IFComp 2003 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
Notes and General Impressions
I was gung-ho about voting in an IFComp for the first time--last year, as an entrant, I only got Miss Congeniality votes--but a combination of last-trimester pregnancy, moving, computer failure, and an extended overseas sojourn sans internet access conspired to keep me from submitting votes on the games I did get to play (about half the ones that I could run). Nevertheless, I've included scores because I did intend to vote. And this time I kept track of the order I played games in.
I scored based on "How much did I enjoy this game?" No subcategory ratings, although exceptional coding (or exceptionally poor coding) might cause me to nudge a rating up or down.
I tutored writing at university for three years, so I am irritated by errors in spelling and mechanics. I forgive a few typos--you make a last-minute change, and forget to run that passage through a spellchecker; it happens--but I find an excess of them off-putting. Please, folks, do a text-dump and run the lot through a spellchecker. It won't catch everything, but you'll clean up the worst offenders.
Another pet peeve: insulting commentary from the game, especially in hints. I am entertained by sarcasm. But something like "What, are you too stupid to figure out [fill in the blank]?" is enough reason for me to quit playing a game and move on.
I'm stealing Emily Short's house/office category from last year's comp, although I wish I didn't need to. I keep wishing for something more interesting in the way of settings in general, though the situation wasn't altogether bleak in this regard.
I second the standing observation that first coding exercises should stay ensconced on one's hard drive and not entered in IFComp, but rather be used as launching-points toward more coherent games. (This is perhaps disingenuous coming from me, but I can only plead that my first coding effort was neither House nor Office.) There's nothing wrong with stringing together a bunch of rooms and objects haphazardly, or simulating your house (and why do most people have such boring houses?) in order to figure out the programming language. But chances are that the results are not going to be exciting to anyone else.
Meanwhile, while I appreciate walkthroughs, I would love to see more in-game hint systems. They don't even have to be sophisticated contextual doodads or Invisiclues (though these are nice, too); just menus work fine. (I have become fond of what Jessica Knoch calls "metahinting"--looking at hint categories without reading the hints in hopes of gaining insight.) I am reassured when it seems that the author has anticipated a player's potential perplexity, and I appreciate not having to go out of the game to get help.
I used tadsr for TADS 2 games and frotz for Inform games from the Terminal in Mac OS 10.2.6. (Zoom for OS X is gorgeous, but for whatever reason refuses to do transcripts on my machine.) I never figured out how to run TADS 3 or glulx, but as I didn't get through all the games anyway, it's a moot point.
I've included retrospective notes--i.e. after having read comp reviews, printed out for me by my sister while I was in self-imposed exile in Korea--[in brackets].
Slouching Toward Bedlam
(Star Foster & Dan Ravipinto)
House/Office: office, kind of.
Half an hour in, I'm already lost. (Not to mention irritated with the quotation marks.) I am apparently a doctor at Bedlam trying to investigate a colleague's (?) suicide. I am therefore at a loss as to why I am obliged to scurry around trying to figure out how the heck the local gear works. Yes, there are hints, and I appreciate that this is a mystery, but so far I am just confused, and disinclined to put in much more effort. I'm reminded thematically, vaguely, of Delusions, except Delusions had reasonably well-defined goals and absorbed my attention. I may return to this one later.
Bonus moral point, however, for mentioning McNaughton. "Ye people of England/ Rejoice and be glad/ For ye're now at the hands/ Of the murdering mad..." It went something like that, anyway.
Rating: 5, if I don't come back to this later.
[Congratulations on winning the comp! I admit that mystery is not a genre I have inherent interest in, and I'm awful at puzzles; I think I shall go into the hints and play this one out to see what happens further in.]
