A Day in the Life of a Superhero | A Light's Tale
All Things Devours | Bellclap | Blink | Blue Chairs | Blue Sky
Chronicle Play Torn | Gamlet | Goose, Egg, Badger | Identity
I Must Play | Kurusu City | Magocracy | Mingsheng
Murder at the Aero Club | Order | PTBAD 3 | Redeye
Ruined Robots | Splashdown | Square Circle | Stack Overflow
Sting of the Wasp | The Big Scoop | The Great Xavio
The Orion Agenda | The Realm | Typo | Zero

WARNING: ABUNDANT SPOILERS

you may also want to glance at my justifications for ratings




A Day in the Life of a Superhero:    An ADRIFT game by David Whyld

Soooo. The superhero thing in IF has been done to death and back. There've been epics (Heroine's Mantle) and trilogies (Earth and Sky, Frenetic Five); it's ranged from dark and bloody (A Crimson Spring) to ridiculously silly (Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning). Squeezing anything more out of the genre - which is, it's worth reiterating, a highly visual one and not at first glance very suited to being transposed into a text medium - seems like a pretty tall order at this point. So, from the outset, there's going to be a lot more demand on any superhero game to do interesting things and do them well.

The writing's... adequate. Not stunning, but no terrible errors. A typo or two that really should have been caught, but no big deal. Certainly going for the schlocky comedy angle here; self-consciously easy-going narrative voice with lots of slightly forced-feeling silliness.

Implementation is a big stumbling-block: if I'm called the Masked Defender, I would like a MASK, please. In addition to this, one gets the impression that having to work within ADRIFT is really causing a lot of problems (though this could be MacScare, of course; I'm told it's 'semi-stable', which is never heartening).

1: "But super heroes do a world of good."
2: "How many super villains have you brought to justice?"
3: "Why do you hate us so much?"

>3
Sorry. That isn't a command generally found in the Good Book of Super Heroes. You'll have to try something else.

Yeah. That wasn't quite as bad as when I tried to talk to my sidekick and was redirected to, um, sniffing my apartment:

>talk to parrot
[talk to smelly]
A fusty smell pervades your apartment. It's probably a mixture of you never getting around to cleaning it and that time the Slug Monster was here to kill you.

Other issues; once I've put the Cat to sleep, it is still described as 'licking its paws as it regards you with malice-filled eyes'; the parser telling me "You can't read the newspaper!", an object drops out when I move the fridge - but I can't see it, and by the time I work out that I have to LOOK BEHIND FRIDGE it won't let me move the fridge any more... anyway, I'm not sure how much of this to put down to the author and how much to the system. I don't want to be a rabid evangelist for Inform/TADS/Hugo/Glulx, but I haven't really ever seen an ADRIFT game that's smooth and enjoyable to play.

Other design issues: this is one of those games with several sets of locations within a city, which you have to travel to to investigate. The annoying thing is that most such games let you go from anywhere to anywhere, but this one, for no accountable reason, makes you go back to your flat every time you leave an area.
NPCs are flat and not very responsive; again, the topic-menu system here is pretty crude and enables indefinite repeats.
The game's directionless, and puzzles are poorly flagged up. The hint system is also irritatingly unwieldly.

Lack of polish hits this one really hard. It was written entertainingly enough for a 5, but... yeah, I don't give out that score when I'm beating my head against the desk in frustration.

Rating: 3
TOP

A Light's Tale:    A TADS-2 game by vbnz

This game was programmed under the alias "vbnz". This is his game and it is freeware. The only things that are not free are the ideas in this game. If you plan on using any of these ideas for anything, free or otherwise, please contact vbnz at: mog_zimri@hotmail.com.
The Beginning
Welcome to the Beginning. From here you get have two choices: Go back, or follow me through this gopher hole and see how far, far down it goes.

Heheheheh. That particular idea, vbnz, I do not think I need to ask you for permission to use.

Overall: irritating narrative voice, infuriating timed-death puzzles, some frankly shockingly bad writing, and no purpose that I could see. The light theme had a little promise, but the rest of the game was so dire that I couldn't be arsed to progress further.

>d
Wise choice; or is it? We shall soon find out.

No, I just found out, when you cut off my fucking head.

Rating: 2
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All Things Devours:    A Z-code game by half sick of shadows

First thoughts: my, somebody really liked Spider and Web, but instead of coming up with some sweepingly original narrative techniques and deeply clever puzzles, they just nicked the basic story (and ganked a title from the frickin' Hobbit, which is never a good way to earn my respect). Sadly, rather early on I hit a puzzle that involved finding batteries, and I couldn't take any more.

