were damn good.  If anything was disappointing, it was the ending.  I almost always want more from an ending than I get, and when the beginning is so cool and promising, I can't help but expect an awful lot from the ending. 

(Aside: there's a lot of symbolism waiting to be discussed in this game.  The girl could be seen as an incarnation of Charon, since I had to give her a coin first, and later she was my passage out of the caves.  Cool, huh?)

Story: 8.  Really neat.  Could have wished for an ending with some resolution, though.

Writing: 9.  Wow.  Great job evoking the setting and feelings.  Formatting quirks and one typo that I could find.  And the mention of the claws came at just the right time: I have "Claws!!" written in my notes.  It was exciting.

Puzzles: 8.  Quite good; simple, easy to figure out and actually making sense in a bizarre and twisted sort of way.  Plus the hints were excellent.

Coding: 7.  Troubles and quibbles with the girl, the only real NPC in the game.  I did notice there was more than one possible phrasing for getting the coin, AND the responses were worded slightly different.

Parser: 8.  Good TADS-level parser, not surprisingly.

Humor/Enjoyment: 5.  No humor to speak of, and some of the enjoyment present in exploring the caves was mitigated by what had to happen with the stone table.

Participation/Involvement: 7.  High level of involvement, a lot of which was due to the plural second-person format.  Even so, the weirdness draws me in.

Lack of Annoyance: 9.  Very well done, almost no annoyance.

General Idea: 7.  I love these weird, disturbing and yet cool games.  The Granite Book does it very well.

Wildcard: 8.  I liked this one a lot!  It was just a bit on the short side.  I like cool games to go on for a while.

Composite score: 7.6 (Comp score: 8)

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Four Mile Island

Anonymous, BASIC

From what I gathered in the readme file, this game was actually written first by Thomas Russo as a "type-in" game.  The anonymous author ported it to BASIC, tidied it up for the Mac and PC, and entered it in the IF Comp "for kicks."  Okay, fine.  I'm not much impressed, though.

First of all, it's a two-word parser, which means you can't say "look at bob."  That and the fact that you can't use "x" as a shortcut for "examine" means I typed out the word "examine" a lot more often that I really wanted to.  I know, you could just type "look bob," but I hate that.  It doesn't make sense.  Plus, you can't use "it" to refer to the thing you were just talking about.  In addition there are annoying sentences in CAPS throughout the game.

The idea is, you are some sort of government agent sent to this nuclear power plant to prevent your archenemy Marchand from blowing the place up.  Fine.  I actually got in and mapped the place just fine before getting totally stuck.  The problem was, I missed the fact that it's possible to walk south from the reception room.  The walkthrough is critically flawed in that it only goes "south" once from the hallway instead of the necessary TWICE before moving about in the other offices.  So I had no clue at all what it was talking about until I figured out you can go south from the reception room.  I know, the exits are listed when you first enter a room, but I'm oblivious to critical stuff sometimes, and that's annoying.

There are some other quirks with the parser, or maybe just the whole BASIC thing.  For instance, at one apparently random point, typing "s" to go south gave me an inventory listing instead.  Later on, "w" did it too.  I think I figured out that each time it happened, there was no exit in the direction I typed.  But why I didn't get the "you fail to find an exit in that direction" I have no idea.  There were items I couldn't look at, but I could open and close.  There was also an odd line break problem: at times the text seemed to wrap just fine, at times it seemed the author had set the line breaks by hand, and at times both.  As in:

"some text here.... A gunfight took place
A gunfight took place here."

Anyway, the whole game seems to be entered on a lark, and it isn't even original.  It's not especially noteworthy, and it isn't much to speak of when compared to some of the gems of this year's Comp.  One last note: I tried to "drop Marchand" when he was in the room with me, and I got the rather puzzling response, "You can drop what you can't take!"  I think that was supposed to be "can't" drop.  Ah well.

Story: 6.  Maybe the best part of the game.  You, your archenemy, a nuclear power plant about to blow. 

Writing: 5.  Not the greatest prose, with simple sentences and pretty contrived feelings: "You consider lunging at Marchand, but no... the chance that he could win a physical contest, however small, is too much."

Puzzles: 5.  The maze is odd.  The walkthrough is flawed and there are no hints.

Coding: 7.  Actually, a good bit is taken into account and I don't really know how hard it is to program in BASIC.  But then there's the...

Parser: 4.  Yuck.  Give me something with some flexibility, not to mention shortcuts, undo, pronouns, and save/restore!

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  Pretty low.

Participation/Involvement: 4.  Again, rather low here.

Lack of Annoyance: 5.  I've seen worse, but this one had its moments.

General Idea: 7.  Not the most original, but it works.

Wildcard: 5.  There isn't anything I want to strike down or reward for.  It's just not that remarkable.

Composite score: 5.2 (Comp score: 5)

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The PK Girl

Robert Goodwin, ADRIFT

The PK Girl is, so far, the most horrendously offensive game in the Comp to me.  By far.  But this illustrates the reason I use a ten-category system: at most, I can only grade this game down in two categories for being horrendously offensive, the General Idea and the Wildcard (unless it also ruins my feeling of involvement with the game, which would be a third category).  So, the most horrendously offensive game can still get high scores in other categories, if it's well written and has good puzzles.  However, the horrendously offensive parts will tend to color my review, so please bear that in mind.

The first, most basic problem was this: the game starts by asking me my name.  Well, my name is Jessica, so I typed that.  There should have been nothing at all shocking about that.  It didn't ask for a character name, or what I wanted to be called, nor did it give any indication that the character to whom the name would be applied had any defining characteristics already.  For instance, that the character was male.  So I was stuck playing a boy named Jessica.  How distasteful.  Does the author imagine that only males play text adventure games? 

I thought at first that the male character problem wouldn't be that big of a problem.  Until the plot became apparent: I and my motorcycle would come to the rescue of some young girls, and the scoring is based entirely on my relationships with these girls.  Yechh.

So, the plot is apparent, I'm resigned to it, and I'm at one girl's house while the three of them are chatting.  I wander the house, looking for something interesting to do.  There's a fridge, with food inside.  I could cook said food.  But when I try, the game says that I'm bad at cooking and I should leave it for "the women-folk."  Grr.  Fine.  One of the girls cooks dinner later, and we all eat.  I stand up from the table after eating and pick up my plate to take it to the kitchen.  Uh, no, I don't: "There's no reason to pick up your dishes when there are girls around to clean up."  Grrr...  And, just to top it off, when I, curious teenage boy that I am, ask one of the intelligent, capable, and psychokinetically powerful characters why she needed my help, I get this: "You don't know very much about girls."  <stunned pause>  As a matter of fact, I know an awful lot about girls.  I've been one.  Second, the implication is quite strong here that females need males to help them out of rough situations.  There just isn't enough growling left in me.

Now, putting all that ... stuff aside.  The game is pretty good, if a bit difficult and overlong.  You are caught up in an ongoing struggle to control and research the psychokinetic power of a few young girls.  Apparently the game is even bigger than I saw, since according to the scoring, there were three (out of the eight) main female characters whom I never even met.  It's an odd way to score: you get points for each female individually, depending on how you interact with her.  Then, if your score is high enough with any one of them, you get one of the "special" endings.  I did not get a special ending.  This is because the walkthrough that came with the game had only the worst solutions to score the least points.  What these solutions are is mainly waiting for someone else to solve the problem, moving the story along.  Sure, you look like a schmuck, but the story does keep moving along.

Unfortunately, looking like a schmuck does not make for a fun game.  A walkthrough that only gives the worst solutions does nothing more than usher me roughly through the game and dump me out the back door at the end.  What I want as a lost, forlorn game player (not to mention Comp Judge) is to be escorted politely, gently, and (ideally) with commentary, through the joy and the wonder that is your game.  Authors, take note.  Of course, you wouldn't need to worry about the walkthrough if you would just implement a gentle, helpful, and thoughtful hint system.

Anyway, I did figure out a few things on my own, which was nice.  And the story was forgiving in that you had plenty of time to figure certain things out.  Even though it may seem like you're in the middle of an intense chase, you're not.  There's not a lot that feels very intense about this game, after you realize your actions don't impact the story nearly as much as they seem to.  Between that feeling of detachment and having to play the game as a teenage boy named Jessica, my level of involvement in the story is quite low.

