IFComp 2002 Impressions
"No matter how small an Adventure you write, it will take far, far more time and effort than you thought it would."--Peter Killworth
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Just for kicks, here's Mike Sousa's reviews of the 2002 reviews.
Notes and Impressions
This is the first IFComp I've participated in at all, period. I entered The Moonlit Tower (which came in 4th--wow!), so my ratings didn't actually count. Also, some games I never quite played through, and others I didn't start; I still have to download glulx and try to get it running on my machine (I didn't even install MaxTads until rather late in the judging cycle, out of sheer intimidation). I only went to grab a walkthrough (assuming one was available) if I felt motivated enough to finish the game; as I consider sustaining player interest an important part of game design, I make no apologies. I also took "sneak peeks" at openings, for what it's worth. My "judging" is based on relative newsness to the whole genre, and is no doubt atypical.
Some quasitrends I noticed: people need to use spellcheckers. This may be the result of tutoring writing for three years, although I will forgive someone the occasional typo and misspelling of words like "egregious" or "lackadaisical." But otherwise, poor grammar and mechanics wear on my nerves. Several games I quit outright without intending to go back to when I typed HELP or HINT and got an insulting answer from the game. To the juvenile it may seem funny, but it's in poor taste. I am likely to continue categorically refusing to play games that are snide to someone playing in good faith.
Most of all, I realize I was guilty of an overly elaborate opening, but my eyes were starting to glaze over from the overly long openings that seemed rampant.
I was bad and didn't note what order I played the games in, so you'll have to do with an alphabetic listing. Tentative ratings are given, based on how much I viscerally enjoyed or was impressed by a game. There are a few that I will be playing in the following weeks; reviews suggest that I'd probably enjoy The Granite Book, for example, or Another Earth, Another Sky.
My Miss Congeniality votes were for Jane, Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish out of Me!, and Koan, in that order. I wasn't able to vote on Janitor since I did some beta-testing on that, although since I'm such a slow puzzle-solver I'm afraid I wasn't much help.
If it matters, I used frotz (from Terminal) and MaxTads (in Classic mode) from Mac OS 10.1.5. I only mention this because some of the games had characters that manifested as question marks, some of which were guessable and some of which weren't.
Augustine (Terrence V. Koch)
Historical fantasy at some level. I appreciate the author's earnestness about the setting, but the introduction was long and the early ploy for sympathy via the standard revenge shtick didn't work. The coding was clunky: X BED resulted in "Which bed do you mean, your parent's bed, or your bed?" but trying to disambiguate with YOUR PARENT'S resulted in "I don't know the word 'parent's.'" And at one point, after a particular tragedy, SEARCH MOTHER results in the jarring "There's nothing in your mother." I didn't finish the game, so perhaps there's an explanation, but compared to the research on the historical period, Kasil was a peculiar name, and magic or no, the lava pit just boggled me. Then I was dumped into a modern-day office, which disoriented me to the point that I quit. I commend the author's ambition, but this one didn't do it for me.
Bastard Operator from Hell (Howard Sherman)
The youngest man, perhaps 25 years old at best, rises and looks you over. "I am the Grand Bastard." He has an unmistakable British accent. "Who sponsors this apprentice bastard?", indicating you. Your mentor rises and claims responsibility for the sponsorship. "Very well, let the trials begin. I shall go first."
This one engendered a bit of controversy, as the author was suggesting that potential playes familiarize themselves with the BOFH setting, used with permission. Frankly, I didn't bother. The game was juvenile, but amusing: your mission is to give your boss hell, among other things. However, the game suffered from an extraordinary number of typos, mechanics errors, and parsing problems, which diminished my enjoyment. Example: "You pick up The Hammer and feel its power coarse through your body." The author sent me a revision for beta-testing after I reported all the typos I found; I will do my duty when I can clear some time to do it properly....7, on the strength of its humor, but I had to resort to a walkthrough to finish.
The Case of Samuel Gregor (Stephen Hilderbrand)
There is a knock at the door of your office. Without waiting for an answer, the Dean of the university walks into your working quarters, followed by three gentlemen sharply dressed in charcoal suits.
