Maga's IFComp 2008 Reviews

Spoilers. Lots of 'em.

My only hard-and-fast scoring principle is that I don't give a game more than a 5 unless I enjoyed it. Other than that: I am extremely stingy with 10s, and the distinction between a 3 and a 4 probably has as much to do with my mood at that particular moment as it does with any inherent qualities of the game.

10:
9: Everybody Dies, Violet
8:
7: Nightfall
6: Afflicted, Buried in Shoes
5: April in Paris, Anachronist, Opening Night
4: Snack Time!, Grief, Magic,When Machines Attack, A Date with Death
3: Channel Surfing, A Martian Odyssey, Berrost's Challenge, Freedom, The Lucubrator, Red Moon, Trein, Escape from the Underworld, Recess at Last
2: Riverside, Piracy 2.0, Dracula's Underground Crypt
1: The Absolute Worst Game in IF History, The Lighthouse



A Date with Death:    An Adrift game by David Whyld

The prose is... a little better than the average, but it needs editing. Editing for length, in particular. Where a normal game would say *** You have died ***, we get three paragraphs and about a hundred words. The humour would work considerably better if every point wasn't so laboured; the potato trial in particular is annoyingly one-note. Yes, I get it already; repeating the joke over and over doesn't make it any funnier.

In Whyld games I usually feel as if I'm just treading water until all the plot has been delivered and the game's over. (I don't have a principled antipathy to railroaded story-heavy games, but there should be at least an illusion of meaningful engagement.) There's usually significant choices to be made, but they tend to have a CYOA-like impact on the game structure; if you're not explicitly making menu choices, then you're usually carrying out one specific action at the right moment. A Date with Death involves pretty long periods of hanging around trying to work out if there's anything significant you can do until the next timed event.

The comedy hook isn't inherently bad, or anything - Varicella is a good example of a vaguely similar setup - but it's approached too earnestly, as if we're meant to be deriving a moral message from this. The victimised people are, to a man, radiantly virtuous and stoutly defiant. This is not how tyrannies work.

Rating: 4
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Recess at Last:    A Glulx game by Gerald Aungst
Broadly, novels about childhood generally deal with guilt, fear, confusion, prepubescent sexuality, dissatisfaction, brutality, obsession and trauma. Movies about childhood are generally about a fairytale time of innocence and joy before real adult problems. IF tends towards the movie style; partly this is because, like movies, it's a medium that makes the autobiographical style difficult. I mention this because Recess at Last opens with a quote about a story where a small child is institutionally brutalised into becoming a calculating murderer, then becomes a story about a small child who is institutionally brutalised into missing half an hour in the sunshine.

I think that there are a vast pool of people who loved Calvin & Hobbes for the sweet stuff, and don't figure out that the sweet stuff only worked because it represented a brief interlude between Calvin being a selfish, sulky, cynical, antisocial little monster. If you take the monster out, all you have left is a Disney moppet.

Thus: very dull. Quick: two very simple puzzles. No serious bugs or SPAG errors that I ran into.

Rating: 3
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Nightfall:    A Glulx game by Eric Eve
This is a pretty big game for the comp, more notably so because this seemed to be a year of very short entries. I ran out of time before I finished, although I wasn't tired of playing at that point. Would have kept playing, but it was under twenty-four hours to the voting deadline.

You are an unassuming lawyer who, since childhood, has had a not-quite-stalkery crush on an unnamed (yet awesome) woman. Now your fictional English town is under threat from an unknown Enemy and is being evacuated, but she has avoided evacuation for reasons unknown; you remain as well in order to graduate to true stalkerdom find her. As you wander around the deserted streets it gradually emerges that she is probably the Enemy and planning to attack the city with a WMD because she is a compulsive overacheiver and wasn't nominated for the local MP.

Mysteries of the Big Hidden Secret type are difficult in IF. IF encourages the reader to step back and analyse the situation more than non-interactive narratives do, so they're a lot more likely to spot your clues and foreshadowing. But you're also not able to guarantee that they'll find all the clues, so the tendency is to put in rather more clues than are necessary. So the timing of the reveal is very difficult to control; if the player figures it out too early, then they're going to spend a lot of time picking up more clues and going OH GOSH REALLY? (Yes, you can put a twist on it, but you need to signal the twist as well, so same problem.)