Rating: 3
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Bellclap:   Z-code game by Tommy Herbert

In a game very reminiscent of Voices, you play a (possibly minor) god, delivering orders through a deferential intermediary (who does the describing) to a supplicant (who does the stuff). It's an interesting twist on the third-person protagonist attempt; the parser, the protagonist and the issuer of commands are all seperate people. Initially, this setup is a little disorienting, but it quickly becomes apparent what's going on.

There are some very funny responses:

>think
He says the whole point of this exercise is that he doesn't have to do that for himself.

some lamentably unintentional:

>throw axe at sheep
The axe has bounced off without much effect.

Due to the constraints of the parser, we can't do anything particularly godly, or rather we can't decide to do so. It's rather as if our Ineffable Plan is working against Us, and the player certainly doesn't have any idea what said Plan is initially. For this, the game has to win the XYZZY for Most Schizophrenic PC; four different personalities in one command line!

For all the cleverness of the format, the game could have used a little more in terms of writing and detail, and possibly some multiple paths as opposed to just multiple solutions. There's a nicely conceived world under here, but it needs a little more care to be brought out; similarly, we see a few nice little sparks of Bellclap's personality (and our intermediary's), but they could have used a little more development. Comp games are short; you have to evoke a great deal in not very much time.

Rating: 6
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Blink:    A Z-code game by Ian Waddell

Very sparsely implemented. One puzzle, again underimplemented. Rather simplistic treatment of the anti-war subject, using the most tacky tools available: over-the-top graphic horror at the terrible terrible gory awfulness of war, and the wide-eyed innocent child whose pure, untainted moral intuitions point to pacifism like a compass to the magnetic mountain. Since I have an allergy to cosy schmaltz, I couldn't stand the PC or his family, and their brutal deaths therefore failed to raise more emotional response than the passing urge to poke the bodies with a stick.

Two problems of excessive pedantry:
If our only son's been paralysed from the waist down since Vietnam, how the hell has he produced offspring who's only 7? (The frame story could be set in the mid-seventies, of course, but CNN didn't exist until 1980).

And redwoods? Hate to be picky here, but do we have squads of Nazis in west-coast USA?

The only real puzzle involves running around in a forest until you work out to take a reed and breathe through it. Annoyingly, only one particular sort of reed worked for this (cat-tails, evidently, being the wrong sort of hollow) so I floundered around for much too long trying to work out whether there was anything in the great underimplemented redwood forests of the Sudetenland that I'd missed. Apparently, there are multiple paths, but they seem to be pretty obscure (or pretty trivial), since I played through two or three times without any apparent variation.

Rating: 3
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Blue Chairs:    A Z-code game by Chris Klimas

Oh boy, psychotropics are such fun when it suddenly emerges that you've got something massively important to do.

Literary allusions are delivered in a rather unsubtle fashion - I'm called Dante, the girl I'm trying to get to is called Beatrice (the guy who's giving us a lift is not called Virgil, and I don't know whether 'Chris' was meant to mean anything) - similarly, cursory nods are made to IF convention (a white house you can go around the sides of, dark tunnels with lanterns).

Writing is very strong and evocative. The general mood of everything seeming deeply significant and unfathomably symbolic that one gets on a decent trip is well-represented (and I'm a total sucker for that theme in lit); the general feeling of malaise and tragedy does a good job of laying out the protagonist's emotional state.

Structurally, it's less tightly held together. The first major puzzle, for instance, is partly randomised to the extent that you just have to get lucky to win it; this is pretty indicative of the game in general. There appear to be multiple endings; glancing at the walkthrough shows a different result than I came up with. I'd have liked to have seen a lot more of this throughout; the mini-mart sequence in particular dragged out rather too long, and while the sense of random purposefulness that you don't really understand was served well by the apparent pointlessness of the puzzles... well, this is hard to express without hundreds of caveats, but it boils down to a need for more random weird solutions that you just happen upon.

Normally, in a game with this writing quality, I'd want a more involved conversation system, but the one here was fine. Tripping is great for your internal dialogue, but it's not going to make you much of a conversationalist.

Rating: 8
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Blue Sky: An Interactive Tourist Trap:    A Z-code game by Hans Fugal

Motivation: diddly-squat. More or less an Artshow piece, with tacked-on puzzles to give you a reason to wander around and look at the scenery, which the author's obviously rather fond of; however, the scenery wasn't deeply implemented or particularly well-described. And just because the focus isn't textual flourishes or character development doesn't mean you're allowed to ignore those concerns. The utterly blank, straightforward interpretation of the place's history and surroundings did nothing for me whatsoever; there was no joy in it.