Story: 7.  Pretty original; probably could have been interesting.

Writing: 6.  Mostly bland, a few misspellings, and "with whom she's best friends with."

Puzzles: 4.  Without the walkthrough, too many of the puzzles are guess-and-check or just a pain.  With the walkthrough, many are left unsolved, and some didn't get clued well enough.  The peddler scorned my $1.25 one day and happily took $1 the next.

Coding: 7.  Missing synonyms, some verbs could have been added, but there are some nice bits (like assuming you want to sit on the motorcycle to ride it).

Parser: 8.  As in A Party To Murder, I had no trouble with the ADRIFT parser.  Not many extras though.

Humor/Enjoyment: 3.  Just about the only thing I enjoyed was taking all the stuff out of the fridge and leaving it on the floor to spoil.

Participation: 1.  The characters kept calling me Jessica and giggling.  Gross.

Lack of Annoyance: 2.  Besides everything mentioned above, there were times when I couldn't do what I wanted when I wanted; the score system was annoying; the conversation system was annoying.

General Idea: 1.  "Rescuing" super-powered young women who should be just fine without my help, and being forced to play a boy named Jessica, are repulsive game ideas.

Wildcard: 2.

Composite score: 4.1 (Comp score: 4)

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Rent-A-Spy

John Eriksson, Z-code

By far, the coolest moment in the game is being in a body bag in a refrigerator in a morgue, and you can't get out because the zipper is stuck.  I felt a true sense of panic, followed by honest relief when I got out.  I mean, whew!

That being said, this game has a great advantage over some of the higher-scoring games so far in that it has lots of ways it can improve, and a great advantage over some of the lower-scoring games in that many of those ways are mechanics, and not character.  Some of the simpler fixes are things like punctuation.  For instance, the sentence:

Billy, the driver says; "We're almost there."

should be changed to:

Billy, the driver, says, "We're almost there."

or, conceivably:

Billy the driver says, "We're almost there."

though I do prefer the former.  Some more time-consuming problems deal with the way the parser/narrator/game/PC? talks to me, the player.  It seems to vary between "I" and "you," with some weird third-person verb conjugations thrown in for good measure (and some responses in the past tense).  The effect is slightly (and unintentionally, I presume) comic, but it also distracts me from the point of the game.  Some examples are "You try to <do something> but fails."  "You dig <in something> but doesn't find anything."  "You failed to <do something>."  My personal favorite is an odd you/I mix: "You crawl out of <the item>.  Phew!  I'm not doing that again!"

In a similar vein, there are some "I" messages that seem to address me (the player) directly, perhaps from the author or perhaps from the PC herself.  For example, I'm trying to get to a certain floor via the elevator, so I push the button.  A panel with a card slot lights up, and I get the response "I guess you need a pass card to go to that floor."  These messages are not comic; instead, they distract and annoy.  Who is talking?  The author, the PC?  And to whom?  And why is it a "guess" if you wrote the game?  That implies that it isn't the author speaking.  But if it's the PC, then she is talking to me, which means she knows I'm here, and also that I control her actions.  She's also accepting her passive role by saying "you need" and not "we need."  Okay, maybe I'm overanalyzing.  But this is what I was thinking during the game, and that made it less fun.  Maybe it was the narrator.  I think I could see the narrator popping up as a character from time to time, but one or two random messages just make it confusing.

Anywho, the puzzles seem to be hit or miss, although more hits than misses.  I needed the walkthrough at a few key points (especially early), but actually did quite a few things on my own (especially inside).  Many of the puzzles could have had better clues, but many had great in-game clues.  It was in-game hints that got me the stethoscope, the book, and inside the morgue.  Then again, even with the stethoscope, I had problems opening the safe due to syntax trouble.  It turned out that I could have used a much simpler command than I was trying.  Sorry, authors (and I abashedly include myself as a target of this reprimand), but allowing simple syntax (e.g., "solve problem" or "open safe") is not enough if players think of complicated commands first (like "write problem with pencil" or "listen to safe with stethoscope").  You've got to include responses, at least, that show the person is on the right track but maybe trying too hard.

There were a few moments in the patient room and the morgue that I could really feel.  I think, though, that the feelings only stand out because the rest of the complex is so stark and artificial-feeling.  This is partly because there are few interesting rooms with few items in them, but even a few items can fill a room if they seem real enough.  The second factor here is the lack of description of the rooms and objects.  The prime example of this is the purchase order you find in the administration offices: "x paper" gets you "It's a purchase order for more office supplies.  It's signed by someone called Amy Bird."  Which says to me, as a game player, "It doesn't matter what it says exactly.  It's related to office stuff, but what you really need to know is the name Amy Bird."  Me, I'd rather see exactly what the paper says, I think.

Oh, and there's a GREAT situational response to "jump" when you're in the morgue refrigerator. 

Story: 6.  Slightly interesting, somewhat cliché, but I do like the protagonist.  What little we see of her character, anyway.

Writing: 5.  Passable at best, with several punctuation and grammar problems. 

Puzzles: 6.  Not bad, overall, with some standouts and some toughies.  Mostly, my difficulties were with syntax or wording, which brings us to...

Coding: 6.  Room for improvement! 

Parser: 8.  Good Inform stuff here.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  Not a lot of humor, and not a lot of fun moments either.  I did like the morgue, though.

Participation/Involvement: 5.  This would have been a lot lower without the morgue scene, and a lot higher if every scene was as intense as that one (which is tough, I know).

Lack of Annoyance: 6.  Some rather annoying bits, and I didn't like not being able to die (no matter how I tried), but on the whole, more non-annoyance than annoyance.

General Idea: 5.  I could take it or leave it.

Wildcard: 5.  I did like the fact that the PC was a chick (especially after the last game).

Composite score: 5.6 (Comp score: 6)

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Identity Thief

Rob Shaw-Fuller, Z-code

Wow, what fun!  This is a cool game with a super-cool idea behind it.  Okay, so I was distracted by the second line of the game, right underneath the title, which said "A cyperpunk thriller."  What exactly is a cyperpunk?  But I soon got over that small annoyance as I read the introductory text.  And it's good stuff, if you like that sort of thing.  I do.  Somehow, the future that Rob Shaw-Fuller fills with corrupt corporations, dirty politicians, and gritty identity thieves manages not to come off as feeling grim or bleak.  Instead, it feels almost light-hearted, in a Stainless-Steel-Rat, I'm-super-cool-so-I-don't-have-to-take-your-crap kind of way.  And it works.  It's good.

Anyway, on to the game itself.  You play a mercenary type whose task it is to retrieve a datachip from the house of a wealthy senator.  But when you arrived, she was awake, and you had to kill her.  That's where the game starts: you bloodied and injured, with the corpse of the senator on the floor in front of you.  Cool!  Of course, there turns out to be more to it than just a simple snatch-and-run job.  First, you have an odd vision, and then you head to your doctor's place after getting the datachip for help with your wound.  There, you find out a bit more about what's going on.  And that's where the game ends.  Kinda abrupt at the end, but any longer and it might have been too long for the comp, which is too bad because the PC sounds pretty cool in a bad-ass sort of way.

I was pretty impressed with the general mechanics of the game, especially when the game assumed I wanted to do a certain thing that would have been really tricky to type, just by me taking the object.  This was good for two reasons: one, it saved me bumbling around trying to figure out how to say it (and this at an early moment in the game), and two, it only did it the one time.  I wouldn't want the game to assume too much, but this one-time assumption worked wonderfully.  Also, when I was wondering if I should hide the body, I looked somewhere (like under the bed, only that wasn't it and I don't remember what it was) and got "there's nothing there" sort of thing, followed by "Not enough space for a body, if that's what you were thinking."  That's exactly what I was thinking!  That was pretty cool.

But (and it's a big but) there were some problems.  One bug was the mirror in the room, which you could close before it was open.  Second, the walkthrough says to "take watch" and "take ring" even though I couldn't find them in the room by looking no matter what I tried.  Third, driving the van was tricky.  I couldn't just "drive" or "drive east," but I had to "drive TO <someplace>" and I didn't remember that I needed to go to the doctor.  In the doctor's office, there was some sort of printing problem because a line cut off in mid-sentence and I got three blank lines on the screen, and a prompt.  That was odd.