Nightfall does a lot of stuff to make your life easier. There is a pretty intelligent GO TO system that walks you step-by-step but lets you pause and take diversions before returning to your path. There is a pretty good 'stuff you should be concentrating on' hint system, which is useful given that this is one of those games where there may be four or five loose ends floating about at a given moment. My main gyp is that the writing and characterisation is pretty pedestrian. The Mysterious Chick is a template: hypercompetent, driven, beautiful, self-centred, cold. The protagonist is introverted and a little bit prissy. That's about it. If a Mysterious Woman forms the core motivation of a game, she should be non-generically attractive, interesting, compelling. Similarly, the setting feels as if it falls short somewhat. Apocalyptic English Cityscape is one of a handful of settings which I go weak at the knees over, but the descriptions were distinctly unevocative. Atmospheric messages work rather better - there's a sinister air, a well-managed sense of time running out.

Rating: 7
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Everybody Dies:    A Glulx game by Jim Munroe
Hey, awesome, illustrations. Good illustrations that set the tone and setting and accomplish transitions that would be very hard to render convincingly in text.

There are eighteen beta-testers listed. Eighteen. Jim Munroe, I could kiss you.

Strong writing. The setting's mostly mundane, but it's brought alive; it's not conceived of as Generic Town, USA, it's a specific place, even if that place happens to be a nowheresburg suburb. Similarly, the characters are all instantly recognisable Types, but they're adeptly sketched.

Smooth but not perfectly obvious puzzle structure. At the final puzzle there's a time limit, so I hacked around with UNDO for a while before it became clear that I didn't actually need to; heavy UNDO use around a time limit always breaks up the flow of a game somewhat, though I'm not sure if I see a good way around this particular case.

Problems? I liked the three-heads approach enough that I'd have liked to see it used more broadly in a longer game. I'd have liked the game to be long enough for the protagonists to get some more individual and interpersonal development. It appears that my main criticisms amount to 'more please'.

Otherwise, um. I suppose that some of the environments felt a little sparse; the initial shot made me want to examine the snow and trees and stuff. I suppose you could make a point that those just don't register with the characters, who are all fairly straightforward kids, but it did break the continuity between image and text a bit. Although I am dealing with a shitty far-North American winter right now, so I'm probably just eager to have my experience validated by someone else hating the snow as much as I do.

Rating: 9
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Channel Surfing:    A Glulx game by Mike Vollmer
I start the game in a near-featureless room dominated by a huge TV; the most obvious first action is to use the TV remote somehow. Examining it doesn't reveal any specific controls; there are no button objects, and no obvious commands are acknowledged except for CHANGE CHANNEL TO 16. Including CHANGE CHANNEL TO X where X is not 16. Prominent objects mentioned in room descriptions are often not implemented. This is the sort of thing that the most horribly incompetent betatester would have caught immediately. There is no excuse for this in a comp game. None. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS STOP DOING IT. And then there is an, um, fourth-wall moment:
"I'll tell you a secret, dude. The guys in charge of all this don't know what the hell they're doing. All this is just a haphazardly stitched together attempt at entertainment by someone unable to express himself in an understandable way."
The endgame is a tooth-grindingly standard-issue Bush parody. Oh, come on. If this is the level of political discourse I want I'll go a popular political blog and read the comment threads. It bears repeating: effective political games are hard. Do not write a political game solely to vent your frustrations. Do not write a political game unless you are capable of writing a very good non-political game. Do not write a political game if it's just going to force the player to swallow your message.

I mean, to be fair, this simulates the feeling of watching vapid television quite accurately. Big textdumps with no significant interactivity? Check. Failure to come up with any content not already universally familiar to its audience? Check.

Rating: 3
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A Martian Oddyssey:    A Glulx game by Horatio
Glulx seems to have been used solely to provide atmospheric music. It's pretty well-chosen music, to be fair. You start out flying over the surface of Mars; descriptions are extremely terse and unevocative, so you're really just going on the names of the regions of Mars and the music. Which gives the whole thing a not unpleasant minimalist feel, appropriately stark for the setting; I was hoping for an Asimov/Clarke type hard-engineering game. (Something along the lines of A Fall of Moondust, say, could work pretty well as IF.)