Rating: 3
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Chronicle Play Torn: A Cyclopean Tale:    A Z-code game by Algol

Ah, the time-honoured Explore An Eccentric Relative's Home game. So superterse as to make bothering to play the game rather unnecessary. Game-killing bug.

Rating: 2
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Gamlet:    A Z-code game by Tomasz Pudlo

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. On the one hand, it's certainly a better core idea, and generally better-developed, than the great majority of the comp games. It's Hamlet, but he's Jewish, sort-of-modernish, and a small, rather plump boy on the cusp of adolescence. Instead of dark existential angst, he contests with sordid, fearful, repressed sexuality, gluttony and parentally inspired guilt. In short, he's not a very attractive PC, but he's (albeit in caricature) a pretty good portrait. The constraints ofthe Comp kind of force caricature here; where in your standard difficult-adolescent novel you'd be able to draw out each element gradually, here they kind of seem rushed. Even were it taken slower, though, I get the impression it would still be unsubtle; in the intro, our father's ghost's pants fall down. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad pants-falling-down scene, but it's still a pants-falling-down scene.

Similarly, the Jewish elements are hurled in your face one after the other; your side-curls waft in the breeze as a random flavour event, for instance. This has, again, a little bit of a forced effect; people don't tend to spend this much time noticing the picturesque details of their own cultures. I have no doubt, however, that Shakespeare would have approved.

Puzzles and game-structure... a little directionless. The handling of 'you can't do that' messages is a little quirky, usually justified by the rather scared little boy not wanting to get into trouble; this does a good job of establishing his character, but does an equally good job of getting us very annoyed with him. The same style of puzzle difficulty translates into the purely physical puzzles, however. We can't carry stuff around so we have to make a belt out of bedsheets. And the hint system is rather crude and unhelpful after a point.

Rating: 7
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Goose, Egg, Badger: An Eccentric Girl's Birthday:    A Z-code game by Brian Rapp

You own a little farm-zoo. The animals have escaped. You need to stick 'em back in their pens.

The hints suggest that you're meant to work out how to trick the animals back into their cages by playing on their personalities. Sadly, like pretty much everything else in this game, the animals were somewhat lacking.

Annoying inventory limit for no good reason. Frustratingly ultra-brief descriptions. Really very unpleasant to play. And I'm not precisely sure where the Hofstadter reference fitted into everything, unless there was some incredibly subtle meta-game strange loop that I utterly failed to recognise.

Rating: 3
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Identity:    A Z-code game by Dave Bernazzani

WOOHOO AMNESIA NOW THERE IS A CRAZY IDEA TO PUT IN AN IF GAME BUT WHO KNOWS IT MIGHT JUST WORK
Descriptions and writing are fairly lengthy, but very utilitarian. Lack of appropriate synonyms (DOOR for HATCH, OPEN for UNBUCKLE). Non-default stuff is hard to come by; I lasered a yak and got a spark and a faint fizzle. And strange sci-fi planets and amnesia are among the most hackneyed devices in IF; if you must use them, you'd better do so absolutely stunningly.

Spot the inconsistency:

>x tubes The broken and cracked cryotubes are designed much the same as the one you were in. In one of the cracked tubes is a young woman dressed much the same as you. In the other tube is a man, somewhat older and also dressed much the same as you are.

>x woman
Through the broken cryotube you can see a woman of maybe 40 years of age. She is dressed in the same clothes as you. It appears this person is dead.

>x man
Through the broken cryotube you can see a man of maybe 30 years of age. He is dressed in the same clothes as you with the addition of a golden insignia on his shirt. It appears this person is dead.

Mostly this is bland. Oh, fuck, a gigantic connect-the-wires puzzle. Fuck. This is where I type QUIT.

Rating: 3
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I Must Play: an arcade adventure:    A TADS3 game by Fortytwo

Mrf. I think the limitatons of this idea were pretty much exhausted by the IF Arcade minicomp. And when I say 'pretty much' I mean 'utterly and totally without a grain of additional mileage available'. Okay, so lack of originality isn't a problem in itself, but rather a general precursor of associated crappiness. And Fortytwo may well genuinely not be aware of a comp held three years ago that didn't produce anything held in lasting reverence by the community. So, let's go on and mock this game on its merits.

There's the occasional mildly funny moment that holds it above a 2, barely, but for the most part it's minimal and boring. There's an annoying NPC who speculates unentertainingly about the worlds underlying the games you play, but these worlds aren't actually very developed in the games themselves. The narrative voice is immature in the same wandering, fourth-wall-grazing style as A Light's Tale; it's much like the narrative voice in the Kingdom of Loathing, except that it's not funny.