The "visions" that I was having were odd too.  At first I had no idea what was going on, and by the end of the game I was still a little fuzzy.  I finally managed to get the story out of the doctor ("ask doctor what the hell just happened" didn't work for some reason), but it's all pretty weird.  I think the reference to the X-men would have been better left out than included.  Anyhow, I like the game and the feel of it, and would certainly enjoy a continuation!

Story: 8.  Cool!  Uh, except maybe the ending.

Writing: 9.  Great consistent tone, almost up to the end (where we get hit with a moral), with only a few typos.

Puzzles: 7.  Mostly good, but dragging info out of the doc at the end was a pain.  And there were no hints.

Coding: 8.  Seems good, although a few more nouns and synonyms would make it great.

Parser: 8.  The whole driving thing was a pain, but overall good Inform quality.

Humor/Enjoyment: 7.  Moments of wry humor, but more the score is from the enjoyable things to do.  I really like the character.

Participation/Involvement: 8.  Great.  I was really into it, especially in the chick's house.  The grub thing threw me, though.

Lack of Annoyance: 8.  Mostly fine, except a few things with the car, the doctor, and the grub (how do you refer to an object when the game text calls it "something"?).

General Idea: 9.  I like it!  ID thief!  Cyber implants rock!

Wildcard: 7.  Overall, I have a warm, fuzzy feeling about killing people and stealing their identities.  But some weird genetic stuff detracts from it.  And there aren't any extras, like "about," or "credits," or "amusing."

Composite score: 7.9 (Comp score: 8)

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Unraveling God

Todd Watson, ADRIFT

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on with the storyline of this game, but once I did, well, it was cool.  It's more story than it is game, and we are presented with the scenes in non-sequential order, but when you get to the end you understand it all.  Which is how non-sequential stories should be.  It really helps that there are clues about how things fit together in the scene transitions: "Two weeks earlier..." "Two years before..." "Three days later..." etc.

Playing through some of the scenes was a bit boring, especially talking to Claudia in the bedroom.  It doesn't make any difference what you say, so you just type "talk to Claudia" several times and you're done.  What she has to say isn't too interesting at the time, but in the larger context of things it becomes quite interesting indeed.  For example, the scene ends by saying something about "she'll support your plans, and that was why you decided to make her fall in love with you after all."  Then, a few scenes later (not the next scene--good touch), you find out exactly why you decided that.  Very, very nicely done.

I had no trouble with the ADRIFT parser, although the nifty sentence completion was missing.  There were tons of missing articles ("the"), mostly at the end of descriptions.  "It's a plain manilla folder.  Manilla folder is closed" or "You open office door" sort of thing.

The story definitely is made more personal by being an interactive work; however, there is one moment where I wanted to do something and would have, if the game hadn't interrupted with "No, you can't change the past... what you really did was..." which only works because the whole thing is pretty much a flashback from the first scene where I'm in Hell.  Speaking of which, because the character doesn't make the same choices that I would have made and has, in fact, a different moral makeup, there's a slight glitch with the ending where I have to choose whether to go back to Hell and save the world or go back to Earth for my own personal gain.  It's almost too easy to say, sure, send me back to Hell, because I (the player) know that the character is a creep and deserves it. 

Thinking back, the extra time in the PC's house while waiting for someone to show up was just the right amount of time.  I walked around the house, looking at things, thinking, and got a great sense of the character just before the doorbell rang.  A great decision by the author.  And the endings were both well done.

Story: 9.  I liked it.  Cool physics and stuff (a bit hand-wavey, but they were there).

Writing: 8.  Pretty good, with a few typos and punctuation problems.

Puzzles: 4.  What score do you give for puzzleless IF?  I mean, really and truly puzzleless.  There were no hints, but I was able to go through the whole thing without looking at the walkthrough.

Coding: 7.  Some problems with doors and folders.

Parser: 8.  Seems fine to me.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  No humor to speak of, and not actually that much fun to play.

Participation/Involvement: 7.  Pretty good, which actually surprised me.  I think the sequencing of the scenes really helped this.

Lack of Annoyance: 9.  Almost nothing annoying (but a few problems with doors and folders).

General Idea: 8.  Fine.

Wildcard: 4.  Okay, so it's a cool story and it's got physics and stuff, so why didn't I like the game overall?  Is it too brief?  Is the character too different from myself?  Not sure.

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Koan

Anonymous, Z-code

Overall, Koan doesn't try to be very much, and it doesn't miss its mark.  This game started with a programming error, and it was apparently programmed with Inform library 6/4 instead of the more current 6/10 version.  Are these facts related?  I have no idea.

Anyhow, the game called Koan starts by saying "Welcome to the game called Koan."  It's almost refreshing to have a game that isn't trying to change the world or sweep anyone off their feet.  It's just a game, and it will tell you so.  On the other hand, walking through places titled "Middle Location: This is the middle location in this game" and "North Location: This is the north location in this game" isn't an awful lot of fun. 

So, your task in this game is to break the stone slab, and you are explicitly told that to do that, you need the pot from on top of the pillar.  The hints say that no matter how you choose to get the pot down from the pillar, you will crack it.  Um, but when I examined it before getting it down, it already had a crack in it.  So I didn't do it; it must have been whoever put it up on top of the pillar in the first place.

There isn't a lot to say about this game, now that I'm sitting here thinking about it.  It's a one-gag game, and not awfully entertaining.  There's no good way to describe the major problem in the game without spoiling it completely, but I'll do my best.  True sticklers for spoil-avoidance should skip the remaining lines of text and go to the numbers, below.  The solution to the puzzle requires to you to type "put <object> on <other object>," but that gives you a response starting with "You take the <object> and..."  This would be fine if the game would allow me to "take <object>" in the first place, but it doesn't.  In fact, it specifically says that I can't carry that, which is very misleading.

Story: 2.  Not much of one.

Writing: 5.  Pretty bland, with a few errors even in the miniscule amount of text that there was.

Puzzles: 4.  Only two, although there were five solutions to the first.  The second needs a bit of work.

Coding: 5.  "Take <object>" should work, and there is no embellishment of any kind (like "hit <object> with <something>" or extra verbs, although apparently the author implemented "lean against <object>" which is cool).  Still, you can move from place to place.  But there was a programming error.

Parser: 7.  You can't go too wrong with Inform.

Humor/Enjoyment: 3.  It was cute and it was clever, but it missed being entertaining.

Participation/Involvement: 1.  I wanted very much to break the stone slab, but only to get the game over with so that I could go eat.  That's pretty much immersion-less.  Plus, the writing on the floors reminded me that I was playing a game (literally): "This is a computer game."

Lack of Annoyance: 8.  Surprisingly low in annoyance, mostly because it was so short. 

General Idea: 5.  I thought it might have been cool.  Even if it was just a gag, the gag could have gotten better presentation.

Wildcard: 4.  0 out of 0 points?  Why not just give me one measly point for winning the game?

Composite score: 4.4 (Comp score: 4)

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MythTale

Temari Seikaiha, Z-code

When I started this game, I wasn't sure I was going to like it.  The game was compiled with debug mode on, which isn't a good sign.  There were PC actions hard-coded in the room descriptions.  I got a "That's just scenery" response for even looking at the desk in the office.  The articles on the bookshelf -- mind, this is ostensibly my bookshelf in my house -- were inexplicably "unidentified."  I had no good idea of who I was supposed to be, my cats were pushing me around...  And then I found the device.  The device is diabolical.  I could see what the buttons were doing, but I just had no idea at all how to get the lid of the tube open.

This was all in the first round of exploring my surroundings.  I was a bit worried, no doubt about it.  But I knew where three of the pages were (the goal is to collect five missing pages of notes), if not how to get them.  And I discovered the hint menu. 

At first, I was wary of using the hint menu.  I would have rather had the hints organized by the locations of the pages, rather than "Note 1" and "Note 2," since I had no idea which of the five pages was the one up the tree.  But it worked.  Also, additional hints like "what is the spider for?" or "how do I interact with the cats?" would have been nice, since that's what I really wanted to know.  But I gave in and checked out the hints, since I could have spent hours fiddling with the device.  And it wasn't too hard to figure out which hints went with which page, after reading a few of the questions involved.

