Maga's Introcomp 2005 reviews

[ Deadsville ]   [ The Fox, the Dragon and the Stale Loaf of Bread ]   [ The Hobbit ]   [ Somewhen ]   [ The Amazing Uncle Griswold ]   [Weishaupt Scholars ]   [ Negotis Book One ]

These are, I'm afraid, more scattered thoughts than careful, thought-out reviews, and for this I apologise. Games are listed in more or less the order in which I played them.

There were a good number of solid entries this year, but nothing that really shone out; I gave out a good number of 6s, but nothing beyond that. Spoilers may appear.

Deadsville by William McDuff

Sooo. Zombie PC. Not a very original idea, but not one that's been done much in IF before (last year's Zombie Cow is the only one springing to mind) and one that might therefore be used to pose some fun puzzles - using your guts to solve rope puzzles, complicated self-repair puzzles, that sort of thing - however, I don't really see any evidence of this sort of thing coming up, and the puzzle approach seems to be standard fare. Plotwise it's going to need a little more than 'rampage around, shoot people, eat brains', and again there's no real indication of what's to come on that front; and I'm inclined to think that if McDuff had a strong idea for where to take this we might be seeing more clues in the intro. Rampages are fun and everything, but even zombies need some supporting structure to keep moving.

I'm amused by the first prompt. Good start. The prose style is a touch awkward, but only a touch; mildly but consistently funny.

One bug which I imagine a lot of people found:

>read gravestone
That's not something you can open.

Score: 6

The Fox, The Dragon, and The Stale Loaf of Bread by David Welbourn

One of the longer intros. The abundance of superfluous rooms is pleasant enough: I genuinely feel as if I'm travelling, even if the bard-style descriptions grate somewhat. The faux-bard prose is a little unsatisfying; it seems to be aiming more at Brothers Grimm than D&D, but there's leakage from the latter - notably the use of the word 'bard'.

Gamekiller bug:

>southeast
You sigh. You cannot ignore the stale loaf of braad. You are starving.

I'd really like to see some alternative solutions to puzzles, particularly the dragon's splinter. A knife should be enough to work any splinter out, really, or at least give a decent reason why I can't use it. Again, the bread was... well, a puzzle that you can't tell why you're doing, or if you've actually succeeded, even though the correct course of action is fairly obvious. This might work better with clarifying resolution, but coming at the end of the intro it's more of a damp squib.

Here's a problem which quite a few introcomp games struggle with: games which don't have a natural distinct introductory section are difficult to extract an intro from, but games which *do* can make it harder for the player to get an idea of how the rest of the game will play out - in this case, because the intro is the first part of an articulated story. Presumably the minstrel gets into deep trouble when he reaches the kingdom and requires assistance, but what form that takes and what style of gameplay that'll translate to is difficult to tell.

What I'd really like to see is a series of puzzles which *can* be solved without the assistance of the rescued critters, but become an awful lot harder; in part because not to do so would probably make for long stretches of play in an unwinnable state.

...and during the ceremony it was revealed that the fox/dragon/bread will be PCs. Which is definitely interesting and should probably have been hinted at in the intro itself; it'd certainly have piqued my interest a little more, although bringing attendant worries with it.

Score: 6

Sigh. Sigh sigh sigh. I'm told I can examine things in darkness, but nothing I try works. Lots of swift death, feels suspiciously maze-like despite protests to the contrary. Claims that we can examine things in the dark, but then doesn't let us do so. Painful to play.

I'm bored rigid with epic-heroic fantasy in general and Tolkien derivatives in particular. Moreover (short of a stroke of adaptive genius) an IF story is less likely to be fun if it's not much more than going through the motions of a book everyone's read - and finishing something the length of a novel adaptation within a year, without gutting the story or the implementation or both, seems a highly unlikely prospect.

Score: 1

'As good-looking as ever' is not a description. Stop using it. Description is absent or uninspired throughout; I don't get a good impression of the locale, of what precisely I'm meant to be doing here (something journalistic, sort of, maybe) Vast hordes of unimplemented scenery and locations, making it extremely difficult to play. All I can do is wander around the underdescribed, underimplemented area. Bah.

This is meant to be an intro: a good representation of what the first five or ten minutes of playing the finished game might feel like, which is something fundamentally different from the code skeleton of a game. Now, if the idea for the game is that ultimately it'd be a virtually unrestricted, open-plan map I can see how cutting off a few exits might be necessary. Fine - but the areas that you leave open should be properly implemented. This intro tells me next to nothing about the envisaged complete game; all it tells me is that it's written by someone who doesn't spend much time considering their audience. Or maybe I completely missed something crucial, but...