Such a game, however, would have to have loving, Lost Pig levels of implementation. This doesn't. At all. I had to really struggle to get the game to understand that I wanted to do some pretty basic actions. I was wearing a space-suit that was attached to a gas tank, impeding my movement; I couldn't find any verb to try detaching it, or even see any tube connecting the two; the game didn't let me do any other actions while carrying the tank, or recognise my attempts to push, pull or place it. No pointers about what I should be trying. In other words, it felt like a strong case of read-author's-mind. I quit in frustration after spending more time than it really deserved trying to fight my way through the shabby implementation.

There's a bug with the controls' distance readout after you crash. And I find it unlikely that a thermometer used on a Mars mission would be unable to give precise readings below zero Celsius.

Rating: 3
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Berrost's Challenge:    A TADS 2 game by Mark Hatfield
Oh joy, a Wacky Wizard's Quest In Nondescript Lazy-Medieval Fantasy game. 'Shoppe' to indicate that we are in Lazy Medieval. A herbalist who, hilariously, smokes pot. Because he's a herbalist, get it?

A very old-school sensibility: hunger and sleep daemons (you can turn them off, but lose points), UNDO disabled unless you acquire a particular spell, a bunch of objects hidden around the map, lots of wandering around. One death and one unwinnable state within ten minutes of play - admittedly, both times by doing fairly silly things. I don't have an enormous amount of patience for this sort of thing; it might plausibly have turned out to be fairly well-designed for a game of its type, but it's not for me.

Rating: 3
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April in Paris:    A TADS 3 game by Jim Aikin
I am an awful American in Paris, and a waiter hates me. I am therefore sad that the solution does not involve earning his respect by typing all my commands in French.

The prose is pretty flat and lifeless, and the setting and characters don't ever get much beyond a two-dimensional stereotype; April, in particular, never becomes interesting enough to be a credible love-interest, and therefore doesn't constitute much by way of motivation.

It's a decent piece of orthodox design with no real surprises, mild puzzles, an off-the-shelf setting and thorough implementation. This is not in itself a dealbreaker; this year's Violet and last year's Lost Pig fall more or less under that description. The difference is that those games have strong, distinctive writing and compelling characterisation. Again: if I am being motivated by a putative love interest, I should be interested.

Rating: 5
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Magic:    A TADS 3 game by Geoff Fortytwo
Hm, all right, a magic system based on transforming things into similar things. I am hopeful - my favourite IF game remains Savoir Faire, and I generally like games with unusual, big-scope puzzle styles - but I'm aware that this sort of thing is hard to implement thoroughly and non-trivially, so I'm not expecting this potential to be fulfilled. And it wasn't; the transformation mechanic is quite narrow in scope, not used often enough for it to become intuitive or fun.

You are a third-rate stage magician. In the town of Lapinsburg, which combines urban decay with surreal wackiness and killer rabbits. There isn't much by way of a defined long-term purpose, other than getting your rabbit-inflicted injuries patched up. The puzzles all make a certain amount of sense, although I think there's a touch of read-author's-mind going on; mostly, however, there just wasn't enough here to draw me in. The writing was pedestrian, the wacky setup didn't do anything for me, and I never really got much of an idea about what I was meant to be working towards.

Rating: 4
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Afflicted:    A Z-code game by Doug Egan
Point of etiquette. >READ, as opposed to >EXAMINE, is for objects that would plausibly take some time and focus to read: books, letters, that sort of thing. Text that can be read in a glance - signs, graffiti, unfortunate tattoos - should not require you to employ READ. Again, there's a window: EXAMINE says that you can see through it well enough, but you need to use LOOK THROUGH to get the important information. Just because there are specific verbs doesn't mean that you have to use them like this.

The initial gimmick - which gives the player a good reason to poke around - is that you're a health and safety inspector and you have to find evidence of unsanitary conditions. This is a pretty good way to a) give the player something to occupy themselves with right from the outset, and b) give them an excuse to be poking around. The gross-out filth stuff is described in pretty abstract terms. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not; the intention is clearly to squick the player out, but I didn't come across much that was really stomach-churning WTMI.