Each time you pick up a sheet of your notes, you are transported back in time to ancient Greece and take the role of a character from a myth.  You have a task in each of these scenes, which isn't necessarily what happened in the versions of Greek mythology that I read (that caused me some confusion at one point).  But the scenes are well done, and fun (when you've got the hints).  The puzzles are especially clever in the Theseus and Polyeidus segments. 

The odd thing is, the part of the game with the cats is what I assumed to be the "real" parts.  The rest of it seems more like visions, dreams, or something that I read.  (After all, the PC is working on a game that deals with ancient Greece.)  But the game begins and ends with the same character, in ancient times, with a very satisfying and "loose-ends-tied-up" feel, even if they really aren't.  The endings are great too: depending on your actions in the final area, you get a different life story.  I went through them in almost worst-to-best order, so it was like I was progressively seeing better and better options for myself.  I did the whole ending without hints, too, which was great.  The obstacles there and the choices felt very natural.  I found five, but there may have been more.  Anybody find more endings than that?  I was even torn about which ending was my favorite.

Overall, this game is extremely well put-together, and impressive in its scale.  There's a lot to this game, and it's possible that if I'd given myself more time I would have been able to solve more of the puzzles without going to the hints as much.  After all, I figured out almost all of what the jar was for by myself.  This is definitely one of the better games in the comp.

Story: 8.  I liked it.  The requisite "game about writing a game" turned out not to be, after all.

Writing: 8.  Good, with some especially good passages, but also some typos and missing punctuation.

Puzzles: 7.  This is a tough one to judge, since I had to use the hints so much, but there were hints, and more importantly, the hints were helpful.  I even went back and did stuff at the suggestion of the hints.   Plus the walkthrough allowed me to get all the points.  Not bad, not bad!  Besides, the puzzles were clever and logical and had multiple solutions when applicable.

Coding: 7.  Lots of stuff, but some missing synonyms.  Plus, some syntaxes were hard to guess.

Parser: 9.  Inform plus customized responses when you were in Ancient Greece.

Humor/Enjoyment: 6.  The cats were very entertaining, but there wasn't much in the way of humor.

Participation/Involvement: 6.  I was getting into it, a little, but the jumping around from character to character was weird.  Plus, I thought of the “office world” as real, but the beginning and the ending were both part of the same continuous story.  Weird.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  There were some annoying parts, mostly having to do with interacting with cats or solving puzzles.  Plus the scene with Icarus was changed from what I remember of myth.

General Idea: 8.  Pretty neat!  I like it.  I like cats, and I like Greek mythology, and this game worked very well with both.

Wildcard: 4.  There were just a few things about the game that didn't sit too well with me.  Being told that a certain action "isn't your way" and then having to do it anyway two turns later is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Composite score: 7.0 (Comp score: 7)

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BOFH

Howard Sherman, Z-code

Followers of RAIF/RGIF might remember a small controversy before the judging period began about "background reading material" for this game.  The author posted a note recommending some background reading on the web to "enhance the playing experience."  Some thought this was very much the same as releasing part of the game before the comp, which would be a violation of the rules for authors; others saw it as "discussing" the game before the voting period was over, which would also be a violation of the rules as most people seemed to read them.  Some thought the game might be dismissed completely from the competition; some resolved to merely grade it down for the offense.  Stephen Granade, this year's Comp Organizer, hinted that those who didn't want to didn't have to vote on the game at all.  I don't have much to add on the topic; I'm not voting anyway (since I was an entrant), so I played the game and will review it just like all the others.

So!  The idea is that you are The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH), who is apparently a copyrighted character in some sort of online comic/mag/fanfic/website.  I have no idea what.  The game warns about strong language and adult material; I have no problems with these sorts of things.  I had no problem whatsoever with the porn on the computers, the being-mean-for-the-sake-of-it, or taking advantage of my company to get the nicest hotel room in Las Vegas.  I did have a problem with the multitudinous spelling, punctuation, grammar, and formatting errors in the game.

I could list them all for you; however, I don't think it would interest anyone very much (I will say that the dreaded ITS/IT'S error was present, in both forms).  More interesting are the coding problems.  For instance, I start the game with a cattle prod, but I couldn't (and still can't) figure out how to use it on anyone.  The game doesn't recognize the verb "prod," I can't "hit <someone> with prod," or even "zap <someone>."  I was also carrying a "swipe card" but I couldn't use the verb "swipe."  The game said that I'd "become so used to using [the card]" that I swipe things "almost without thinking."  Yeah, right.  That's easy enough to test with the locked door to the east of the starting location.  I try just walking east.  "The door is in the way."  Okay, open door.  "It seems to be locked."  Okay, unlock door.  "With what?"  With the only thing in my entire inventory that might conceivably be used to unlock the door, darnit!

There are also some exits from rooms that are nowhere to be seen in room descriptions, and yet necessary to win the game.  There is a room with objects lining the walls, but I can't see any such thing as one of them (and lots of other missing synonyms -- it's a puzzle just figuring out how to refer to one particular item).  There are actions which make your score go down if you do them in the wrong order.  The walkthrough included with the game was in the form of a game transcript, which meant I could get the exact same enjoyment from just reading the walkthrough that I could from actually typing the commands in the game.  Also, the walkthrough was created with an older version of the game and a few things had been changed in the current version.

It's hard to tell what, exactly, I'm supposed to be doing at any given moment besides just generally being a bastard.  This makes for a frustrating game experience, because I have to turn to the walkthrough at every step just to figure out what to try to do.  Hints would have been very welcome.

Story: 6.  Doesn't seem awfully exciting, but not too bad either.

Writing: 5.  Missing punctuation, awkward phrasing, incorrect uses of "its" and "it's" both, and spelling errors.  Plus, it wasn't that wonderful to begin with.

Puzzles: 4.  I didn't get them, and ended up going to the walkthrough for almost the whole thing.  Come to think of it, every single thing except for the looking around.

Coding: 5.  All SORTS of missing synonyms and nouns specifically mentioned in the text.  Plus, problems with syntax.

Parser: 7.  It's Inform.

Humor/Enjoyment: 5.  There may be funny things there for some people, but most of it wasn't that amusing to me.  I mean, this alleged bastard didn't know the verb "piss," and there was no clever response to "eat me" or, in fact, anything I could find.

Participation/Involvement: 3.  I just didn't feel like a bastard.

Lack of Annoyance: 5.

General Idea: 7.  This would have been a fine game if the implementation weren't so shoddy.

Wildcard: 1.  This is for the "suggested background material" post before the judging period began.

Composite score: 4.8 (Comp score: 5)

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Scary House Amulet!

Shimpenstein, Z-code

Hee hee!  What a fun little game!  When I walk into a room with a skeleton and I get a message like "The skeleton gnashes gruesome teeth at you! Chak chak chak!"  I can't help but giggle!  The tone is amazingly consistent throughout the entire game.  The only thing that could have been done better with the tone of the piece was the lame "you can't go that way" messages that popped up.  Somehow, the exclamation points and simple language make me feel like I've got a little friendly yet devilish leprechaun over my shoulder as I run around the game landscape.  It's delightful.

Several of the "NPCs" are delightful as well.  For example, there's a giant spider whom I'm supposed to attack (or otherwise subdue so that I can take an object).  The spider is my favorite of all the things I can talk to in this game.  It turns out to be a religious spider: "Hey, that's my bible!" it tells me.  "Spiders can be religious too, you know!"  Heh.  Plus it talks in really funny ways: "I'll just quaff this energy drink and then you're dead meat, buster!"  Heh!    

There's a maze, which is a bit of a pain.  I had though I solved it and didn't need to blunder around in the woods anymore, but it turned out I was wrong.  The hints were very helpful, with the possible exception of the bat puzzle, but even there the hints allowed me to solve all the parts I was stuck on.  I had some problems saving and restoring, although I'm beginning to suspect this is because of my new Frotz interpreter and the fact that TADS and Frotz both use .sav extensions.  Ah, well. 