To be fair, it's not buggy, the puzzles aren't hideously obscure, and there's a decent enough hint system.

Rating: 3
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Kurusu City:    A TADS-2 game by Kevin Venzke

Oh boy. Japanese names and a robot dictatorship? I'm expecting some ill-informed anime fanboy crap here, or (little better) a parody of ill-informed anime fanboy crap.

Actually, it's sort of got that flavour, but I'm not really sure if it gets very close to it. It's anime-like in that we're a Japanese schoolgirl and everybody we meet is a hot chyk, but otherwise... quirky. Weird. Mostly terse, but occasionally has flourishes of bizarre fantasy. Laden with weird adolescent quasi-eroticism, which fails to break out into actual porn but always seems to be verging on it.

The random wandering-around-city framework makes for somewhat frustrating gameplay, particularly since the city and its characters seem rather two-dimensional. Implementation level is extremely low, and puzzles are rather randomly flagged up. There's also the constant annoyance of having to evade robots, which come and grab you rather randomly; I used UNDO a lot. The hints don't constitute a complete solution, and leave annoyingly difficult bits. Overall, this could easily have been a lot better with some more work on both the writing and the puzzle design.

Rating: 5
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Magocracy:    A TADS-2 game by Scarybug

The fact that the intro text includes a straight-faced use of the word 'melee combat' tells you all you need to know about this game. It has a few IF-ish things that distinguish it from just being a special-case roguelike, but not a whole lot.

As one might expect, every aspect of this game is a big congealed blob of cliche. We have an evil, seductive enchantress called Lilith, for fuck's sake. The spells (central to gameplay) are handled as Enchanter-style verbs in conventional RPG categorisations. It's a last-one-standing sealed-area conflict. You have hit points.

The heavy use of randomisation is legitimate in itself, but there isn't nearly enough attempt to smooth off the edges of this and make NPCs look like anything other than rather awkward bots. Because charming small armies of enemies and monsters to aid you in combat is a major part of the game, you'll often get Westfront-style responses ten or twenty short lines long, something like this (not an actual transcript, please note):

Lilith moves into the area.
Lilith hits you for 9 damage!
The frumious bandersnatch moves into the area.
The frumious bandersnatch leaps to Lilith's defence!
The frumious bandersnatch banders you for 3 damage.
The wumpus moves into the area.

and so on. Contrast this with the vast extrapolatory textdumps and you've got a very ugly game. Even within the bounds of heroic fantasy, this style really does a terrible job of giving you a feel for what's going on. As interactive fiction, then, it's a monumental failure, because it fails summarily to take advantage of the fiction bit. I saw nothing in here that wouldn't have been better-rendered in a roguelike.

Rating: 3
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Mingsheng: A Chinese adventure:    A Z-code game by Rexx Magnus

Long ago, way back in the aesthetically-swirling mists of time, the ancient sages of Chung Fu developed an incredibly powerful technique that projected their chi through an innovative combination of two of the most awkward and difficult things to reproduce effectively in interactive fiction: combat and spirituality.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha," they crowed in melodramatic fashion, sweeping aside their long, whitened moustaches with an imperious gesture, "some millennia hence a foolish Western devil will attempt to master our exceptional art and capture it in an IF game, and he will be defeated utterly." And in their cosmic wisdom they were not mistaken.

There's a genuine attempt to represent the beauty and spirituality of nature, and there is stuff worth developing here, but it's not striking enough to achieve the effect that's required here. Again, the idea of representing combat in terms of elemental properties is a nice one, but it's not brought out enough in the text - we don't get much of an idea for what's going on, what the principles and so on behind each element are, and how these translate into physical actions; so we might as well be entering numbers into a keypad lock. Again, the mood this piece is aiming at is very hard to achieve in the context of an IF game where you run about solving puzzles; contemplative thought is replaced by jamming the ethos down your neck. This is all largely down to the difficulty of the themes.

Another point: representing what's essentially wilderness on an IF map is hard to do, because if you have too many constrictions (particularly when you're just wandering purposelessly) it feels deeply unnatural.

Your spirit is strong, grasshopper, but you have much to learn.

Rating: 5
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Murder at the Aero Club: An interactive murder mystery:    A Z-code game by Penny

IF has had plenty of detective stories before, but they're essentially linear - you can't come to a false conclusion - so I was interested by the possibilities implicit in the ACCUSE verb, outlined in the initial info. Of course, I was a little pessimistic about the possibility that it'd be exploited properly, or indeed at all. And lo, my pessimism was justified!