One of the affinities that IF style often has with movies: the concealment of the protagonist's inner narrative. The trouble is, IF doesn't really have many good formal similarities to movies, and it reads far more like novels do. So this reads very much like the novelisation of a bad slasher movie penned by Hemingway.

In particular: once you start finding body parts, the logical thing to do would be to get the hell out. I found body parts before I even entered the restaurant, which really messed up both the pacing and the logic of the PC's actions. There was a lot of potential here for things to be really sinister - after I found the foot, I didn't expect to be able to make it out of the restaurant, or even out of the kitchen. I made it outside, and I drove away, and for some reason I never mentioned it to anyone.

You happen upon a dude who keeps severed feet in his fridge, you call the police. This goes double if you are a law enforcement type person yourself. It's okay if the plot requires you to avoid this - I can think of a half-dozen good reasons that could rule it out - but a reason is needed, and I'm not offered anything. And given that I can't do that, I really don't know what I should be doing next. The next best option is 'leave'. That gives you a losing ending. So I'm supposed to, um, hang around in Dismemberment House in the hope that I'll find, well, what exactly? Better evidence than a few inconsequential human body parts? This is the sort of thing that really demotivates players.

6 seems high for this, perhaps, but it gets bonus points for the engaging gameplay hook and the moment of genuine creepiness.

Rating: 6
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Anachronist:    A Z-code game by Joseph Strom
The prose is ungainly casual-wacky. Again. With lots of SPAG errors. However, the premise, if not glaringly original, suggests that we're going to get a non-standard take on puzzles at least.

There are no betatesters credited, and it shows. Unimplemented objects and disambiguation problems abound:

>x wire
Which do you mean, the chain fence or the wire?
And there are a good number of outright code errors. A Roman shield turns into an officer's uniform if you get it to move through time, but when it's called 'uniform' it has the description of the shield, and can't be worn. Similarly, when the rune tracer is used on something non-magical, you get something like this:
>point tracer at welding equipment
The rune tracer elicits no reaction from the rune tracer.
Similarly, TOUCH X WITH Y doesn't work, but the less plausible TOUCH X TO Y does. Glancing over the solution suggests a lot of read-author's-mind is required to make headway.

The central puzzle gimmick is, likewise, fairly unintuitive: objects in the game change into their contemporary equivalents if left lying around when you change time, so that a modern motorcycle becomes an ancient horse or a futuristic hover-disk, and so on. This doesn't really fit in too well with the idea that what we're doing is time-travel, rather than some equally dodgy sci-fi device. In First Things First, for instance, things changed over time as you'd expect them to: if you left a motorcycle lying around and moved into the Future, it would rust.

So I got the sense that there may be some fairly decent puzzle design under the shabby exterior, but having to constantly struggle against underimplementation made it really difficult to keep going. Particularly since my goals seemed a little contrived: my aim is to destroy the magical timepieces, right? So why didn't I bring a sledgehammer?

So this is a game that could have been made a lot better with rigorous betatesting. As it is, it's really frustrating to play.

Rating: 5
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The Absolute Worst IF Game in History:    A Z-code game by Dean Menezes
You were looking for a 1, I think. Granted!

Rating: 1
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Buried In Shoes:    A Z-code game by Kazuki Mishima
Urgh. The Holocaust. This gives me instant exploitation-creepiness, but. I suspect that it's going for solid emotional impact in the Photopia / Shrapnel mould, but it didn't quite elicit enough emotional response from me to make it really work. Partly this is because all the elements are very standard, instantly-recognisable signifiers of the Holocaust, and thus instantly recognisable as not being anybody's actual story. And Washington DC gets thrown in there, just for disorientation purposes, which felt very much like a Standard Technique. So the whole thing felt like cheap button-pressing, which might very well be an unfair reaction to a serious attempt, but there it is.

I typed >I DON'T KNOW to the final question (I didn't expect the parser to respond, but that was what felt right); I just didn't feel, honestly, that the game had addressed the issue enough for me to respond, to feel entitled to respond.

So I suppose the thing is that I am not enormously moved or impressed, but the author's showing an interest in style and form and recurrent imagery and emotional impact in a way that is, apparently, utterly alien to the majority of entrants in this comp.