There was only one missing synonym that I could see, and I don't have any spelling or grammatical errors written in my notes at all.  It's quite a fun game to play, if a bit short.  The only thing that was really, really out of place was the response to "x me:"  "You have green hair!  Your name is Britney!!"  How bizarre is that?

Story: 5.  You're supposed to get an amulet out of a mansion, and weird stuff happens.  Not an awful lot of story.

Writing: 8.  It's actually pretty good, with no spelling errors that I saw, and no missing punctuation (which has plagued many other games in this comp).  Plus, the consistency of the feel of the writing is impressive.

Puzzles: 7.  Mostly straightforward, simple to solve.  That's a bonus.  The maze was a pain.  That's a minus.  But there were hints available, in a fun new format which knew what puzzles I might be faced with at any given time.  Pretty neat.

Coding: 7.  Seemed mostly fine.  I didn't notice any special added features, nor any real bugs. 

Parser: 8.  Have I mentioned yet that I'm seriously reconsidering my scoring system?  I think I'll combine the coding and parser categories together and call it "mechanics" or something like that.

Humor/Enjoyment: 7.  "Chak chak chak!"  Heh!  This game is great.  A little on the short side.

Participation/Involvement: 4.  Okay, it had fun parts, but I don't really feel the character's motivation.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  Only annoying parts were the forest maze and the harpy's lair: was that a maze also?  Not sure.

General Idea: 6.  Pretty good game idea, overall.  I like the setting and the weirdness of everything that happens.

Wildcard: 7.  I like it.  I'm pleasantly surprised by the lack of writing mistakes, and I really love some of the funny lines.   

Composite score: 6.6 (Comp score: 7)

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Another Earth, Another Sky

Paul O'Brian, Glulx

This is a very impressive game, with clever puzzles and interesting locations, with nary a spelling or grammar error to be found by me.  It's a continuation of Earth and Sky, the author's 2001 IF Comp entry.  Not having played the first one, there were a few things I didn't know that seemed to be assumed.  For instance, the special commands to activate certain powers of the sky suit or the earth suit.  But the hints were helpful enough there.

Yes, I went to the hints pretty quickly on this one.  About fifteen minutes in, I couldn't get past a certain door, and rather than risk missing stuff at the end because I didn't finish, I turned to the hints.  To my great joy, these turned out to be some of the best hints I've seen.  They give just enough information, or question just the right bits, to make the player think and consider the options.  The best part was, even when I went to the hints for some clue as to how to do something, I still felt like I was solving a lot of the puzzle on my own.  This is a marvelous feeling!

You play Austin Colborn, and together with your sister Emily, you are searching for your missing parents.  You've tracked them to a remote cabin in the woods, the home of a certain professor with whom your parents were apparently collaborating.  But when you follow in their footsteps, you find yourself in a whole different part of the universe.  The miniature planet you finally get to is a really cool setting for an IF game: it's a sphere with six different sectors.  Because the sphere is so small, you can go east four times and end up in the same spot you started at, or go north to the pole and every direction is "south."  The direction handling was done very well here.  I imagined the sphere as a cube, with six different sides numbered one to six like a die, and that really helped to figure out when I could go where and which direction to move. 

Every segment of the landscape but one had some sort of cool alien animal to watch, or try to interact with.  That was pretty neat, but other than that there were no major NPCs.  Oh, except for maybe your sister Emily who isn't with you for a good chunk of the time.  Even without interacting with her too much, I still felt like I knew both of the characters pretty well.  Their interaction seemed quite natural.  I think that was helped by the option of using "talk to Emily," which started a bit of conversation between the siblings based on what you'd seen so far.

The puzzles really were clever on the planetoid, which is always nice.  The descriptions and differentiation between the segments made each part seem so vivid and colorful.  There are some great responses when you're on the right track, or even if you're on the wrong track, to let you know why what you're trying won't work.  Emily was available at the beginning for a few in-game hints, which is a good way to go about hints, but she didn't give anything away -- and why should she?  She doesn't have all the answers any more than the PC does.

Overall, this is a kewl game.  I have it written down like that on my notes, too.  There were only a few tetchy things that could have been improved, a few nouns or synonyms that could have been added, and a little more explanation at the beginning for those of us who haven't played Episode 1, and the game would be just about perfect.  And there was a squid.  Not just any squid, but an intelligent squid who drew figures in the sand and piled rocks on top of other rocks.  The method of transportation inside the planet was not only intuitive, but actually fun to figure out and play with.  Not to mention the super-cool suit that gives me heroic strength and special abilities.  That came in handy.  In general I'm not much of a comic book fan, but Another Earth, Another Sky doesn't knock you over the head with any comic book type stuff.  There's the occasional word art, like "CRRASH" in big maroon letters, which I guess is comic book style, but I thought those were pretty cool. 

I was surprised both by the total absence of writing mistakes and the almost-total lack of annoyance in the game.  A very rare combination indeed; the only thing that was annoying were the robots at the end.  I think I did get into an unwinnable state, although the author tried to make that impossible.  Let's see how the numbers turn out, shall we?

Story: 7.  Original, interesting.  A little abrupt at the beginning, and no resolution at the end (there's an Episode 3 coming out next year, according to the hints).

Writing: 9.  Good, and no mistakes!

Puzzles: 9.  Excellent hints, too!

Coding: 9.  Great job here.  I don't know much about Glulxe, but I do know I don't have anything written in my notes about syntax problems.

Parser: 10.  Several extras, and nothing at all wrong with it.

Humor/Enjoyment: 8.  I really had a good time with the planetoid, and there were funny bits!

Participation/Involvement: 7.  I think the conversation choices (both menus and "talk to") really helped give me a feel for the player character, and the interactions with Emily helped make me feel we had a specific goal.

Lack of Annoyance: 9.  Almost perfect, but there were the robots. 

General Idea: 8.  Nothing wrong here at all.  Searching for missing parents, exploring alien worlds with super cool powers and abilities.

Wildcard: 8.  There was a squid, after all, and that's pretty cool.  I liked the penguins and the cat-beings also.

Composite score: 8.4 (Comp score: 8)

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Terrible Lizards

Alan and Ian Mead, TADS2

I think it was in the TADS designer's manual that I read a terrific piece of advice about creating a world for your game.  The advice was something like this: A lot of people start out thinking that the more locations you have implemented, the more realistic it feels to walk around in the world.  I think they were discussing the example game, which was set in an airport.  Sure, they said, you could implement all the other terminals, and restrooms and other gates and all sorts of things that real airports have, but it would be distracting and annoying to the player to walk around in a bunch of basically empty rooms.  They were right, I felt at the time, and now I'm sure of it. 

Terrible Lizards has an awful lot of empty space, and mapping it just isn't that much fun because it isn't laid out nice and neat where going north, then east, and then southwest will get you back to your starting location.  In addition to that, the description of each location doesn't always list the correct exits, which is a real pain when you're mapping.  Not only that, but sometimes it lists "east" and you can go "east," but in reality, you have entered the square that was west of you.  That is all annoying, but I spent a few minutes and mapped it out anyways.  Might come in handy, I thought.

I found a few interesting locations in all of this, but most of it was filler space.  The real trouble came when I started trying to complete my mission.  My task was to collect genetic material from five types of dinosaurs and then return.  I managed to get a hunk of flesh off of one type of dinosaur, and I had seen a second type, but didn't have any way to attack it or kill it so that I could take part of its flesh too.  My Bot was following me around, which was neat, but that thing was also the cause of a horrible, nasty, disambiguation problem.  Examine bot.  "Which bot do you mean, your Bot or the Black Bot?"  Mine.  "I don't know the word 'mine.'"  Okay, examine my bot.  "I don't know the word 'my.'"  Um, examine your bot?  "I don't know the word 'your.'"  Okay, forget it.

After I did all the exploring and had one hunk of dinosaur flesh in hand, I turned to the walkthrough.  Oh, I was supposed to do something completely different at the beginning (actually help my nemesis), which led to a whole different sort of task: to get my bot working again.  That necessitated a change of mental gears pretty quick, but it didn't matter too much because I needed the walkthrough a lot.  I'm also not sure what I got points for, since it wasn't notifying me as I got them. 

