This year, since I'm not judging the competition, I played to enjoy myself: I avoided games I was certain I would dislike, and I closed some without giving them a fair chance because the style or genre didn't appeal to me at the moment. I may come back to those later. Scores are just what I would have assigned if voting, prior to a rounding-up -- I would probably have reset the upper end of the scale upwards to give a 10 to my favorite game (Elysium Enigma) and a 1-point bump up to several of my other favorites. I played several games almost entirely from walkthrough. I think I was feeling less tolerant of puzzles than usual this year -- or at least, less tolerant of puzzles that were out of place or not contributing to the story. There seemed to be a lot of this going around. Mobius and Delightful Wallpaper both did innovative and fun things with puzzles, and I enjoyed them. Labyrinth may have as well, but this was presented so abstractly that I couldn't get into it right then. (I did have a lot of flashbacks to David Bowie in tight leather pants, which may or may not have been the author's intention.) But in several other games, even including Elysium Enigma, there were quite a few times where I was conscious that the story had been hijacked to make room for an IF-style puzzle when there was really no *need* for such a thing, and where the puzzle itself was nothing that terrific. This is not, I should add, a rant against puzzles in all cases -- I like a really well-designed puzzle for its own sake, and I like it even more if it can be justified in the context of the story or if it sheds some new insight on what's going on. But I felt that several of the more narrative entries this year did an awkward job of incorporating the puzzles, and should either a) have done those puzzles better or b) come up with a different form of interaction for the player. There was also a lot of SF this comp. Usually we get more Dilbertesque office puzzle-fests and more surreal modern-day houses with inexplicable elements of fantasy injected. I'd definitely rather play a decent SF game than another entry in either of those well-worn subgenres, but more variety would be even better. Since the science fiction was starting to blur together, I tended to react especially positively to the couple of games that broke out into less-common genres and did a good job of it. I did think that the overall quality of this competition was better than average: I ran into fewer outright dogs. Even the games that I rated 2 or 3 were good enough that I didn't feel the authors had entered them in bad faith. They're down there because they weren't strong enough to compete with the better material in the 4-8 range, but they usually did still have something going for them. Most years there are a wad of games that were entered despite numerous bugs that were known to the author, or that just aren't finished in any sense, or that have obviously never known the love of a good beta-tester. This year -- a couple pranks, a couple not-so-great games that I think were honest attempts by people who still have some craft to learn, but very little that made me want to shake the author for daring to waste my time on purpose. I didn't run into anything I thought was amazingly, unexpectedly, jaw-droppingly great, as I occasionally have in previous years -- hence my unadjusted, unofficial scores topping out at 8. Still, having a bunch of solid, fun, well-tested new games is no bad thing. I also appreciated the prevalence of walkthroughs and hint systems in these games -- another bit of polish that makes a game much more fun, especially under competition conditions. If I'm rushing to finish something, I do appreciate having some built-in hints that give me nudges, or a walkthrough system that delivers just a piece of the walkthrough at a time, rather than only the raw text file that may spoil more than I am ready to know. My comments on individual games follow. They have some spoilers. Read at your own risk. ===== Elysium Enigma (8) Interesting story, though I got frustrated in a few spots about not being able to confront Leela as directly as I wanted to. The secret truths here were not especially shocking, I thought -- no vast twists that surprised me -- but I did enjoy uncovering what there was to uncover. (And I didn't end the game with full points, so it is possible that there was still more under the surface here that I just did not ever get to.) The puzzles felt a bit old-school for the narrative, though -- this doesn't really feel like the kind of 'verse where we ought to be catching trout with a conveniently sharp hook just in order to move a cat. Unless cats on this planet are much larger than they are on Earth, I'm usually able to dislodge even an unwilling one by force. So the puzzles of that sort felt a bit forced. There were also several that were just too