So, when I attempt to talk to the guy whodunit, I always get this:

He seems so busy, it'd be a shame to bother him.

And, um, at this stage I've gathered enough evidence that it's all but certain he's the murderer. (Later it turns out he is. There's a twist for ya). I've just discovered the perfect way to stop myself being interrogated by the FBI. Look busy.
Very nondescript writing - certainly nothing that worked up any enthusiasm in me. Underimplemented - default PC description, missing scenery. The NPCs range from some comedy rowdy foreigners, what looks like a minimal self-portrait a la Anchorhead, and a guy who, for some reason that was left somewhat unclear, drinks aeroplane fuel.

Rating: 3
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Order:    A Z-code game by John Evans

The game's principal gimmick is that you can create items out of nothing. It's a nice idea, but obviously has some flaws; it means, for instance, that the items you get are inevitably going to be somewhat bland (nobody's going to CREATE PHANTASMAGORIAL CORNUCOPIA). Instead of Guess The Verb, we have Guess The Object. At least one thing that the hints claim I can create but doesn't work; the class of things you can create is not very precise, containing tools, elements, and miscellaneous properties that you wouldn't have guessed from the rest of the class.

As far as I can make out, it's also timed, which is a very dangerous tool to use across an entire game; Varicella and 1893 pulled it off, but unless you're very sure of how it's being used it's best to restrict it to very short sections. I don't tend to save in comp games; if they kill me in a way that UNDO won't fix, then they're short enough to restart if I feel it's worth doing so, and if they're causing me undue suffering it's a great excuse to stop playing them. I did not feel compelled to restart Order.

Rating: 4
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PTBAD 3: A Mystery:    A TADS-2 game by Xorax

The standard surreal pointlessness game that's probably intentionally trying to place last. We get one of these every comp. They never get any more enlightening.

Rating: 1
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Redeye:    A TADS-2 game by John Pitchers

Argh. Massive, massive overuse of HTML to make things all colourful and hideous, for no good reason. Misspelt in places (not just to imitate accents, either). Grotesquely stereotyped NPCs. Really, really underimplemented, and what puzzles there are are awkward as all hell. Only way to advance the game in places is to be really, really stupid, and the plot is no great shakes either. When I couldn't leave a taxi for no apparent reason, I quit with joy in my heart.

Rating: 2
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Ruined Robots: World Domination, With Robots or Without Them:    A TADS-2 game by nanag_d

Some useful attempts have been made for newbie-friendliness, with lots of hyperlinks and a common-actions status bar. Still, basic character description, ultraterse generally. The hyperlinks often lead to really stupid actions: climbing into a fire for no apparent reason, taking a desk that can't be taken. Images used inconsistently; at times, they're completely baffling. Often hyperlinked objects can't be referred to with that word. Essentially, this looks like someone learning to code TADS; I couldn't stand to play long.

Rating: 1
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Splashdown:    A Z-code game by Paul J. Furio

This is nothing new (or unique to IF), but given the speculative, fantastic, escapist nature of the subject it's deeply bizarre how swiftly SF leaps into genre convention, and how rarely it attempts anything beyond said convention.

Observe the level of implementation!

Some bolts and metal scraps seem strangely out of place here on the walkway floor.

>x bolts
That's not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.

>x scraps
That's not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.

>x metal
That's not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.

>x floor
You see nothing unexpected in that direction.

Please, please don't tell me that something looks 'strangely out of place' and then refuse to let me examine it. This isn't just an implementation gyp: this is basic courtesy to the player stuff.

So, as far as I can see, there's going to be a lot of uncoupling coolant tanks and powering up machines and so on and so forth, accompanied by chirpy, repetitive comment from an annoying robot. Not having a gigantic hard-on for coolant tanks, I need some motivation at this point. Not for the character: for me. By the time I've reached the computer, I've seen no writing that goes above the mediocre, one rather awkward puzzle and enough branching rooms to suggest that this goes on for rather longer than I'd like. Given that 'you are wandering around a spaceship IN CRISIS' is about as common an IF scenario as cave tunnels, I'm inclined to get bored of them very fast. But no: we're colonists, in cryostasis, on an interstellar voyage. My character is as good-looking as ever. I am not in the habit of fiddling with spaceborne soup-cans for the radiant joy of it.

Rating: 3
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Square Circle:    A TADS3 game by Eric Eve

My bookcase currently contains both Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Honderich's Punishment: The Supposed Justifications, but I have utterly failed to get around to reading either of them and hence my closest frame of reference here is Kafka's The Trial, the Patriot Act and Guantanamo.