Well, there was apparently supposed to be an in-game walkthrough, but the response was more like a placeholder: "[insert walkthru]."  And when I asked for a hint, I was told that the game was written for a seven-year-old, "do you have one of those handy?"  Enh, I think I've already given my opinion about snarky responses to a genuine plea for help.  If you don't want me to finish your game, put an insult in when I ask for help.  But there was a separate walkthrough file included with the comp entry, and with that I did finish the game.  Unfortunately, the walkthrough file was in the form of a game transcript, which included all of the game's text and pretty much spoiled everything.  Why should I bother typing the commands into the game myself when I can just read the game's responses in this handy transcript?

Overall, the game isn't awfully complicated once you know your way around.  The puzzles aren't the most intuitive, but they're not horrible either (again, once you know exactly what it is you are trying to accomplish).  The map itself is rather annoying, and there are a few spelling and punctuation mistakes, but worse are the mistakes in the exit listings.  In the end, though, I didn't care too much about the mistakes because the game isn't that big of a deal.

Story: 6.  It's actually a fairly interesting story idea.

Writing: 6.  Some mistakes, and generally the writing style isn't the best.

Puzzles: 4.  Mind-reading required.  No hints, and the walkthrough is a transcript.

Coding: 6.  There's some sort of error message at the very beginning, and the problems of rooms that don't connect properly falls in this category as well.

Parser: 7.  Can't go too far off with TADS.

Humor/Enjoyment: 2.  It just wasn't there.

Participation/Involvement: 5.  It started off pretty good, and then fell apart when I had to pick up the walkthrough to get through the game.

Lack of Annoyance: 3.  See comments about mapping.

General Idea: 7.  Actually, I thought it was a pretty cool idea.  I would have liked a game where I got sent into the past and had to collect DNA samples from several different dinosaurs.  It almost feels like what we have in this version of the game is about a third of the way along to a more enjoyable game in the same setting.

Wildcard: 4.  Actually, my neice is six years old, not seven, but she lives three thousand miles away and wasn't available for comment.

Composite score: 5.0 (Comp score: 5)

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Jane

Joseph Grzesiak, Z-code

This was an interesting one.  It starts right out telling you that it "deals with the potentially uncomfortable topic of domestic abuse."  Telling the player up front about the topic is a very wise move, in this case: Jane is really nothing like a traditional work of interactive fiction.  The idea is simple.  You play the role of various characters over the course of a few weeks/months in the story of a woman with a violent husband.  There isn't a lot of room for changing the course of what happens; in fact, I think it's pretty much impossible.  You may not notice it much the first time, but play it through again.  This isn't just the linearity of a story-game, though: the inability to affect the ultimate outcome of the story actually lends to the sense of helplessness in the title character, and the helplessness too of those around her, who watch and want to help but can't seem to find the right thing to do or say.

The conversation is done with menus, which is a fine way of doing it when you're trying to tell a specific story.  The problem is this: a menu with only one option isn't really much of a menu.  The author explains in the afterword that he would have preferred to implement more conversation options.  I can imagine it's a pain in the butt, keeping track of conversations and characters and stuff -- heck, Emily Short has written more than one game entirely consisting of complex conversation.  So I don't mind too much.

I also agree with what the author says in the afterword about alternate endings: if he had implemented an ending where Jane gets away from her abusive husband, then he would risk making any ending where she doesn't seem like a "losing" ending, and that can't help but trivialize the subject.  It's a difficult thing to handle in a work of interactive fiction, but I think this is an excellent attempt.

It is a little disorienting to switch from one character to another -- yes, I know everyone always says that.  It doesn't make it any less true, and it's also true that it detracts from the overall feel of character and cohesiveness of the story.  At the same time, though, the two scenes near the beginning that we get from the husband's point of view are invaluable for a deeper understanding of the complexities of the topic, which is something the author was clearly trying to portray.

There's no question that the piece is being used to raise awareness of domestic abuse, and I'm not really sure that the Comp is the place for such things.  On the other hand, it certainly is honest about what it's doing, and uncomfortable though it is to play through, there is no doubt of it's sincerity.  And I do approve of raising awareness of such things in general.  This is by no means a fun game, but it is well coded and a competent job of story-telling. 

There are a couple of oddities that only an "IFer" would notice, mostly scenery objects that can't be interacted with as you might expect in reality: shoes that can't be picked up, a bench you cannot sit down on, and a wife you can't kiss ("Keep your mind on the game" is quite a jarring response when I've forgotten that this is anything related to a "game" at all).  Plus I couldn't save or transcript and I don't know why.  In summary, a thoughtful piece that addresses a serious issue in a skilled and competent way.

(There, I went the whole review without mentioning Photopia.  D'oh, I just did!)

Story: 8.  It's quite good.

Writing: 8.  I don't have notes on any spelling or grammar mistakes, and the writing itself was pretty good.

Puzzles: 1.  There just weren't any.  Unless you get up and leave the computer, you can't help but finish the game.

Coding: 7.  Fine, except for a few oddities mentioned above.

Parser: 7.  Some of Inform's verbs are taken away, mostly in the realm of interacting with other characters, but it's certainly not bad.

Humor/Enjoyment: 1.  It's just not enjoyable, nor meant to be.

Participation/Involvement: 7.  I was drawn in pretty well, even with the switching of characters.

Lack of Annoyance: 9.  It was annoying to be told that I "shut myself in the bathroom," only to find that the door isn't really closed, and I can't close it and lock it before the husband barges in.

General Idea: 6.  I approve of the motives, but I'm unsure of the forum.

Wildcard: 7.

Composite score: 6.1 (Comp score: 6)

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Not Much Time

Tyson Ibele, TADS2

In Not Much Time, you are awakened by a mysterious phone call from your aunt, who needs your help.  Something is wrong, and it's up to you to find out what to do about it.  We never learn much about the PC, except that he has a car and an apartment, likes to sleep in, and is still called "boy" by his aunt.  But the PC doesn't matter too much to the overall story.  Actually, we do get some character information in the form of memories as we explore the house and its surrounding grounds, now that I think about it, which is a very nice touch.   The setting feels very much like a solitary older woman's cottage in the country, which is what it's supposed to be, and the family connection gives us a better sense of both the woman we're looking for and the player character.

Okay, so is it a good game?  This is a wonderful game.  Probably my very favorite so far.  I died in a funny way in my seventh turn, and was chuckling from the introductory text (it said "Aunt's farm" -- heh).  Sure, I made some notes about the comma splice in the description of the starting location, and a few about spelling and punctuation mistakes throughout the game, but who cares?  This game has a funny plot, a neat setting, and best of all, awesome puzzles.  And I didn't need any hints or the walkthrough to solve the entire game (a first for any of the comp games that actually had puzzles).  Fellow puzzle-impaired IFers, take note.  This game rocks.

I almost didn't realize that I was solving some of the puzzles as I looked around the farm, picking up objects and examining things.  What really worked with the puzzles in Not Much Time was that I saw every single puzzle before finding the solution to it, and so the solution was clear once I found the right object.  For example, the barn has a loft, but you can't get to it because the ladder has a loose nail and wouldn't support your weight.  Loose nail?  Examine nail.  "<snip main part of description>  A hard hit from a hammer would fix it good."  Ah, says I, so if I find a hammer or something that is similar in shape, I can fix it!  So, many turns later when I come across a tool box, I get excited.  Indeed, there is a hammer within, and I rush back to the barn to fix the ladder.  What fun!  The only part where I almost got stuck was when I found a key so long after seeing the thing it was for that I had forgotten I might need a key for it.  So I have this key and no idea where it goes.  Luckily, a few minutes' pondering reminded me of the item that it was for.

In addition to the things you have to do to solve the game, there are a couple of optional puzzles which are fun.  And tons of fun, extra items lying around for no reason.  Well, for no reason in the game sense, but plenty reason in the world, like the food in the fridge.  I, naturally enough, picked up every item that wasn't bolted down in my search for Auntie.  Did this lead to annoying inventory problems because of the limit on how much I could carry?  No, it did not.  Not because there was no limit (there was) but because there was not one, but TWO "rucksack" objects in the game.  The game won't put items in them automatically for you, but that's all right, since it was fun putting different things which shouldn't fit into the objects.  For example, one is a wooden bowl found in the kitchen.  This bowl can hold everything from tomatoes and carrots to a garden spade, a broom, AND a garden hoe.  Wow.  That's fun!  Some may call it a bug, but I call it entertainment.  Plus, you can put one of these objects inside the other (heh!).