hard or guess-y: I would never have gotten the datatab password without the hints, nor would I have thought of CRAWL UNDER TARPAULIN as a plausible command. On the other hand, the hints *are* pretty thorough, which kept this from ever getting to be too impossible, and I did finish in just a bit over two hours. The coding is strong and the work is well polished, as I would expect from Eric; the game feels thoroughly tested and smooth. There were a couple of conventions I disliked. The exits command lists even the exits I have discovered are useless (like going outside the borders of the town), and I found this distracting. I also found the room description in the center of town quite confusing, in that it suggested to me that I should go north to find a track connecting east/west objects; but that was wrong, of course. On the other hand, Leela's interactions were very good. I was interested in what was up with her, but also uneasy; I found myself telling her things confidently at the beginning, then becoming suspicious, and finally starting to think that maybe I had already said too much. And that was really cool. I think one of the things that interactivity can do for a story is get the player to buy into dubious actions, whereas the reader might be standing back a bit: when you read a novel and the protagonist does something foolhardy, you may mutter a bit at the page. But how mad can you really get if that was *you*, innocently prattling on with imperial secrets because you thought you were talking to a naive village girl? For me, that aspect of the game was the neatest, most art-revealing thing to come out of the competition, and it's likely to stick with me. But this game had a lot else going for it as well, including its extreme technical competence. Mobius (8) Tightly implemented, fun variation on the repeating-time-loop genre. I am a little tired of this idea -- I didn't finish "All Things Devours", for instance -- but this was version was a fresh take on the idea. No story worth speaking of, I'd say, but satisfying as pure-puzzle game. It did occasionally get a little annoying that when I had screwed up an iteration I had to then wait (or sleep, or commit suicide) a couple times to get the chance to start over. Still, this is a minor gripe. Moon-shaped (8) A few of the puzzles were non-obvious, but overall, this was pretty solidly constructed, with some interesting areas to explore. I did wind up relying quite a bit on the hints; this may have reduced my frustration with some of the less obvious bits. I was a little weirded out by the idea that the seductive wolf was also Red Riding Hood's father -- shades of the Baron, there. I did enjoy the gradual realization of my true nature, though. The things that made sense only in moonlight were neat, too. Good work overall. Delightful Wallpaper (7) Strange, evocative, and with the entertaining outlines of a plot in the middle distance. But still really a puzzle game. There were a few moments that felt a little-underclued, but generally it was good; I even found I was able to solve the map puzzles, which at the very beginning dismayed me with the prospect of something tediously labyrinthine. The notebook helped a lot. Still, I was glad when I got past that phase of the game and into the business of placing the intentions. (The distinction between the two phases did give the game a slightly odd schizophrenic feel, but I suppose either side on its own would have felt insufficient; and I do appreciate that we want to get the player to explore the environment thoroughly before expecting him to make use of that knowledge when placing the intentions.) Another point in its favor: the Dark City/Gorey/"Hush"-episode-of-Buffy flavor, which was unlike anything else entered. Tower of the Elephant (7) I don't generally have high hopes for games adapting pieces of static fiction. It's hard to do this at all convincingly: the pacing of the original is wrong, there are usually elements of the original story that are hard to convey in IF terms; often the protagonist of the original does at least one thing that is weird and hard to get the player to emulate. "Tempest" didn't really work. Neither did Francesco Cordella's "Land of the Cyclops", though I think that failed in interesting ways. (Which I went on about at length here: http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if-review/reviews/20020719.html) And then I'm also a little suspicious of the impulse in the first place. Why are we adapting this story to IF anyway? Is it because the author actually has an interesting idea about why that particular piece of fiction would make good IF (and, to be fair, I think both Nelson and Cordella did have some such reasons in mind)? Or is it because he simply couldn't think of a plot of his own and/or wanted to cash in on the popularity of the original? Derivative IF works, whether