[Somewhat later: Far too much infodump--especially at the beginning, when by virtue of having been dumped into a new gameworld I don't have any idea what information is important, and therefore get overwhelmed--and a few too many fiddly devices. Fortunately, the hint system is quite good, but I'm not convinced the devices had to be all that fiddly, and I never would have figured some of them out without the hints. So far I've only seen two of the five possible endings, and I will probably have to hit a walkthrough to see the rest, not being patient enough to screw around with varied iterations.]
Internal Documents (Tom Lechner)
At last you have arrived at the Township of Sebastian, sent by none other than incumbent Governor Randy Blight himself with a letter in your briefcase detailing the Governor's Executive Decree to allow you to perform your civic duty and examine the records of the John B. Holden Estate after a large public outcry over allegations of bribes and extortion to garner favors from various government officials, including but not limited to said Governor Randy Blight, allegations which have been causing a precipitous drop in the polls for your boss. You were quite surprised that you, a heretofore mundane functionary were called upon to handle such a high profile case, but you are confident that with due diligence justice will be done.
House/office: nope, initially (I never made it to the house).
Governor Randy Blight, eh? Why am I thinking Bill Clinton? Wordy intro--one doesn't need to emulate bureacratic doublespeak to that extent, surely? Location descriptions are pedestrian at best, and a number of scenery objects are not implemented; I'm wandering around this small town with no idea of how to get to the investigation site (surely I would have a map, or at least directions?), I come to an abandoned factory, and I'm told by the game, when I try to explore, "...really your business is at the Holden Estate." Sure: care to provide directions? (The people in the bar were unresponsive to inquiries thereon.)
Some formatting and punctuation errors. Not to mention the ersatz fisherman--shouldn't such events only be allowed to happen once?
I quit at this charming response to my attempts to figure out how to get where the game was telling me to go:
>HINT
...a job at the Holden Estate...
>G
...You have to get on to the estate grounds...
>G
...The gate's closed, so over the wall! ...
>G
...What's in your briefcase?
>G
...Geez! Climb the south wall near the gate, and open your briefcase.
--given that I can't figure out how to get to the estate grounds, and the insulting "Geez!" I see no reason to play further. A bit of sarcasm in game-responses is fine by me. I draw the line at insulting text. I have better things to do than be sneered at for a sincere attempt to play the game sans walkthrough.
Bonus moral points for "what are the issues," "who is randy blight," etc., however.
Rating: 4. It looks like there's a game in here somewhere, even if I have no desire to persevere in playing it.
[Reviews revealed that this wasn't the political parody/commentary that would have entertained me, and that the map was indeed large, although I must have been more than usually directionless.]
Caffeination
Time grinds to a halt as the morning wanes. Your pre-work caffeination fades, quietly draining the color from the world replacing it with low-toner photocopies of reality. At 11:00 am it is doubtful you will have enough energy to make it to your 1:00 pm lunch break without the aid of a strong chemical kick in the pants. Possibly, if you are clever enough, you can locate some strong coffee, the elixir of life, before you collapse. It is time to go in search of...
House/office: office, unfortunately.
2nd line of the opening reminds me overly of Gibson's well-known cyberpunk opening line, which I'd quote if I were sure I remembered it correctly. Otherwise: not another "running around the office" game? I thought we had enough of those last year. Anyone who refers to their own game as "less of a piece of crap" due to beta-testing--well, I'm not encouraged. Especially with two, count 'em, two typos in the first paragraph of the description of the first room. And for God's sake, the caffeine quest has been done. (For the record, I'm a tea-drinker.)
Oh, and these:
The screen shows a spreadsheet half-filled, but the cursor doesn't move when you jiggle the mouse. It must be locked up again.
The computer is currently switched off.
>SWITCH COMPUTER ON
The computer is on.
Eh? (We'll ignore the fact that, unless it's a case of monitor image burn-in, it's hard for a computer to be locked up while not being on. Though, given the contradictory response to SWITCH COMPUTER ON, perhaps the thing is merely in a state of quantum flux. Schr¿dinger's Spreadsheet?)