Mystery/academia/philosophy, mostly. While it was intriguing at first, I had wonky character issues with frotz on Mac OS 10.1.5 (I'm gusesing at things like Leopoldstrasse, with the German double-s--und ja, ich verstehe ein bisschen Deutsch). There were enough sloppy formatting errors and the conversation interface was just clunky enough that I gave up fairly early. For instance, "You can't see any such thing" is not a helpful response to TASLK TO SKINNER. 5, based on incomplete playing.
Coffee Quest II (anonymous)
This wasn't going to make a good impression on me after I'd already played Bastard Operator from Hell. The humor was far too juvenile, and the gamepay much less entertaining. HELP resulted in "If you're not up to the job there's plenty of others who are," so I decided to take the author literally and quit. Not rated, as I couldn't be bothered after that.
Color and Number
This looked like a straight-out puzzle-fest, complete with levers and knobs and colors even, and while I figured out one puzzle, I was too scared to play any more. So I didn't really give this one a fair chance. Not rated.
Concrete Paradise (Tyson Ibele)
I was underwhelmed by this jailbreak, which seemed rather schizophrenic sometimes: clumsily cued puzzles, and odd jumps from scene to scene. Some of the ideas had promise, if the coding becomes more polished. 5, not completed.
Constraints (Martin Bays)
Eyes open to black and the sting of rushing air - limbs flail and the panic begins to grasp. Falling, in darkness.
This is a trilogy of three existential-flavored pieces, all very short. I like the conceit (even though I quit out of the endgame maze because I'd previously been playing a long session of OAngband), though I think the philosophical polemic could have been toned down, and I get headaches from existentialism, which isn't the author's fault. On the flip side, the writing and coding were competent, which made me happy. (Martin kindly helped me with some of my own programming issues, in fact.) Quibble: In "Falling," my random thought of DIVE was responded to by "There's not enough water to swim in." Eh? 6.
Fort Aegea (Francesco Bova)
Being the sole Priestess representing the Order of the Amylyan Druids in this distant Northern outpost has never been easy. However, as the settlers are incredibly humble and always helpful, your experience has been very rewarding.
While I appreciated the thoroughness of the setting information, it was almost too much. You have access to some weighty tomes from the very beginning, and the Dungeons & Dragons derivatives and a vague feeling of having stepped into an alternate-world interpretation of Mercedes Lackey's HERALDS OF VALDEMAR fantasies combined to make the setting less believable or engaging than it could have been. I ran out of time trying to deal with the puzzles, as I'm not only bad at puzzles, I'm really bad at anything timed. Not bad, and I'll have to come back to it. 6.
Hell: A Comedy of Errors (John Evans)
You return to conscioussness--or were you ever conscious before? It's as if you have awoken from a long dream, and you were dreaming about being someone else. You can remember things...shapes, language, scattered ideas, but...who are you?
Actually, this game opens with a disclaimer, although I didn't find the shtick--you're a demon torturing souls to get more "penance" (read: money) out of them--especially offensive. It was cute and clever for the first hour, but it's not at all obvious how you determine a soul's, er, weak points in terms of torturing, and the help system is decidedly unhelpful. At least I didn't find any typos. [As of 2007: Ironically, I see one in the excerpt but can't remember whether I copy-pasted that directly, or whether that's my typo.] In any case, I got bored and never returned to it. 7, based on incomplete playing.
Identity Thief (Rob Shaw-Fuller)
You're a thief, but not the usual kind. Sure, you could pick locks and shoplift cheap playback units from under the noses of paranoid Somalian shopkeepers, but that's too far down the risk/reward scale to be a good career choice. You steal people's identities, then use those identities to help yourself to secret information, credit, and anything else valuable.
Yet another long infodump opening. I was intrigued early on by the technological "toys," which are nifty once you figure them out, but rapidly had to resort to a walkthrough. Fascinating, though short, and the puzzles weren't especially well-cued. The ending was also something of a letdown, but I wonder what a longer revision of this would look like. 8.