based on a book or emulating/parodying previous games, often leave me cold. Where's the invention? Where's the author's new take on things? This is not to say that it's impossible to write a good retelling or re-envisioning of existing work -- people have been retelling classical mythology for the last several thousand years and haven't run out of interesting versions yet. But the the existing art or story doesn't mean that the author can get away without doing any imaginative work of his own. Anyway, Tower of the Elephant is one game where, unexpectedly, I think the adaptation worked reasonably well at a craft level. Not perfectly: I don't care for the passivity of the section where my PC watches the thief do things. The problem here is not just that this section is railroaded; it's that the PC is completely passive. In static fiction we can accept stories where someone else takes over the action for a while and the protagonist doesn't do that much; in IF, this doesn't work so well. It did take me several tries and a hint to get past the spider; I think this could have been better clued. There were also some implementation faults in the endgame, where the syntax to cut out and use the heart was fairly restricted and a number of (I thought) sensible phrasings were not honored. This could be cleaned up before the final release. Still, on the whole, the structure of the game wasn't hopelessly lamed by its source material, and that's an achievement in itself. I'm not quite so sure about the value of adapting this story to IF rather than coming up with something new, but again, I was more sympathetic this time than I usually am. In particular, the adaptation provided texture: the game did a good job of preserving the prose style of the original. That style is unusual for IF, but not unworkable, since it does dwell heavily on descriptions of objects and actions. I enjoyed the novelty. We don't see a lot of this exact kind of fantasy, really. I was a little reminded of the Oz books, which I imagine could also be selectively adapted for interactive fiction, since they tend to be heavy on imagery, setting, and wacky objects, and episodic enough to slice into pieces. All in all, I don't think this was a great game, but it was competent, playable, and fun, and some of what I liked about it did come from the work it adapted. Which makes it perhaps the most successful static-fiction adaptation I've played to date. Unauthorized Termination (7) This had a bunch of rough edges, implementation-wise -- some problems typical of ADRIFT parsers, and some others. It also has a somewhat railroady presentation -- there are usually only one or two sensible things for the player to do, and often these are more or less explicitly laid out for you -- and there was one bit, involving finding an item, which I would never have gotten without the walkthrough. The endgame could have been better paced, I think. All the same, I found this strangely enjoyable. The robots, despite everything, came across with something approaching a genuine personality. I found the encounter with the First One almost touching. The mystery plot, though laid out in a linear way, still took enough turns to be interesting as I discovered it. So yes, there were some flaws, but this was fun. Aunts and Butlers (7) This doesn't always *quite* hit the mark for tone, but it does manage a general Wodehousian flavor much of the time. There's a trick about this, though: Wodehouse plots tend to revolve around completely bizarre solutions to wacky situations. In IF, this is a problem, because the player is required to come up with the bizarre solution on his or her own. This is the same problem I had with Hitchhiker's and Bureaucracy -- amusing games, but not particularly *fair*. In the case of Aunts and Butlers, I tried to get the zany solutions myself, but one of the early puzzles stumped me; when I looked at the answer, I realized it was something I would never ever have tried, and lost faith. So I played from the walkthrough for most of the game. This was probably wise, since in passing I noticed several other points where it's a good idea to do things in a certain order without any particular motivation, or where the solution is fairly esoteric. It says something that I still enjoyed the game anyway, but I would have enjoyed it more, if, somehow, these implausible puzzles had been solvable. I did very much like what happened with the pheasant hat, though. As homebrewed systems go, this was pretty decent, too. Missing just a few conveniences from other systems, but it didn't annoy me nearly as much as nonstandard IF systems usually do. I also enjoyed this game a little more because it strayed from the conventional genres of the rest of the competition. A fresh setting or genre is worth a lot to players trekking through 40-odd games. Primrose Path (6) One great visionary