Also:
You can see a window and a water cooler here.
>GET WINDOW
Taken.
Fascinating. And probably unintentional.
You can see a SpineMaster 5000 (tm) chair (on which is Lesley Lovely) and a stack of invoices here.
>GET ALL
SpineMaster 5000 (tm) chair: It is too big to carry around.
stack of invoices: Taken.
Not a good way to show where the NPC is, and surely she should object to having her office space invaded? Enough.
Quibbles: "fluorescent," not "florescent." And "half and hour ago"? Some formatting/newline issues. Remember: one space between sentences, not two.
Rating: 3. The premise is hackneyed and I'm not impressed by the coding or the writing.
No Room
You are nowhere. It's dark.
House/office: nope, that'd require having a room.
Right. Not just a one-room gimmick game, but a no-room gimmick game. This is likely to be questionably amusing--assuming I can remember my middle-school chemistry--for about five minutes and no longer.
Also, given the darkness, I would like to know how one identifies zinc and copper (as opposed to, say, other metals?) by touch. I suppose it's possible that one would know beforehand. Of course, if one knew much beforehand, one would bring a functional light-source. But I digress. I do think, however, that a few more alternate wordings for the solution could have been allowed: I had the right instinct, but not the specifics, and the game's responses (as opposed to the hints) were not particularly helpful.
On the other hand, it isn't as if it took more than 10 minutes--if even that--to play this through.
Bonus moral fractional-point for implementing WIN.
4--it's minimally interactive, all right, and I didn't find any bugs, but where's the fiction part? (All right, I should have kept this in mind when playing Koan last year. One learns. But I only got Miss Congeniality votes last year, rather than turning in scores.) At least it doesn't suffer from a plague of typos.
The Erudition Chamber
It had been a bad day. In fact that might be putting it mildly. It all started when Maester Drummond asked you to balance the time flow inhibitor. Maester Tubal's latest experiments had shown that the time flow between the Keep and the Outside was beginning to equalize as it did every ten years or so, and the inhibitor had to be rebalanced to correct the problem. The incident was almost always used to evaluate the highest ranking novice to see if they were ready for the Maester's robes and this time around that novice happened to be you.
House/office: nope.
Wordy intro--a trend I remember from last year?--but the setting sounds interesting. Okay, time to explore. Some interesting alternate history going on here, although probably not completely plausible (I am not well-informed on the War of the Roses); but I can suspend disbelief, as it doesn't seem essential for playing.
Inspired by the title, I discover that MEDITATE, THINK, and COGITATE are not recognized verbs. Not that I expected them to be, but it would've been a neat touch.
Good touch:
>READ JOURNAL
To make reading this journal easier please refer to it in sections, of which there are three. For example, if you wish to read section one simply type "read section one."
An unfortunate, if inevitable, phrase:
>TOUCH CANCER
The Cancer isn't important.
Quibbles: My understanding is that double-headed axes were generally ceremonial and not used in serious combat. Also, "book" would have been a nice synonym for the journal.
Some reaction might have been expected between the lamp and the pool, or also:
>PUT OIL IN POOL
Done.
>I
You have a leather flask, a glass vial, and a lamp (providing light).
>GET OIL
You'll have to put the oil in something.
>PUT OIL IN FLASK
Done.
(Hmm. Oil and water...?)
Rating: 7. The game is marred by an inordinate number of typos/spelling errors, and the premise is not especially original. However, I had fun with this and am looking forward to finding other puzzles/solutions. I can think of worse excuses for a puzzle-fest, and I admit that I'm curious as to statistics on players' chosen paths. The puzzles that I encountered appeared fair, forgiving, and well-thought-out. I confess that puzzle-solving isn't my strength, but exploration and various attempts yielded solutions, and at no point did I feel overwhelmed by frustration, which is my usual reaction.