>LOOK UP (viable topic) IN whichever BOOK consistently crashes HyperTADS. That said, I'm running same in the Classic environment on an OS X box; other people don't seem to have hit this issue. Luckily, I managed to get someone to send me a transcript of the full contents of the books.

Now, the game does a lovely sendup of Enlightenment rationalism as applied to social theory, doing two things: it makes the equation between sociology and geometry overwhelmingly explicit, and it enters into analytic definition-wankery. So everything points to the solution to this involving a similar semantic definitionwank, that takes advantage of a silly little loophole in the given descriptions of geometric concepts. Sadly, Euclid did a pretty reasonable job of it, and you don't have a convenient n-dimensional universe on hand to conduct topology experiments in. I initially expected the solution to involve some monstrosity involving light being passed across a modified sphere; it's actually somewhat simpler and more elegant than that.

I'd be very interested to see if anybody solved it without the hints (or prior knowledge of that little mathematical chestnut); it's technically completely possible, but in the same way that the geometric puzzles in the Meno are possible for the slave-boy. (edit: I'm told people did indeed manage it, which demonstrates that my ability for lateral thinking is as below average as I suspected.)

Unexpectedly, the game dragged out well beyond the solving of the title's puzzle. This took things beyond allegorical, suggestive Kafka territory into a heavily-described Orwellian dystopia (the latter is harder to pull off), and introduced a lot of aimless wandering about in forests. The cribbing from Orwell became more and more apparent. Really, the game could just have ended with your escape and it'd have seemed a great deal tighter and more effective. I was predicting an ending that went a bit like this: after the guy with the machine pistol gets you to sign the document, they throw you into an asylum for repeatedly asserting logical impossibilities. (The square circle! How ridiculously Meinongian! You shall not leave this room until you've come up with a gold mountain.) The end.

As it was, I got myself into what seemed to be an unwinnable state a couple of times. This was very annoying, as the straight walkthrough is by no means as quick and simple as is suggested. I was, by this stage, busy predicting another hypothetical ending (YOU are the revered mind behind the New Enlightenment! omfg bitter bitter irony) so it saddened me that I couldn't work up the energy to go through all that again.

This showed promise of being a strong 8 or even a 9; sadly, it just wasn't disciplined enough.

Rating: 7
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Stack Overflow:    A Z-code game by Timofei Shatrov

Minimal, random, surreal, and so terminally unengaging that I couldn't work up the energy to continue. Having the geekiest title in the universe didn't help either.

You happen to be aboard a space station of some sort. The interior reminds you of all these dumb sci-fi movies you've seen. Something like an elevator is at the east side of the room.

(Yes, um, so I played this just after two dumb sci-fi games, with something like elevators, in space-stations. So my initial reaction was OH GOD NOT AGAIN. But at least it's honest).

Rating: 2
TOP

Sting of the Wasp:   Z-code game by Jason Devlin

Hooray! I'm a spoiled tasteless slut harpy, wandering around among other spoiled tasteless slut harpies with vile names and viler everything else, trying to save my loveless marriage by retrieving a photo of me shagging the help. There is no evil, underhand, catty trick I won't sink to in order to salvage the shreds of my reputation. I'm a Fury with streaked mascara, dignity progressively being shredded away by hissy gossip and my own single-minded bitchy purpose.

The game does its best to make its audience cringe in disgust, and succeeds admirably. It's also one of the most engaging games I've played this comp.

The game deserves at least a 7 for this line alone:

While you enjoy senseless destruction of nature as much as the next Republican, now is not the time.

Technically, it's slick, with decent hints and a minimal but effective conversation system. There are a couple of things that look rather like an unwinnable situation, but I can't confirm this.

It's compelling and well-written. In terms of gameplay and puzzles, there's really nothing incredibly striking here - and all the writing's quality is really bits of the same joke, and once the tone's established things aren't really going to progress anywhere. Still, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and will most likely be going back for a replay or two.

Rating: 8
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The Big Scoop:    A Z-code game by Johan Berntsson

Timed death puzzle. Not a generous one, either. So much so that, having worked out the only apparent way to avoid said timed death, I die one turn before I can achieve it even while taking the shortest possible route. No hints. Nothing in the writing that makes me enthusiastic enough about this game enough to keep submitting myself to the same timed death over and over again.

Rating: 3
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The Great Xavio: A Mystery:    A Z-code game by Reese Warner

Nice idea: he's a grad student, he's an absent-minded logic tutor, together THEY FIGHT CRIME. Or (an equally noble aim) harass David Blaine. Sadly, it sort of flops at this point.