puzzle/moment; confusing plot that I never quite got a handle on; some minor annoyances in play. I felt pretty extensively led by the hints, again because I was not sure how to make sense of what happened by any other means. I also wound up not liking the protagonist and Leo as much at the end as I had in the middle of the game -- possibly because some of the early remarks about their relationship promised a substance and complexity that never in fact materialized. I can easily believe in a relationship that has gone through phases of romantic attraction and phases of friendship and phases of distrust or dislike. What I can't believe is that said relationship would feature so few concrete events or specific feelings. What draws these people to one another? What pushes them apart? You turned Leo down before; why? And so on. I guess it's not necessary to spell all that out if this is a puzzle game, but it felt like it was reaching to be a story game in spots -- especially since I get to decide whether the protagonist accepts Leo's offer of marriage. And before I can feel much of anything about that, I need to have feelings about him -- more detailed than "I guess he's a talented artist and his mom has some real issues". I don't know -- I guess ultimately it seemed that this game was trying to do several different things, and it didn't quite succeed at any of them. But the climbing of the raindrops is an awesome scene and will stick with me. I would encourage the author to write more. Preferably with a bit more clarity about what he's trying to accomplish. Carmen Devine, Supernatural Troubleshooter (5) There are some writing issues here. Unfortunately, one of the worst offenders is the first room description in the game: "Bouncing along in a 4x4, the harsh bite of Chen's cigarette burns in your lungs as his smoking fills the jeep." "Bouncing along in a 4x4" is a dangling modifier: grammatically, it should apply to "the harsh bite of Chen's cigarette". Even when we rule that out, it's not immediately obvious what it *does* refer to -- not Chen's cigarette either, presumably, but Chen himself? Or perhaps the player, who is not mentioned in the sentence at all? We can work out what sort of scene we're probably supposed to be imagining here, but it requires some unraveling of that very first sentence. This wasn't the only thing about the beginning that made it hard for me to get immersed. I've never been to northern China, and I could have used a few more elements of physical description to set up scene and atmosphere. What're the road conditions like? What's the landscape? Flat, mountainous? Dominated by huge abandoned steel mills from the 1950s industrial push? Rural, with the occasional house or farm? Empty wasteland? Is it just cold, or is there snow or ice on the ground? What does Chen look like? What is he wearing? For that matter, what am I wearing? Not that we need to answer *all* of these questions by any stretch. The author obviously did enough research to choose a specific city for the protagonist to land in, but more sensory detail would have helped flesh this out. Finally, and perhaps worst, it took me a little while -- possibly longer than the author intended -- for me to understand who and what the protagonist is. There are hints in the cover art, I guess, but they're not entirely clear. If I examine myself, I'm told I have "natural weaponry", but there is no indication what that might be or how I might find out. Result: I am reminded of the distance between myself and the protagonist by the fact that she knows a bunch of important things that I don't -- and have no way to explore. Attempts to look at myself, the landscape, Chen, my outfit, my "natural weaponry", etc., aren't very revealing. Well, all right. So after this stark beginning, I was not able to get Chen to do anything, at first, and then READ FOLDER inexplicably crashed the game. Tried again, now with more confined expectations. Managed to read the folder, arrive in the village, and so on. Then found that most of the puzzles seem to require a certain amount of reading the author's mind, and that the walkthrough doesn't actually give the commands needed to win, just a general description of what you ought to do. Which unfortunately is not quite enough to get me through this one. Oh well. I wish I liked this better than I do -- "Chinese werewolf story" should be a fun departure from the usual fare, but unfortunately this is not developed far enough for me to get into it. The setting is not very rich; the werewolfiness is not very fully explored. In its favor, I do like the fact that the player can do different things depending on whether or not she has shifted into wolf form. Still, this could have gone further and been more interesting. That interesting material could have been revealed through puzzles, plot, or exploration, and it wouldn't