Rating: 6
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Dracula's Underground Crypt:    A Z-code game by Alex Whitington
I am immediately struck by consistent misspellings. The writing isn't just banal: it's wretched. There is unfunny meta-game commentary. Standard-issue irreverent wacky. A guy with a comedy Germanic accent. Death from trying an obvious action. So, yeeeeah. Not restarting this one.

Rating: 2
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Freedom:    A Z-code game by Anon
Please reconcile:
"Freedom" is intended to create the experience of suffering from social anxiety disorder.
and
>x me
As good-looking as ever.
Now, I have social anxiety disorder, and am thus predisposed to sympathy. Being green: not easy. And I see the seed here of a game with a kind of Kafkaesque take on that joke in Fine Tuned where you get everything wrong and have to go back through everything. But there's no time for it to develop; within fifteen minutes I'd negotiated the deepest perils that my neuroses had to offer and won the cute shy girl. Social anxiety should be more difficult than this. It should make the audience feel bruised when they finish playing. Otherwise the message that they take away is that social anxiety disorder is occasionally mildly annoying.

Okay, I acknowledge that Games with a Message are very difficult to write; but this is why one should not, all else being equal, try to write a Game with a Message until one has produced decent non-Message games. Also, everything is very very generic indeed. I am aware that some people think that it is all Everyman and Universal Experience and stuff. This is true insofar as the experience of being bored out of your skull is one that everybody can relate to. If you're going to write a Game with a Message, for fuck's sake write it about a distinct individual with nuances and quirks and passions, or at least render your generic individual in strong prose so that there is a chance in hell that your audience might care.

Rating: 3
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Grief:    A Z-code game by Simon Christiansen
Little Thomas is an adorably frail child prone to sudden attacks of death. If you take him to school, he dies in a car accident on the way home. If you leave him at home, a burglar breaks in and shoots him, unless you lock the front door, in which case he plays with matches and burns the house down with him inside it. If you take him to work and hide him in the broom closet, he drinks drain cleaner. Every time he dies you have to go back and start again. By all rights this should be hilarious. The thing is, the game's tone doesn't suggest a Gashlycrumb Tinies / South Park attitude to small children dying like flies. I had to supply that all myself.

Eventually, the tone builds: to keep Thomas alive you have to be the most paranoid parent imaginable, taking him to work and hiding him from your co-workers. This gets very creepy - seriously, I was expecting Munchausen's to make an appearance on the next iteration - but there's still nothing in the tone to suggest that this is meant to be a freaky-controlling-parent scenario. When you finally work out how to keep Thomas alive, it turns out to have all been a dream - Thomas died in the first, most straightforward scenario, and all your parental paranoia was actually retroactive guilt.

The emotional impact is very minor even so, largely because everything in the game is a cardboard cut-out: generic cute moppet child, generic parent with generic job, generic school, and so on. A potentially interesting variation on the Aisle-type recursive game, but the near-total lack of personality kills it.

Rating: 4
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The Lighthouse:    A Z-code game by Eric Hickman & Nathan Chung
A basic learning-I7 game. Should not be in the comp.

Rating: 1
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The Lucubrator:    A Z-code game by Rick Dague
I'm a re-animated corpse. I can't talk. I can't attempt non-verbal communcation (although I'm smart enough to work out how to kill someone with a sprinkler system and a TV set). As a result, I'm on rails. My creators are pretty much what you'd expect of Zombie Science postdocs: one amoral Frankensteins-For-Progress type, one But-What-Of-The-Ethics type. The story cuts off very shortly after Alice gains enough brain function to be a useful PC, and (coincidentally) at the precise point where the story might have a shot at doing something non-standard with the basic premise and becoming interesting.

A bug: continuing to hack up Jeff's corpse after he's dead keeps printing the same message and giving me more points.

Writing: um, well, this is pretty representative:

The partial darkness somehow emphasizes the stoic monotony of the industrialist design of the building.
Telling people how they should feel about your descriptions rarely works. You have to suggest it. (And for a murderous re-animated corpse I appear to have a remarkable sense of architectural criticism.)

Rating: 3
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wHen mAchines aTtack:    A Z-code game by Mark Jones
Okay. So we have a Westworld kind of thing.