Koan (Esa Peuha)
Welcome to the game called Koan. Your task is to break the stone slab south of here; to do that, you will need the pot on top of the pillar here. However, this may be more difficult than you think, or perhaps less so. In any case, the objects elsewhere in the game may or may not be helpful.
I suspect I'm the only person in the IF community who liked this, and I blame my skewed sense of humor. It is very much an interactive Zen puzzle. I solved it within minutes and burst out laughing, while my sister got stuck. However, there were a few things that could have been coded more smoothly. (CRACK as a synonym for FRACTURE would have been nice) in such a short game. I thought it cute. 8.
MoonBase (Mike Eckardt)
This stereotypical sf "something's wrong at the base" adventure amused me at first. I disliked the room of sudden death, however, and the second time I typed HELP, I got: "I said that help may be asked for...not that it would be forthcoming." This was the last straw, and I stopped playing right there. 5, not completed.
MythTale (Temari Seikaiha)
Cold. So very cold. Snow falls around you and gathers in deep drifts that lie across your path. You are so tired of the snow, of the cold, of this endless journey that has driven you beyond exhaustion, until you hardly know or care why you ever came to this forsaken place. You shake your head, tell yourself again, that y ou must be reached there soon. Must be soon, must be an end to this endless snow, to this cold, barren place. Another step, and another, another corner of rock to edge toward. You pause for a bare moment, then force yourself to press onwards, onto the ledge.
The opening reminded me of Jack London's short story, but disorientingly, this flips between Greek myth and your house full of domineering and predictable (insofar as cats are ever predictable) cats. Now, I am a cat-lover, but the "cat-manipulation" puzzles seemed contrived (perhaps partly because I wanted to be interactively playing with cats--I'm kitty-deprived at the moment--rather than messing around with finding notes on Greek mythology). The cats, by the way, are named after various Greek deities. It's cute and I liked the game, but the mythical vs. present-day parts never quite hung together. On the plus side, despite the contrived-ness, the puzzles were generally fair, and the hint system worked for me.
Not Much Time (Tyson Ibele)
You're trying to find out what happened to your dear aunt, who has turned herself into--well, I didn't get that far, but she's a witch. The premise didn't interest me in and of itself, and the clumsy writing and typos ("hurculean effort," and the "ladel") eventually led me to give up, although I could possibly have solved it with more persistence. (Why don't IF-people have more interesting houses?) 5, not completed.
Photograph (Steve Evans)
In the periphery of your vision you see something of the room - the wood stove, a window. Beyond your field of view there is nothing but clutter and increasing irrelevance. You're pleased that you'll never have to look on any of it again.
The beginning was just sedate enough to be off-putting. I became extremely irritated early on by the railroaded plot and a bit of early guess-the-verb (I think X WINDOW should have been rerouted to the desired phrasing). Every time I wanted to do something, the game told me I ouldn't--and while it's increasingly obvious that the character is psychologically paralyzed, this information is simply not given early enough. I think this was trying to be Photopia, but the epilogue was jarring, and I was too annoyed to feel any emotional engagement. The writing was competent, but the game pretended to give me choices that it then refused to parse, and railroaded me through the rest of the way. 6, based on playing it completely.
Ramon and Jonathan (Daniele A. Gewurz)
Main Tribunal of space station Tithonus. The verdict has been just read. It is formally a condemnation, but in practice it leaves Ram??nd Jonathan, who used to call themselves People's Friends, free and unpunished.
And yes, those question marks appear when I run it. I thought at first this would be something like Camus' Les Justes. It's apparently sf with political/social philosophy involved, but I found it frankly impenetrable (possibly English is not the author's native language?). I boggled at the inexplicably spectacular effectiveness of HIT ILIANA--surely some gentler demurral would make more sense?--and throwing the grenade elicited zero response from anyone else. Having no idea what else to do, I gave up. 3, incomplete.
Rent-a-Spy (John Erikson)
As the black minivan leaves the main road, Billy, the driver says: "We're getting close to the target , Jane. Are you sure you won't need any help?" You nod slowly and look out through the window.