really have mattered to me which the author picked: I would have enjoyed learning more about the PC's history and powers, or solving more puzzles using her wolfiness, or having more plot events that turned on the politics and behavior of the pack she meets. But as it was this potentially novel premise was really underused. The reason I've gone on about it so long is that I felt Carmen Devine could have been so very much better than it was, and that possibly there were some neat details that remained languishing in the author's imagination rather than making it into the game so I could see them too. (Random aside: I can only remember one other IF game about a werewolf. Does this comp really triple the existing corpus of werewolf IF?) Legion (5) Managed to get rid of "her" by descending into the core and waiting. Suspect from the hints that it is also possible to do other, more complicated things, but never really got the hang of what I was supposed to be doing and how. I am told something way more interesting is possible, so maybe I will try this again later. However, I think it is a major tactical blunder to have a trivially easy win-state that can distract the player from the actual point of the game. The *author* may know that that side path is just there as an easter egg of sorts, but the player -- especially in a game like this where the goal, setting, and even the nature of the PC are all completely mysterious at the outset -- is likely to explore blindly and reach it by accident. Madame Spider's Web (5) This was clearly a competent game, well-written and well-tested. It did not interest me at all. I wandered around and noticed a number of objects that were plainly part of some puzzle set-up or other, but had no real motivation to do anything with them. Maybe if I were in a more old-school mood, I would enjoy the project of figuring out why the piano only has five or so working keys and why there is a depressed black button in the surface of the sideboard. I did, after all, basically enjoy Hollywood Hijinx, which is what this reminds me of. (Not in tone, but in terms of having lots of random gadgets strewn about for which there is no plot justification and no obvious puzzle goal either.) But I tried three times to play it and just could not maintain interest. Traveling Swordsman (5) I wanted to like this, I really did. I liked the snazzy titles. I got the sense that it was pretty well polished. I was hoping for something dashing and swashbuckly... and once again I had the sense that the puzzles were getting in the way of the story. I did not at all understand what was going on with the strange girl at the farm, nor would it have been obvious to me without the hints what I was supposed to be doing about that fact. I felt as though there was a potentially interesting idea inside this game, but that the need to have conventional IF puzzles had essentially stifled the story. Grr. Another Goddamn Escape the Locked Room Game (4) Okay, so this one advertises itself honestly. But it isn't interesting. Game Producer (4) I am tired of games about creating games, games set in your office, and games where you have to get caffeine in order to proceed. To make matters worse, this one runs on a time limit (and has the equivalent of a hunger puzzle where the caffeine itself is concerned). And there was really nothing about this premise to hook my interest. There are lots of NPCs who don't respond to obvious questions about nearby puzzles; there are lots of objects I wasn't allowed to look at closely enough. (I couldn't, for instance, find any clear description of the beer fridge to help me figure out what might be wrong with it.) All in all, kind of a bore. Hedge (4) Typo in the first few paragraphs. Then I couldn't get much of anywhere, and had this conversation with the game: > hint The Hedge Oracle descends on a wisp of cloud to answer your call. ŇTry asking him about something. HeŐll tell you everything you need to know.Ó The Hedge Oracle vanishes in a spray of mist. > ask bouncer about the list This provokes no reaction. The Bouncer looks at you and mimes unscrewing the lid from a jar. The sun blazes furiously from the clear blue sky. > ask bouncer about the hedge This provokes no reaction. The Bouncer looks at you and mimes unscrewing the lid from a jar. The sun blazes furiously from the clear blue sky. > ask bouncer about me This provokes no reaction. > ask bouncer about bouncer This provokes no reaction. The sun blazes furiously from the clear blue sky. This did have a few bits of promise, but I couldn't get it to go much of anywhere and was discouraged by the implementation quality from trying too terribly hard. Requiem (3) I can tell that this was going for something better, but what happened to me was that I stumbled about making moves that I intended to be exploratory, and instead they turned out to have represented