Lots and lots of SPAG errors, highly awkward prose. Some of the dialogue awkwardness is perhaps intentional, because it's spoken by robots; but the dialogue isn't that much more stilted than the standard-issue prose. Maybe the surprise twist will be that the protagonist is a robot, which would account for his juddering internal narrative, bare-bones approach to room descriptions, bland personality and tendency to use slightly incorrect nouns ('portrait' for a landscape painting, 'drawer' for a dresser).

More likely, English isn't the author's first language. This probably makes for a more surreal and disturbing game than you might have got with fluent writing; I spent a lot of the game being unable to make sense of particular actions or utterances. The plot logic seems to have a similar kind of slightly nonsensical quality, and this gives a compelling, alienated twist to the horror; the rules are different here, the world twisted a couple of degrees from the vertical.

A lot of directions described in the room descriptions don't work as described. Various objects are unimplemented. I spent a good chunk of the game carrying a shower around. The map is unintuitively arranged, with exits often listed incorrectly; I found it fairly hard to navigate without a map. At at least one point this hung me up because I didn't know about a room's existence.

The action mostly involves you walking to places where you're told to go, performing a couple of very obvious actions, and standing around watching other people do stuff. There is a machine-tooling puzzle to break things up. Later, a puzzle requires you to use a control panel that's called PAD by the room description, but doesn't respond to that noun.

Not a good game, then, but a Rybred kind of badness.

Rating: 4
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Opening Night:    A Z-code game by David Batterham
This falls, very clearly, into a genre: it's not one that I think has been played around with very much by IF, but otherwise this is a very generic example. Everything's so briefly handled, and the prose is competent but unambitious; this doesn't really give much time for the story's elements to become anything more than templates. The following is pretty much the sum total of the character's traumatic war story:
In April 1917, the United States entered the war in Europe. You signed up and shipped off to France. Months of bitter trench warfare changed you; you never recovered your youthful optimism. And yet you were one of the luckier ones in your regiment. Looking around, you can almost see the lifeless bodies of your comrades piled against the walls of the trench, almost hear the sounds of shelling.
This is such a standard-issue, impersonal WW1 story that it has dramatically lessened impact; there are no human details, nothing to hook me into this particular person's tragedy. This problem recurs throughout: there's nothing to distinguish the Marquis Theatre from any number of derelict theatres in bittersweet showbiz-nostalgia pieces. Miranda Lily never became distinctive enough to get me to identify with the protagonist's obsession. Show, Don't Tell.

There was enough here, emotionally speaking, that I was beginning to tap into the melancholy mood just as the story came to a close. But only just. With a bit more development, slightly slower pacing, work on the prose and characterisation, this might have been pretty good.

Rating: 5
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Piracy 2.0:    A Z-code game by Sean Huxter
Sigh. I should put it on the record that I can deal with space opera, provided the prose is pretty good and the worldbuilding shows some imagination. The prose here is, well, it's at least brief and to-the-point, but it doesn't make for pleasant reading.

So, tum-te-tum, a not particularly logical escape-imprisonment opening, and then I type SOUTH and get this:

Your family lives for generations with the shame of your record. No one in your family speaks of you again.
Not only death, but perpetual ignominy? All I did was type SOUTH.

Rating: 2
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Red Moon:    A Z-code game by Jonathan Hay
Ooh, overblown survival horror. The awesome thing is that in spite of an unknown oppressive horror threatening the protagonist's existence to the point of insanity, he is able to make comments along the lines of (on viewing a family photo), 'My, that salmon is huge!' Then it turns out to have all been a nightmare, and the trick is to do enough stuff to wake yourself up. Aside from one red herring that distracted me for five minutes or so, this is a veryvery quick game; I was left wondering what the point was.

Rating: 3
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Riverside:    A Z-code game by Drew, Jeremy and Vic
Prose of the painfully-banal school. Prose this tedious immediately gives me doubts about the author's ability to deliver on plot and theme. Dialogue is particularly generic.

A great deal of unimplemented scenery.

There's this general gloss of excitable materialism. I've just left the funeral of my closest friend, and the next moment I'm in a parking lot assessing car models and thinking 'whoa, who has the Lexus!'. Later, we wax lyrical about my Italian-leather sofa, oversized plasma TV and Stepford girlfriend. This happens a lot in bland-prose IF; you see it in AIF in particular.