A spy adventure that failed to grab me due to spelling errors making me tetchy, and disbelief that Jane started out with no equipment for her mission. Example of typo: "It's to dark to continue further into the forest." Reviews coming in suggest that the game is better than its lack of polish suggest, so I may try it again. 5, unfinished.
Scary House Amulet (Ricardo Dague)
A black forbidding gate looms between yourself and the gravel drive going up to an old eerie house set on a hill to the north. Light from the full moon casts strange shadows behind you and the dark forest engulfing this area. The road you came from is west.
Yes, that's the formatting you see. This game, a dressed-up haunted house dungeon-hack, did not give me a good first impression. As you can see, it's unabashedly tacky. That being said, the adaptive help was quite good, the coding was competent (says the person who forgot to deal with GET ALL), and after a while I found myself getting into the spirit of the thing. And bonus points for the Kiki (Sluggy Freelance) reference. I was amused, though I think if it was going to do tacky, it should have gone even further in that direction. 6.
Screen (Edward Flores)
In the town where I grew up there was an enormous oak tree at the foot of Mr. Field's driveway. The neighbourhood kids would congregate there -- after school, on weekends. There must have been about five forts built in that tree (of varying degrees of complexity). In summer we would be pirates, in winter Eskimos. It was a magical place.
This looked initially folksy and interesting, but became disjointed, trying to handle childhood nostalgia and TV nostalgia at once, and not quite succeeding. Please note, however, that I watch probably fewer than 20 hours of TV a year [okay--that was true at the time I wrote this...obviously, Joss Whedon has swallowed my brain since then], so if this game had a target audience, I'm not it. The typos detracted from the experience, I died as the Caped Crusader, and wasn't motivated enough to bother trying again. I'm not sure what this game could have done better, other than figuring out its theme more consistently, again because I don't know much about TV. Sorry. 5, not completed.
The Temple (Johan Berntson)
Familiar as your dream may be, the shapes and the colours that surround you feel as scary as ever. For more than two months the beginning of your nightly nightmares have stayed the same. The old woman drags you up from your bed. Your struggles are in vain against the iron-hard grip of the bony hands as she pushes you out of the window. But instead of falling headlong towards the backyard below you find yourself in an alien world, trying desperately to wake up.
While I enjoy H.P. Lovecraft (to whom this is a homage), I'm not a fan. As you can see, the introduction is a touch clunky. Once I got into the game, though, it was more enjoyable, if not exceptional (Lovecraft is hard to pastiche/imitate well, given his own prose flaws). I got myself killed after an hour due to being stuck, as I couldn't locate "the underground." I'd like to try it again, and I'd rate it a 7 on the basis of what I saw.
Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish out of Me!
(Mike Sousa & Jon Ingold)
Both dark and wonderfully wacky; I came to this rather late in the judging period and it was quite a pleasure. The puzzles were a bit abstruse, but the adaptive help system was a delight, the coding worked, and I enjoyed the story greatly. Quibble: TALK during the ocean sequence elicits, among other things, "You mumble to yourself." One of my favorites. 9, and thanks to the help I even finished.
TOOKiE'S SONG (Jessica Knoch)
You slept in late and watched part of the ball game in between naps, until Tookie, your faithful hound, ran over with the leash and would not be refused. You set out on a walk through the neighborhood (fully intending to be back in time to see the last few minutes of the game), when you spotted a rather strange thing in the sky.
Very sweet and lighthearted: your dog is dognapped by aliens. The author provides an extensive friendly help system, which I appreciated, though I came to this one so late in the judging period I still haven't finished it, as I found the initial puzzles slightly off-putting. I do want to go back and finish it, though: it looks entertaining, if not hugely original.
When Help Collides: The Wreck of the H.M.S. Snark
(J.D. Berry)
Amid the mangled virtual-ware littering this sector, your "Best Help" trophy stands defiantly. It has survived the crash.
This seemed to be parody, but I ran into programming errors and a game-killing bug within four commands (GO TO SHIP). This was not promising. As I was playing this somewhat early in the comp, I tried again and got past the bug, played it through to one ending (if there are multiples), and was underwhelmed. The premise was cute for all of 5 minutes, but if there was any redeeming depth, I simply couldn't find it. 3.