Bio
"Well, the good thing about all the scientists leaving is that you have the whole place to myself. No more bossy scientists telling you to move along and clean up after them.", you say to yourself. As you're lying in bed, thinking about why you became a janitor, you hear the intercom system come on.
DING DING
ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE DETECTED
LOCKDOWN INITIATED
Uh-Oh, that can't be good!
House/office: Some of both. More's the pity.
The number of punctuation/spelling/etc. errors in just the introduction is unpromising. (And that's just part of the introduction.) Look, if you spellcheck nothing else in your game, at least run the introduction by someone--first impressions matter.
Three moves later: Wow, I died already, not that I wasn't warned. Let's try again.
Second death: Screw this, I'm resorting to the walkthrough. And lo, I am even more wroth. The initial room description contains an object with which it is necessary to interact in order to proceed without running into timed death. One cannot refer to the object BY THE NAME GIVEN IN THE DESCRIPTION; usually that's a good sign that the object hasn't been implemented. However, the walkthrough reveals a synonym? that works (that I wouldn't have thought of), even though the name given in the description does not. This is a poor way of implementing the first puzzle of a game, which probably wouldn't even have registered as a puzzle were it not for this idiocy.
Later on, an action listed in the walkthrough is not recognized by the game. Not to mention a typo (it's "combination," not "combonation"--the game does, however, recognize the correct spelling).
This was sufficiently irritating, the quality of writing even just in terms of grammar/mechanics/spelling sufficiently poor, and the game sufficiently uninteresting, that I didn't even finish using the walkthrough. (I have qualms about a walkthrough with errors anyway--I forgive one or two easily-caught typos, but not much more.) The only good thing is, I suppose, that it didn't crash.
Quibbles (and note that as I walked through, I didn't even bother trying to catch everything):
"Your standing in your room or apartment (whichever you want to call it). It's about the size of a large bedroom, complete with all the furnishings." (That should be "You're." And describing a room as "the size of a large bedroom" is singularly uninspired. In fact, the author uses "your" for "you're" on multiple occasions, which I find vexing.)
>CLIMB BED
I don't know how to climb the bed.
>TURN ON TV
I don't know how to turn the TV on.
(Don't know how to do much, do you?)
Steve hands you his card and you unlock the door.Unlocked.
Inside the tent you can hear some Russians talking.To the east you see a back door to the tent.
(Formatting.)
And it's "laboratory," not "labratory"; "atmospheric," not "atmosphiric."
Rating: 2. As I said, it didn't crash. That's all.
[It seems I wasn't the only one zinged by that opening puzzle. Heh.]
The Atomic Heart
It seems you were just getting ready to recuperate after many labouring hours (the amount of strange tasks that Mrs. Go could find for you was amazing). As you plugged in the charger cable was a nanosecond of... strangeness...
House/office: House, briefly.
It seems I'm a robot--at first. Then more interesting things happen...then I trigger an ending awfully easily by (as it were) walking away. And the game seems to indicate that, in order to do as it asks, I have to walk away, as there's no coffee in sight...I'm confused. Restarting...and still no luck. I'm apparently missing something really obvious, so I'm going to the walkthrough.
All right, post-walkthrough, I am vexed: there is a story in here, and plenty of gadgets to play with. However, I encountered an early dump "out" of the story, leading me to believe that the "initial" segment was a prologue to the main action, when in fact it comprises the bulk of the game. But without getting dumped out, especially while floundering around trying different things, I wouldn't have guessed at the main storyline, which involves a rebellion of newly-sentient robots. (R.U.R., anyone?) So the second segment that seemed to end so precipitously serves, in fact, as an epilogue, but this was not obvious to me; I thought it was a lead-in to a human-POV investigation. Even with the walkthrough, the ending sequence lacks a sense of conclusion, of "you've reached a natural end to the story."