While Dr. Todd fulfils the normal tutor-postgrad relationship by expecting you to do all the work, he follows you around rather than t'other way about, and annoys you by being badly written. No logic professor I have ever had the misfortune to be lectured by has used the word 'logical' that much. Or attempted to apply the principles of logic to the real world. To be fair, the last logic professor whose lectures I attended with any regularity ended up caught in a scandal involving an Internet prostitute-recommendation website. I offer this fact up merely because it is more entertaining than anything in The Great Xavio.

Infuriatingly sparse implementation abounds - if you want to go through a door, you have to unlock it, then open the door, then go through it. There are no shortcuts, so everything has to be done at the greatest possible length - and then the doors, of which there are many, lock behind you after you've passed through them. It also doesn't help that the game's kind of directionless, which means wandering back and forth a lot. NPCs are two-dimensional and frustrating to deal with.

Rating: 3
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The Orion Agenda:    A Z-code game by Ryan Weisenberger

Big-ass textdumps. Huge. Instant death on following a direct pointer. Several times. Also, the name could really, really have done with some work.

We have a pretty basic principle here, ripped off from classic science fiction (or possibly Star Trek, what with all the jumpers). Altruistic interstellar federation doing its best to avoid cultural contamination, that kind of thing.

It's worth noting that his game probably wins the Terrence V. Koch Prize For Frequent Uninentional Hilarity:

The shuttle begins vibrating madly and the screaming gets louder as the wings conform to find the best shape for entry. It feels like we are twisting and turning randomly as we plummet, until suddenly the autopilot finds the right combination of thrust and wing shape, and the vibrating stops. We are now gently cruising down to the planet's surface. "Holy crap," I say, as I pry my fingers loose from the chair armrests.

"Holy crap is right," Rebecca agrees, "That was intense."

"Is it always that crazy?" I ask.

"Yeah," she says, "but don't worry about it. You'll get used to it."

Whoa, if I want that kind of game I'll play Deanna, thanks.

My pole is wobbling occasionally. His pole is rock-solid.

Ryan Weisenberger, you are a filthy, filthy man.

The Orionions are a simple people.

My next speedIF, Digging for Orionions, is going to be about a futuristic alien race engaged in vast archaeological efforts to work out how the hell they came to have such a stupid name.

There are cool gizmos, most of which confirm the rather poorly-concealed Star Trek fandom. They only have one purpose, however, and occasionally screw up when used for anything unintended.

>scan flower
That wouldn't tell me much. The medscanner is for analyzing organic objects.

I didn't enjoy playing this, but with better pointers, a little less instant death, a few bugfixes and a little more writing it'd have made a 5. However, it's too clunky to merit more than a 3 or 4 in its current state.

Rating: 4
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The Realm:    A TADS-2 game by Michael Sheldon

>i
You have a shoes (being worn), a trousers (being worn), and a shirt (being worn).

Oh, dear. Oh dear oh dear.

This appears to be the obligatory Game With A Randomly Wandering Cat. I, by contrast, am a Randomly Wandering PC, distinguishable from the Cat by my tendency to pick up random objects.
This would be a 3, but the shitload of fucking stupid elements (dragon quest, wandering cat, dumb guards) take it down to a 2 because I'm in an irate mood and have had enough port to make me cavalier in my dispensation of wrath.

Rating: 2
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Typo:    A Z-code game by Peter Seebach & Kevin Lynn

It seems fairly obvious what's going on here: somebody's designed a typo-correction library, but it didn't work too well, so (in a stroke of arguable genius) they decided to write an IF game about a typo-correction library that doesn't work too well. These guys did Janitor, another IF game about IF games, which I loathed with a passion and everybody else wet themselves with joy over. This, however, infuriated me less because of the subject matter - I could have totally coped with it if it hadn't been so frustratingly implemented.

It appears that we're a betatester. It's left initially ambiguous as to whether the library's intentionally half-assed, or whether Seebach & Lynn actually want feedback on their spanky-clever typo-corrector, and, to quote the game,

"Your job is extremely important to our company, but in a way that doesn't require us to pay you very much."

Of course, the first ten minutes was inevitably spent playing with the typo-correction engine, with such immature results as:

>turds
[Flavorplex Psychic Typo Correction has divined that you want to "dust"].
What do you want to dust?