important decisions. Wodges of text went by. Plot happened. I was an innocent but confused bystander. Then an end arrived, and I gratefully accepted the opportunity not to play any more. Pathfinder (3) Lots of weird implementation stuff. Described objects are missing. The blackberry's desc. doesn't change after I've killed Steve -- it goes on claiming that I still want to expose him. And then I got caught by the driver with not enough time to investigate the situation. At that point I had no desire to replay to that point. (Killing the player is a risk, especially if you do it with a timed puzzle where just undoing a move won't help: if the player isn't that into the game and didn't save recently, he probably won't come back.) There was some creepiness about the opening here, but it all dissolved into sheerest nonsense. Fight or Flight (3) I suspect something here is supposed to be frightening, but I didn't encounter it. After a few attempts to wander the map, do stuff, and find a plot, I hung out for many turns in the lounge. My buddies ambled around punching one another on the shoulder and flirting in that teenagerly way that is excruciating to be around. Points for accurately reproducing this effect, but I don't enjoy it in real life. I waited hopefully, but no monster came to eat them. Eventually I gave up. Polendina (3) Starts in bog-standard Your House. Yet again. The puzzles weren't very sensible, and I got tired of being abused by the narrative voice, even though there eventually turned out to be an ostensible reason for it. Played most of the last part of the game from the walkthrough, more out of sense of duty than with any enjoyment. Apocalypse Clock (3) Buggy, underimplemented, and -- despite what you might consider a reasonably gripping premise -- strangely dull. It has some good turns of phrase, but I couldn't take any of it seriously, the puzzles were nothing to write home about (and didn't all work), and... yawn, really. Enter the Dark (2) Prose style demerit on the first move. Laying/lying error. Strange spacing. Parser that doesn't recognize "x" for examine. Here is the interaction I had with the game immediately before quitting: > w Potters Cemetery West A massive oak tree is dominating the center of this part of the cemetery. The tree must be hundreds of years old. The branches stretched out covering over the tombs that lay beneath. A tomb looms in the shadows of the giant tree and you canŐt help yourself as you are drawn near to it. The front of it has a finely carved doorway with what appears to be a ladder on it. There are angels climbing into a clouded sky. This picture reminds you of the famous JacobŐs ladder in the bible. There is an odd crow over-looking you. > x crow I donŐt know the word ÔxŐ. > examine crow You canŐt do that. > climb tree I donŐt know the word ÔclimbŐ. > u You canŐt go that way. Sisyphus (1) Couldn't figure out what to do here *other* than push the boulder uphill. Tried this repeatedly, then gave up. No walkthrough, either. Ones I didn't finish or really play in any detail because the opening put me off severely: Any of the Windows games, Quest, or Java. I'm prejudiced against homebrew systems and it takes something pretty fascinating about the blurb (or the author) to get me to try them. And I haven't been positively struck by Quest in the past. Labyrinth (NR) This might be fine -- indeed, it looked competent -- but it also looked like a completely storyless puzzlebox, and I couldn't figure out where to go with it to start out with; and then I realized that I am not that interested in storyless puzzleboxes right now. So I quit. Bible Retold (NR) I generally find Christian IF to be hugely annoying. Lawn of Love (NR) Previous unsatisfactory experiences with Santoonie games have not left me with any urge to try this one. Star City (NR) The initial room description seemed all glorpy and offputting. This might not be fair. If lots of people like it, maybe I'll try it again. Strange Geometries (NR) Much too long, too rambling opening. Every time I tried to get myself to play this, I was put off by the writing. Finally I had to admit that it just wasn't going to happen. Ballymun Adventure (NR) Bored by move 1, I'm afraid. There might be something interesting here, but I just didn't get far enough to see it. Xen: the Hunt (NR) Turns out to be a sequel to another game I didn't finish. Reading the flashback makes my eyes glaze over. I quit. Manalive (NR) Ennh. Prologue did not like me. Enh enh enh. A Broken Man (NR) Well, I guess if we're assassinating someone, it's a good idea to wear an assassin outfit. Hrm. No, I just can't suspend disbelief even for a few turns. Wumpus Run (NR) I am not interested in any more Wumpuses ever again. PTGOOD (NR) Because this one pretty much advertises itself as a waste of time without my having to start it up. =============================