I would have found even a minimalist hint system to be very helpful here, although a clearer narrative structure in the first place would have been preferable. At least, it would have been nice to realize what was going on before resorting to the walkthrough; because of the misleading first impression I formed, all the way to the end of the walkthrough I was expecting the POV-switch leading to a second segment of gameplay.
I also note that even with some sort of hint to clear up that first impression, I doubt I would have solved this game in the two-hour limit, which is actually fine: I know I'm not an especially good puzzle-solver, and there is plenty to play with.
Meanwhile, FULLSCORE offers no response, and SCORE claims that "This game doesn't offer a score," which I had begun to suspect thanks to the persistent Score: 0 in the status bar.
Nice touches:
>OPEN VIEWER
You are allowed to view the blackbox recordings, but not to tamper with the equipment.
>OUT
You'll have to let go of the charger cable first, since it's attached to the alcove and not very long.
>LET GO
(of the charging cable)
You unplug the charging cable.
Dropped.
Quibbles
>X DATABASE Your database contains information necessary for your programming to function - children's psychological behaviour, simple food recipes, learning tutorials etc. It also contains various data that you store as part of your environmental adaptation and basic information retrieval. To look up things in the database type 'CONSULT DATABASE ABOUT <thing>'. >
(Missing newline.)
Gary says: "Oh, thanks.", and sighs.
"Oh, so now I'm supposed to be impressed by those stupid planes, right? Like all the other stupid kids at school. I hate them!".
The droid says "There!", and suddenly you can see and move again.
(Punctuation.)
Snapped cables hang out of a hole in the wall and from the back of the broken TV lying on the floor. I guess that this isn't how the TV is supposed to be removed from the wall.
(What is this second change-of-person to "I"?)
Rating: 5. The premise of a robot-rebellion is not, of course, new to sf, but here it seems reasonably well-thought-out for a small game. My real trouble was with the narrative structure, which--at least for me--gave insufficient signals as to "where" I was in the story. The puzzles looked fairly systematic once I had some idea of how to muck around with cables, and the coding was pretty solid. I would like to score this higher, because it's a generally polished entry, but the overly-misleading "epilogue" was just too much of a handicap to my ability to play.
Temple of Kaos (Peter of Gambles)
The walls are bare, cold solid stone
Light filters from the roof.
Enigmatic, undisturbed, aeons have passed by.
Intact, life-devoid, on plateau high.
But chambers two, entrance none
The mystery has now begun.
House/Office: Not even close, unless you use the "temple as house of (a) god" definition.
Now this is a different opening. Poetry! Even though the meter seems strained in places. Nonetheless, as stylistic quirks go, I approve. (Says she who used to spend lunchtimes copying passages of Sidney Lanier or Spenser or Wilfred Owens into her assignment book.)
--restarting after initial run-through. Damn, but this is intriguing. And I just had a Realization about a certain circular object. Shame on me.
The WALKTHROUGH command for game-segments is much appreciated.
Nice touches:
>GET ALL
You'd be better off taking one thing at a time.
>SPIN
You gyrate gently about.
>GET SHIFTGRETHOR
The shiftgrethor cannot be taken.
>DROP SHIFTGRETHOR
You may not relinquish the shiftgrethor.
Spoilery, but a nice touch:
>X ETERNITY
If you take a piece of eternity, what is left?
>TAKE ETERNITY
In utter none-ness you reach out
And seize the very fabric of existence.
Tearing aside the veil of dark and doubt
Allowing eternal light to flow about
The whirlpool twists
'til Time exists
Once more.
Thoughts:
>PRAY
You feel like offering up a prayer to whatever ancient gods this temple was built to serve.
>PRAY TO GODS
I don't know the word "gods".
(Pity. That would've been a nice touch--hardly necessary, but a nice touch.)
>UNLOCK DISC
You are unable to see how to unlock the disc; perhaps time will tell.
>ASK TIME ABOUT DISC
I don't see any time here.
(Worth a try.)