Heh.  Thinking about the extra items reminded me of the food you find in the fridge.  When you eat either item, you don't just get a message like "Eaten."  You get:  "You gobble it down and lick your lips.  You've had good tomatoes, but not that good!"  That's fun, too.

A quick word about things that could have been better.  In order to finally get to your Auntie, you have to have something from the mailbox.  It's a must.  But, also in the mailbox is a letter explaining (pretty much) what went wrong with your Auntie and how to fix it.  So, when I finally got to my Auntie, and she told me what had happened and how to fix it, I already knew.  Let me say, I (the player) already knew what she was saying.  The PC did not, as evidenced by the cut scene's dialog.  In fact, he must not have been paying any attention at all when I read the letter, because he sounded surprised even to find out that she dabbled in magic.  Hellooo?  That was a plot wrinkle which might have been better.  Besides, I already had two of the three things she needed in my possession.

As I said above, there were a few punctuation/spelling mistakes, but very few missing synonyms.  I got most of the way through the game, hit one, and realized I hadn't written any down on my notes.  So I went back and looked, and came up with an exhaustive list, with about five words that could have been added.  Not bad at all!

I also had trouble (okay, I couldn't find a way to do it) putting things in the well.  Apparently the author had implemented a new verb which makes perfect sense, but not made "put <object> in well" point to his new verb.  Another oddity was right near the end of the game, I had a book in my possession I didn't remember picking up.  Not sure what happened there.  Also, at the end of the game I had only scored 30 out of 40 points (which was my score before I handed Auntie the final item) and had visited "28 out of 27" locations.  I'm assuming that the 10 points for the final item didn't make it to my "score" variable before the code for the end of the game.  As to the locations, well, who knows?  Just a quirk, though.

There are "amusing things to do" listed at the end of the game, but I would add "break crowbar" to that list.  Heh.  And the author missed a great chance to have a really funny response to "eat crow."  But those are just extras.  What's here already is a terrific game, and a lot of fun for me.  Plus, it was pretty funny, with lots of funny responses and funny things to do.  Okay, I'm starting to repeat myself.  Let's see the numbers.

Story: 8.  Original, highly entertaining, with only a few quibbles about what the PC should know or not know at any given point.

Writing: 7.  Good throughout, with a few typos and some punctuation problems.

Puzzles: 10.  Yes, really.  Optional puzzles, fun items, and made so that I could solve them all and still feel challenged.  Perfect.

Coding: 8.  Extra verbs and few missing synonyms, but some other minor troubles (as with the well).

Parser: 8.  Generally fine. 

Humor/Enjoyment: 8.  Lots of funny stuff!

Participation/Involvement: 6.  This is a lower score because we never get a feel for the PC, and the PC seems ignorant of many things that I, the player, know.  But I still felt motivated to help out my Auntie.

Lack of Annoyance: 10.  This is a first.  I got to the end of the game and was jotting down some scores, and I realized that there was no annoying thing in the game at all. 

General Idea: 10.  This is what IF is all about: wandering around, picking up cool stuff, opening locked doors, discovering secret passages, and talking to chickens.

Wildcard: 8.  I liked it.

Composite score: 8.3 (Comp score: 8)

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When Help Collides

J. D. Berry, Z-code

Even the title of this game says "What the heck is going on?"  That basically summed up my position most of the time. 

The game is divided into four (five?) main sections.  The first one has the neatest idea, and I think is supposed to tie the other sections together.  You play a game help module, in trouble after sabotage from one of the "self-help" modules floating around your virtual space.  This is the "collision" mentioned in the title.  You actually get to see some scenes, should you choose, where players in one of three different games ask for help.  All you have to do is push the right button, but after your run-in with the self-helper, everything that comes out of you sounds like new-age, feel-good psychobabble.  This section actually gave me some hints as to what to do later on (although I didn't know I would be playing those sections at the time). 

Anyway, rather than walking through the strange and disjointed plots, let me talk a little about the game.  There were some messages to me, the player, throughout each of the sections (except maybe the last one -- I didn't see much of that) which worked very well.  The help module in the first section is the player character, yet it is very aware of me, the player, and makes a sort of one-sided conversation at times.  It's quite strange, and yet it works, because the entire setting is so strange that without help from somewhere I'd really be lost.  And after all, it is a help module, so it makes sense.

The second part, if it counts as a whole section, consisted of me typing one of three commands pretty much at random until I was out of it.  The walkthrough suggests that there is some sort of reasoning behind what you're supposed to type, but I certainly didn't figure it out. 

I had quite a bit of trouble in the "D&D" section, for a couple of reasons.  First, it's second edition D&D, and we really should have all moved on to 3rd by now <g>.  Second, I couldn't figure out what to do on my own.  The walkthrough says you can do it without asking the DM for help, but doesn't say how, so I followed the path given in the walkthrough and asked the DM for help.  Get this: here I am, playing a computer help module who's playing a guy named Jason who's playing a character named Megnax, or whatever, and I the player have Megnax ask the fictional DM for help after checking the walkthrough file that came with the game.  It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

This game is almost stranger on the replay.  But I didn't get to the replay during my two hours, because I spent so much time in the virtual world and then in the D&D world (there are three different tasks there, after all) that I had to go right to the walkthrough for the "Parched Mesa" section, and then when I got to the "Bleach of Etiquette" section, I read that there was no walkthrough due to the random set-up.  Now, the concept in this section looks really interesting, and one day I might enjoy taking a look and trying to play it out.  But time was up, and this is the Comp, and the walkthrough wasn't going to do it for me, so I had to sign off. 

Story: 5.  Uh, what story?  There were at least different chunks of story, probably four, and I had trouble making sense of any of it.

Writing: 8.  Pretty good, and lots of it, with only a few typos.

Puzzles: 3.  There was just so much I couldn't figure out, and the walkthrough said the levels were on the status bar but they weren't (although maybe that was Frotz 2002), and how are you supposed to figure any of these puzzles out?

Coding: 9.  Only a few missing nouns, and lots of nifty extra stuff (like library messages in "Parched Mesa").

Parser: 8. 

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  I liked the beginning.  The way the help module PC interacted with me was funny and enjoyable.  It didn't really continue, though.

Participation/Involvement: 2.  If I can't figure out what's going on, I can't feel I'm a big part of it.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  Oddly, given that I couldn't figure out what was going on most of the time, it wasn't all that annoying.  Certain parts were, and I don't like not having finished the last section, but on the whole not too bad.

General Idea: 7.  This would have been better if it was just based on the first section or two.  Actually, the "Bleach of Etiquette" looked like I really would have liked it too, if I had gotten to play it.  But the problem is, these different ideas don't hang together awfully well.

Wildcard: 6.  I liked lots of the ideas; I wanted to like the game; I tried to like the game.  I just get the feeling something really cool was happening on the other side of a two-way mirror, and I was on the wrong side and didn't get invited into the party.

Composite score: 5.9 (Comp score 6)

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Ramon and Jonathan

Daniele A. Gewurz, Z-code

This is an amazingly short, one-and-a-half-puzzle game.  If you can call it that.  I mean, the walkthrough is only 20 lines, no joke.

You don't really play the main character, and who the main characters are is unclear.  In fact, your role in the whole thing is also unclear.  The half-puzzle consists of preventing someone else from doing something (inadvertently: all you do is ask a question), and is pretty simple.  The whole-puzzle is to ask more questions until a specific object is mentioned, then obtain that object and use it.  If you do this quickly enough, you will see the only group of people who actually does anything in the game doing their thing.  You are invited to go along for the ride.  End of game.

You do have a few options: you can leave before getting that invitation, and while you haven't seen all there is of the game, the results are very much the same.  Your character still leaves it up to another group to do anything important, which makes for pretty drab play. 

The setting is almost cool.  There's a single mention of being on a space station, and the Men in Black (yes, "MiB" are specifically mentioned in the text).  But none of it actually enters the story at any point, and ends up distracting us from the plot, which could have taken place here on Earth.

Let's skip to the numbers.