Most annoying of all is the lack of any direction of LOOK UP to the manual, which has a lack of synonyms (and most of the synonyms just tell you the word you need to use, rather than actually directing the command to it). The manual is the only thing in the game you might look up anything in. With a fixed manual, this game would be merely clunky; without it, it's hair-pullingly frustrating:

>look up lethal response subsystem in manual
"See the entry for lethal response system."

>look up lethal response system in manual
"See the entry for lethal response system."

Another infuriating disambiguation I hit frequently was '>turn on blue'. 'Which blue, the blue switch or the blue light?'
Well, of course, I can't turn on the blue light, which is just the indicator light for the blue switch, so trusting that this is an IF parser written after 1994 I blithely reply '>switch'. The answer to which, of course, is 'What do you want to switch?' RAR. These are probably side-effects of fiddling with the standard parser pretty heavily and not completely fixing everything that was torn out in the process. Now, the game's obviously about half-finished libraries, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant to play.

The sub-game is about fixing a complicated pizza-making machine, whose response to doing just about anything wrong is to brutally kill you or, if you're lucky, produce a pile of revolting goop. When you die, the tech-monkeys hoot amusement in MST3K style (we could have done with more of this: it was amusing) and automatically UNDO. Once you've worked out all the fiddly details, the typo-corrector goes homicidally beserk:

>x box
[Flavorplex Psychic Typo Correction has divined that you want to "kill self with wire"]

This would have got one or two points more if it had been less blood-vessel-explodingly maddening to play.

Rating: 5
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Zero:    a TADS-2 game by William A. Tilli

Hmm. The writing is laden with hideous, fragmentary grammar, though perhaps that's intentional. It's occasionally mildly funny (as with the description of the PC's ancestry, for instance). It's notable for its nice use of graphics, which fits in very well with the (otherwise annoying) white-on-black colour scheme.

I'm rather disappointed that I couldn't eat the pixie.

It's a fairly nice idea; although the goblin world showed signs of developing into something riotous and detail-ridden (something along the lines of the peerless Goblins of the Labyrinth sourcebook) it never got very far and ended up mostly flat. A little more work was needed here before release, I think; detail and direction.

Speaking of flat, the layout of the place was rather hard to follow; this may have been intentional, but since you have to scurry back and forth a lot it's rather annoying after about ten minutes.

Rating: 4
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WHAT THE RATINGS MEAN, sort of

Wow, I must be going soft in my old age, or possibly it's just because I wrote most of this sober. Without knocking up a histogram, I'm fairly sure that my most common score was 3.
In any case, all this is to be taken with a pinch of salt; my rankings tend to the intuitive.

You Deserve Smiting
1:	Abysmal. No redeeming qualities whatsoever. As a rule, this will only be awarded to games that are both buggy / ultrasparsely implemented, poorly written and with a special annoying something that really gets to me. About half all speedIFs are superior to this game, and even those that aren't don't have the nerve to enter the comp.
2:	Shitty, but not to an unusual degree. Generally, these games will be underimplented, ill-thought-out, poorly written and so on, but have failed to commit anything spectacularly egregious.
...enh
3:	Barely competent. Deeply tedious, but probably not irritating enough to rouse my fury.
4:	The distinction between a 3 and a 4 is largely to do with the amount of work put in. A basically dull game will make it from a 3 to a 4 on things like size and stability, or a faint glimmer of promise here and there.
5:	There's a cut-off point here: nothing that I don't actively enjoy gets above a 5, regardless of its other merits. You'll usually have to demonstrate at least a spark of originality to get here, as well, whether it's in writing or plot or puzzles; things set in undeveloped genre-fiction environments will get 4s or below unless they've done distinctive things to the basic framework.
Enjoyed Somewhat
6:	At and above this stage, a game probably has a pretty interesting basic idea and has developed it in interesting, fun ways. Usually (in comp games at least), a failure to get higher than a 6 suggests that these things haven't been developed nearly enough. A game with a basically uninspired idea that had been heavily developed but reached the limits of the idea might also get this, but this rarely happens in the comp.
7:	A game will rarely make it to a 7 without capable-to-good writing, a good basic idea and some artful exploration of that idea, with evidence of strong design.
Very Good Indeed
8:	At an 8, I've got to be more than mildly enjoying myself; I have to be enthused.
9:	The distinction between 8 and 9 is tricky; much more so than that between 9 and 10. Most of it is to do with the power, scope and ambition of the piece. I didn't give out any 9s this comp, sad to say.
10:	Awe-inspiring. A game can manage this while having significant flaws, as long as the overall effect is so good that they seem like mean-spirited quibbles. In order to grant this rating, I have to fiercely enjoy playing the game, and it has to be powerfully distinctive and hit a note that I personally dig.

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