Quibbles:
If you have any comments or suggestions, or would like to report a bug, I'd be pleased to hear from you. Please send email to Peter Gambles
(At...?)
>X BLACK
Which black do you mean, the black chest, or the dagger?
(But no dagger was mentioned in--hmm.)
>EAT ETERNITY
I don't see any eternity here.
(But it's in my inventory, at this point.)
"My temple will prevail through all eternity. "
(Spaces.)
The candle in the hollow stubornly refuses to take light.
(stubbornly)
Rating: 8, provisionally (I plan to keep playing till the two hours is up).
[I see that complaints centered around the game's noncausal, ah, logic. Unfortunately, my computer died before I got any further into it, and I can see the danger thereof. I appreciate the ambition of the effort, even if the result wasn't entirely playable. I admit I went overboard on the fancy prose in my last-year entry, but I'm not courageous enough to attempt IF in poetry!]
Amnesia
A cool beach where you should have washed ashore and not have been able to remember anything because you where supposed to have amnesia, which you didn't, which completly ruins the whole storyline this game was going to have, so now the auther will have to make a game up on the spot, enjoy. By the way if you want to learn about me just type about. Their is a huge rock sitting here innocently.
(Er..."were," "completely," "author," "there." And a comma after "By the way.")
House/office: Neither, but...
That's five typos in the introduction alone. This does not bode well. Neither does the twee metacommentary. And ABOUT elicits, among other things, yet more spelling/capitalization/etc. errors.
Five moves later: More self-pitying metacommentary?
I shan't bother detailing more spelling/usage errors, but here's a sample room description:
town
the center of the town with houses NE, NW. To the W is a volcano, to the N is a mountain, and to the E is a jungle.
Your spirit guide strolls into the room.
No. No. No. And unfortunately, I can't kill the spirit guide, which is the only incentive I have remaining to continue playing this game. A series of disjointed rooms with overbearing authorial interjections and this level of poor proofreading does not a game make. If there is a coherent plot in here I haven't seen any sign of it.
Rating: 2. This looks like (and from the ABOUT text, undoubtedly is) a beginner's first coding exercise. Which is all very well, except I'm not sure what it's doing in the IFComp. Such things should be kept safely on one's own hard drive and not inflicted on the public.
The Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky
Hm... Well, what can I say? That's a room and you're in it. Quite simple, heh? Butt... er... but whatever. Why are you here? Well, you don't know because you're an idiot, a useless imbecile, a brainless piece of lard! Wow, that gotta hurt! At least emotionally. Come to think of it, that's the only way one could get hurt in this medium. So prepare for some, as people say, "deep hurting". But let's stop the nonsense and proceed with stupidity. I told you nothing about the room, didn't I? How cruel, ain't it? Anyway, the room is a simple red cube (unlike the complex red cubes that have real and imaginary components) and you're inside it, looking in every direction and realize as much as there is no obvious exit. Damn...
I was browsing openings, and not only was the opening exceedingly unpromising, the gratuitous swearing-at-the-player, especially once I found that QUIT was disabled (with a fairly insulting response, as well, not that this was a surprise given what little I'd seen), led me to kill frotz. I'm not even going to bother playing this. This is drivel that doesn't need to be on my hard drive.
Yes, I appreciate the "complex" math joke, but it doesn't come close to redeeming the rest of this.
Rating: 1. I'm that annoyed and I don't mind showing it.
Adoo's Stinky Story
Welcome home, Adoo, time for a relaxing Summer! Or so you thought. After an extended leave of absence at a far off University, you return home to the familiar surroundings of Texas, home sweet home. Upon returning, however, you discover that your welcoming home, site of countless childhood memories, has been ruthlessly put on the market. Your heartless parents drove the emotionless "For Sale" sign into the grass, as if this haven were some piece of property, and not your protective scantuary.
House/office: house, adamantly.
I beta-tested this one and hence could not vote on it. [Remember, I did intend to vote. Maybe next year.]
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