Story: 5.  Hints of something interesting, but anybody can come up with hints.  It's fleshing it out into an actual story that's difficult.

Writing: 7.  Pretty dry stuff, but at least no mistakes.

Puzzles: 3.  If you can call them puzzles.

Coding: 6.  The game works, but if you wait around long enough you get 12:84 a.m. on the status bar clock.

Parser: 7.  Not much wrong with this.

Humor/Enjoyment: 1.  It just wasn't funny or enjoyable.

Participation/Involvement: 1.  As close to none as I've seen.  Who am I?  What do I want?  Where am I going?  Who is this woman?

Lack of Annoyance: 6.  Pretty annoying for such a short game.  I spent 90 minutes in game time in a crowded courtroom, completely unable to figure out what to do.

General Idea: 4.  The problem is, I can't figure out what the general game idea is.

Wildcard: 3.  There's not much to this game, and no hints or explanatory text to help me figure it out.

Composite score: 4.3 (Comp score: 4)

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The Case of Samuel Gregor

Stephen Hilderbrand, Z-code

The Case of Samuel Gregor is an interesting one.  I don't speak German, or anything resembling it, so I was a bit bewildered to hail a taxi and be given six choices, only two that I really recognized (and I had to check my notes).  How was I supposed to know "Bahnhof" was where the train station was?  No one had mentioned a train station.  Well, actually, if you examine the money, it does say that it isn't enough for a train ticket.  Kind of an odd, in-game way to connect the beginning scenes to the end, where I escape on a train.

Of course, the question of "Who am I?" is a more tricky one.  I think I have it figured out, but I'm not completely sure.  At the beginning of the game, I seem to be playing Ms. Efros, a psychiatrist, who apparently is studying some special "Power of the mind" that can "sway the fleeing feet."  About halfway through, after doing some weird stuff, the walkthrough says to return to the office at the University where I started.  I do, and there, behind the desk, is Ms. Efros, my psychiatrist!  Whoa!  Talk about weird.  I think I then play the rest of the game as Samuel Gregor. 

The only really cool thing to come out of the whole person-switching thing is one scene that gets repeated, where I'm playing a different person each time.  I know there was a movie that did exactly this, but I can't think of it so I won't mention it.  And no, there's no apparent time travel or glitches in the universe, it's just that the same thing happens again and I'm playing the role of a different person.  But every other aspect of the character switcheroo was confusing.

There were a few problems with the mechanics of the game: a vase of tulips and daisies but you couldn't see any such thing as a "daisy" or "tulip" or "flower;" a book that you could apparently "flip through" and read pages of without "taking," leading to a problem; no such thing as a "closet" in the bedroom when I have to go inside the closet; and a few miscellaneous misspellings.  Plus a serious, game-ending bug when you put something in the coat pocket: it get stuck there permanently ("That seems to be part of the coat") and therefore you can't use it.  If you happened to put the cash in the coat pocket (in an attempt to work around the annoying inventory restrictions), you can't hail a taxi and so are stuck.

Also, every time I read the paper while waiting in the train station, Mika comes along and puts the <item of interest> in the <location.>  But the <item of interest> is still in my inventory.  And then I had to type "z" for 90 turns while waiting for the train.  And when I was Samuel Gregor, some of the automatic responses changed, which was really cool, but room descriptions still mentioned "Samuel Gregor" and "he" and talked about my professional opinion as to his sanity.

Overall, if you've got a walkthrough, it might be interesting to play through, but the puzzles are really too hard otherwise.  Your score goes down for doing something you have to do to win.  And don't expect an explanation, or even the slightest hint about what Samuel Gregor wants or if he's really crazy.

Story: 7.  Pretty good, certainly original, but too many loose ends for my taste.

Writing: 7.  Again, pretty good, with a few typos.

Puzzles: 5.  Too hard for me, some authorial mind-reading required, and no hints.  Plus a general lack of direction or clue as to what to do next.

Coding: 7.  Quite a few missing nouns, but mostly handled well.  I liked the hail a taxi idea.

Parser: 8.  Fine, no problems.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  I seem to remember some slightly funny lines, but now I can't really remember what they were.  Some of the NPCs we meet could have been funnier.

Lack of Annoyance: 5.  I did have to type "z" 90 turns in a row.  And there was the inventory problem.

General Idea: 8.  Cool!  "Physically leaving myself" in order to "escape myself."  Something was really cool about this idea.

Wildcard: 6.  Okay, I actually kinda liked it.  Even with the oddness.  And there were a few extras in the walkthrough file. 

Composite score: 6.2 (Comp score: 6)

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Color and Number

Steven Kollmansberger, TADS2

Is this the biggest puzzle-fest in the entire comp?  Why yes, I believe it is.  At least out of the games I've reviewed.  I mean, you've got your levers to pull in the right combination, your statues to line up, your buttons to push, your switches to switch, your beads to play with, and secret passages and obscure hints that just happen to be left behind in the form of cult doctrine by a cult member.  Hm.  Of course, there is something of a story behind all this: you're a cult expert, called in on an apparent mass suicide.  The nice touch is, you've wanted to be on the police force but have been turned down thus far.  Maybe this is your chance to show you've got what it takes.

The story is pretty much left out between the opening and closing scenes, though.  That's all right, since we're in a Puzzle-Fest Temple, and a story would only get in the way.  I have six pages of notes on this one, although that's a little inflated since some of the backs of these pages had stuff on them and I had to squeeze in my notes around that.  But anyway.  There are in-game hints, which are insufficient to actually solve some of the problems, so I turned to the walkthrough a few times.  But the ones I got myself are the best!

My favorite part was figuring out the whole numbering system, and figuring how to get any number using the beads and urns.  This definitely appealed to the math major, logic-puzzle-solving side of me, so if you prefer other sorts of fun, you might want to miss this one.  But the beauty of it was, there didn't seem to be any rush.  I could push the buttons to my heart's content, until I had it all figured out exactly, and the same with the ropes (although I got lucky and did six moves that solved that one), and nothing bad would happen.  I like that.  It doesn't make sense in the world, but it's very good for a puzzle-fest. 

I thought several of the puzzles in Color and Number were original (admittedly I haven't played a tremendous amount of games), especially the circles on the floor.  It was easy to figure out how it worked, and actually pretty easy to figure out what you were supposed to do, with the note you find in one of the rooms.  The trickiest puzzle in the whole game were the statues, and the hints didn't help enough there.  Heck, the walkthrough almost didn't help enough.  Also, after turning the statues for a while, I got a message: "[TADS-1022: index values too high (must be at most length(list))]" but it didn't seem to make any difference.

Although some of the puzzles are non-intuitive, it's still easy enough to finish this one in two hours with a walkthrough, so if you enjoy the puzzle-y games, I recommend this one.  Just remember to take the beads with you.

Story: 6.  Rather interesting, but with a tacked-on feel, and not enough of it.

Writing: 7.  Mostly plain-Jane descriptions, but no errors (that I found)! 

Puzzles: 8.  If the hints were improved, this would be a higher score.

Coding: 7.  Good but lots and lots of missing nouns.

Parser: 8.  Problem with "put object ON thing" as opposed to "put object IN thing," and more syntax options with switches would have been nice.

Humor/Enjoyment: 4.  No humor to speak of, and while the puzzles were very clever and intellectually interesting, they weren't all that fun.

Participation/Involvement: 6.  Actually not bad for a puzzle game.

Lack of Annoyance: 7.  I'm not too annoyed by puzzles that make you push buttons over and over, as long as I know that's what I'm getting into.  But there were a couple of annoying bits: the statues not giving any hint when they were in the right direction, for one.  I was expecting them all to glow.

General Idea: 8.  Pretty cool.

Wildcard: 8.  I liked it pretty well, most especially figuring out the numbering system on my own.  Yay my brain!

Composite score: 6.9 (Comp score: 7)

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Not Rated:

• Blade Sentinel, by Mihalis Georgostathis (Quest).  Couldn't finish.  No hints, no walkthrough, no review.

• Photograph, by Steve Evans (Z-code).  I was a beta-tester for this game.  You should play it if you haven't.

• Tookie's Song, by Jessica Knoch (Z-code).  Enh, that's me.  You should play this one too.

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