At one point, a command that the walkthrough suggests should work (OUT) fails, thus blocking the game. This would have been a 3; for a gamekiller of this degree it gets a 2.

Rating: 2
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Snack Time!:    A Z-code game by Hardy the Bulldog / Renee Choba
Like A Day for Soft Food, only with a dog. Written in a style reminiscent of Child's Play. Quite short and easy; puzzles are clued effectively enough that it's pretty obvious what you need to be working on and what you should do next. There's not really anything that catches my interest - everything here has been done before, repeatedly, and the subject-matter isn't inherently fascinating - but what there is is pretty solid. Provisionally 4, fairly likely to rise to 5.

Rating: 4
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Trein:    A Z-code game by Leena Kowser Ganguli
Ah, the obligatory High Fantasy Textdump Game. PanCeltic fantasy, it would appear, although none of the Beltane-and-faerie stuff seems to actually intrude on the plot to any real degree, unless there's some big alternative plot I somehow missed.

The writing is awkward. A castle is 'built like a fortress' - no, really? - and there are a good number of style, punctuation and grammar errors. Lots of superfluous capitalisation and ellipses, abundant undescribed or unimplemented items. An empty torch bracket into which one cannot put a torch (you have to put the torch ON it); a torch that cannot be lit.

The plot and puzzles are a by-the-numbers trudge: local lord has been controlled by his evil chamberlain. You must find evidence of this misrule; brilliantly, there is actually an object called 'an Evidence'. You progress through the obligatory tavern, castle and dark alley.

Textdumps aside, it's mercifully brief and very easy.

Rating: 3
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Escape from the Underworld:    A Z-code game by Karl Beecher
By the opening screen, I knew two things about this game: it features the old saw of Hell as office space, and the prose is lifeless. I suspected that this told me everything I needed to know about the game, and the only issue is whether it would throw horrible errors at me to earn a 2, or come up with some solid design to scrape a 4 or 5. Neither occurred.

Rating: 3
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Violet:    A Z-code game by Jeremy Freese
Wow. The first game I played in the comp and I really like it. I shouldn't really like it, given that it's a one-room collegiate office game in which you have to remove distractions from writing your dissertation, but the parser voice saves it. Thoroughly. The parser is personified in one Violet C., a perky Australian, who is funny, sweet without being saccharine, rather more confident than the protagonist, and calls you by a thousand pet names. Or rather, what Violet's hopeless boyfriend thinks she'd say.

The antagonist is your skanky ex-girlfriend, who has got wind of your crisis and has decided to sabotage your efforts. There is one particular moment - where the key slides back under the door - that is beautifully timed to make you really fucking hate her. I savoured that moment. The game has lots of little kickers like this, which all contribute nicely to getting the audience to identify with the protagonist.

On reflection, it's this close to being one of those interminable geek-humour games that are basically a homogenous regurgitation of Douglas Adams, Zork and Dilbert. The difference is that the writing is alive.

For the most part, Violet is a very responsive parser. Trying random stupid things generally gets you a worthwhile response.

The protagonist is sort of a boiled-down version of every self-loathing geek academic. Most self-loathing geek academics with perky girlfriends (cough cough ahem) actually have some redeeming and distinctive personal qualities; we don't get to see any of this, partly because of the everyman IF convention, partly because the premise shows him at his worst. But, y'know, this generates the What I Like Most About You Is Your Girlfriend syndrome. You know every hilarity-ensues movie starring a not-particularly-funny comedian and his troubles with his girl-next-door? Like that. The game steadily demolishes the protagonist's dignity, and by the end I felt faintly guilty for being partly responsible for doing that to him. Which is more or less how he feels about it as well. Kind of like waking up next to someone deeply inappropriate; sure, you both had a lot of fun together, but being in each others' company still makes you feel like pretty shabby people.

Provisional score: eight. Strong writing, parser responses, random events, general polish; gameplay is pretty run-of-the-mill, however. Moved up to nine when I gave Everybody Dies a nine and then had to think very hard about which of the two I preferred.

Rating: 9
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