Score: 1

Whyld's prose is gawky and frequently ill-considered, but not without its charm; in fact, here the gawkiness is put to good use in characterisation. This might end up becoming Kurusu City done properly. Then again, it might as easily end up like Kurusu City without improvement.

Front rooms are generally called 'front rooms' because they're at the front of the house; your front room is different in that it's at the side. You're not sure whether this is down to bizarre architecture, drunken house builders or just your father's liking for being 'different'. Aside from being at the side and not the front, the front room is wholly unremarkable: TV, video, stereo, several shelves of books, a sofa and a chair. All very humdrum and uninteresting.

All the implemented objects are described at similar length, giving more information about the family than the objects themselves - and thus indicating where the game's interest is going to lie, and where the player's attention should be focused. An NPC-based game in ADRIFT faces limits, of course, and there aren't actually any characters or puzzles within the scope of the intro. Trepidation would probably be the safest option here; another case where I'd really like to score the game higher on the basis of my highest hopes for the theme, but am held back because of realistic expectations about the implementation.

Score: 5

Good setup: interesting slant on the old conspiracy-theory pot-boiler. The game so far feels pretty sparse, though; there's not a great deal you can really do, the world feels textureless and empty. Cutscene-type events are well done, but this isn't backed up by the interaction. It's difficult to motivate oneself to find puzzle solutions in this kind of environment. Which is a real shame, because the premise had me really, really wanting to like this game.

I did like the slant on the menu-conversation system, which uses brief descriptions of the type of response - "Denial", "Blatant lie by omission", that sort of thing - as options instead of the actual response. It's functional, occasionally amusing, and you don't lose anything by it. A more developed version of this in the final game would be very interesting indeed, but within the intro itself it's not fully exploited; NPCs feel wooden and conversation is limited, even in a scene that's titled 'talking to (some NPC)'.

So, a lot of potential, but none of it really lived up to. I vacillated on the scores a lot; I really wanted to give it a 6 or 7, but there were a lot of flaws that resulted in it not actually being that fun to play. Character-switching was handled in a confusing way. There wasn't enough to do, which meant that play just wasn't much fun on the whole; if I'm going to be railroaded I'd like to be able to look at the scenery. The prose did the job but was generally overterse and lacklustre. Score: 4

Negotis is the biggest intro in this competition by a long shot, and has obviously had a lot of work put into it. It very swiftly declares that it's quite happy to incorporate stock elements from genre fantasy and sci-fi (sigh), and that we'll be dealing with a lot of RPG stuff with the stats showing: combat, stealth, trade. There are a lot of important verbs you're going to have to learn and use regularly.

Personally, I always prefer stats to be kept hidden, and if the PC never realises which stats are at play that's even better. Mimesis is clearly not a massive priority of the author - as further evinced by characters doing the equivalent of "Ask me about topic X". There are wacky Zork-like materialising-to-perform-some-trivial-function people.

That said, there's quite a lot of attention to detail for such a large intro. The prose is generally somewhat fractured, however, and not just when it's making game mechanics explicit; descriptions often contain a great deal of information without actually giving you much of an image of what was going on. Nonetheless, a lot of good non-default responses (identikit PC, but with a visible-mechanics RPG what do you expect) and only one obvious bug. SPAG errors are a little overfrequent, but not to the point where they greatly impede the game.

The combat system alternates between meticulous detail (wounds are carefully recorded and fester if not healed) and annoying predictability (the one opponent in the intro always does the same amount of damage if it hits; wounds invariably get infected, and fast).

The intro features one real character, who is again fairly detailed; there's particular attention to his 'I don't know about that' responses, which are varied and effective. I found myself disliking him rather quickly, however, partly because most of the awkwardness in handling plot-coupons is delivered through him and partly because he's a Bossy Sagacious type and an unscrupulous capitalist to boot. The number of times I limped back to the clearing, dripping blood from my infected burns, and he leaned back and observed something to the effect of "That looks painful. I sell healing scrolls, you know. If you don't have the cash, I might buy some pearls from you at a tenth of their actual value." Fortunately, money can virtually be summoned from the aether in Negotis, although that does leave one wondering why Harkan is so tight-fisted about it.

This'd probably get a significantly higher score if it weren't for my deeply-ingrained dislike of explicit mechanics in IF and stock fantasy in any context. It looks to be pretty good for what it is.

Score: 5