I'm taking a break from IFcomp reviews to get back to my first love. Relationships don't work this way in real life, of course.
I come to you with a plea. Support Amelia Brightman, also known as Violet.
Amelia Brightman is Sarah Brightman's sister. I've spoken at length elsewhere about how disappointed I am with the musical path Sarah's been on as of late. The term "fanbot" comes to mind, and indeed, I run the risk of attracting an influx of angry commenters using up the world's supply of exclamation points. It's happened before. Oh well. I thoroughly disagree with how Sarah and her producer Frank Peterson think her career should go. And now I get to say the same for Violet.
Who is she, anyway? She's sung backup for Sarah, and was the lead vocalist for Frank Peterson's project Gregorian. There's a really convoluted history about Peterson, who used to be involved with Enigma, but isn't anymore, apparently on bad terms. Gregorian's first album, Peterson has stated, was rushed and he's embarrassed of it, but he's mined it and reworked a lot of the songs for Sarah and Princessa. (It's also the only recorded appearance I've found of Susana Espelleta and Birgit Freud, which saddens me.) Her debut album, Ultra, has been finished for approximately umpteen years - OK, more like five, but still. Here is the saga of Ultra:
- It's announced on the Sarah Brightman boards and people get excited.
- Music previews get posted on the Nemo Studio site.
- Nada, for a long time.
- I read a magazine article about the Free Fiona people and get the wacky idea that I can rally supporters to Violet too. So I start posting on the Sarah Brightman forums asking how the album is coming.
- Nada.
- Frank Peterson holds a video chat and I manage to get him to answer my question. He says it'll be released independently.
- Nada. I resume posting.
- The mention of her disappears from the Nemo site. The previews then disappear (I saved them to disk, though.
I forget who found her Myspace, but she has one. An independent one: yet another bit of writing on the wall. On it, she posts several songs from her vanished album (Fly, Wasted Life, and The Fairest Of All Seasons - a cover.) I don't know if they're different versions of the Ultra songs, of course, since I've only heard small samples of Fly and Wasted Life.
Amelia also posts original songs: "Can You Hear Me," a pretty great dance song, and "Release Myself," which she claims is unfinished, but sounds finished to me: mournful pop with an equally good animation she made herself. Most of her time, however, is spent touring with Gregorian as their Ethereal Female Vocalist who also happens to have written or cowritten most of their original songs. Yes, they have original songs.
Recently, she posted this blog entry. I can't say I'm surprised. "The management" has phenomenally botched this debut. This debut, and Princessa's next album, and the Sinsual project with Marjan Shaki.
Going back to that feud I mentioned early, Michael Cretu also phenomenally botched Ruth-Ann Boyle's debut album with its iTunes non-release and his terrible lyrics. He might not be the _worst_ lyricist working now, but then again, he very well might. Yes, English is probably his second language, but pretentiousness knows no linguistic borders.
This makes me angry, as you can probably tell. It is hardly unprecedented for solo albums to succeed. Unfortunately, it's not unprecedented, either, for groups like this to completely disregard their (usually female) vocalists and toss them out, sink-or-swim.
Amelia's next entry, though, said to look at this as a new beginning. I do. Amelia Brightman's music is still good and she is a good person. Support her; she could use it.
And to top it off, her "Now Listening"? The Kick Inside. Thumbs up for amazing influences!
(By the way: Amelia, if you're reading this, is there any way that the songs from the old album can see the light of day? I know your blog post says the new debut will have all new songs, but I loved the old ones too.)
~*~*~
Miscellaneous notes:
- I still really love Veda Hille's _This Riot Life_. She does Christian hymns better than a lot of Christians.
- Wikipedia: "Her poem "None other Lamb" was set to music by American Idol songwriting winner Scott Krippayne on his 2008 album, "Simple Worship." - Scott Krippayne, leave Christina alone!
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
IFcomp08 reviews: The Lucubrator
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
The Lucubrator
by Rick Dague
Interesting title, and interesting concept for a game here. However, this was clearly rushed:
- The implementation was spotty at best. The author has included a walkthrough, which is good, because otherwise I never would have finished it. The game requires heavily on precisely timed actions, which aren't clued at all. I'm sure that to the author, everything made perfect sense, and there was no question in his mind about when to bite Dave, or kill Jeff. The problem is that this doesn't make it to the player, and when you try to perform actions "out of order," you either get standard library messages or custom messages that really don't help. Even the walkthrough isn't totally accurate at times.
The puzzles here, too, were mindread-y. Take the first one. If there was a clue that the PC's hands were free enough to wave, I missed it (and >WAVE is one of the more obscure standard Inform actions, anyway.)
Now I'll echo other reviewers. I've mentioned before how "Violence isn't the answer to this one" is, 90% of the time, not your ideal library message. Well, here's another great example. As pretty much everyone else said, this game is all about violence. If your game is all about violence - hell, even if it's just partly about it - take the five seconds to change this message to something apropos. David Fisher has two extensions that make this easy.
Implementation wasn't the only thing that made this seem rushed. The prose needed copy editing. There were several mechanical errors, missing commas, extra spaces - it was just messy. In a game that, at least in the walkthrough, is about half textdumps, this isn't good (well, it's never good, but this makes it worse.)
So, long story short: Good concept, poor execution. I've run into this several times this comp. I wonder if there will be future releases.
The Lucubrator
by Rick Dague
Interesting title, and interesting concept for a game here. However, this was clearly rushed:
- The implementation was spotty at best. The author has included a walkthrough, which is good, because otherwise I never would have finished it. The game requires heavily on precisely timed actions, which aren't clued at all. I'm sure that to the author, everything made perfect sense, and there was no question in his mind about when to bite Dave, or kill Jeff. The problem is that this doesn't make it to the player, and when you try to perform actions "out of order," you either get standard library messages or custom messages that really don't help. Even the walkthrough isn't totally accurate at times.
The puzzles here, too, were mindread-y. Take the first one. If there was a clue that the PC's hands were free enough to wave, I missed it (and >WAVE is one of the more obscure standard Inform actions, anyway.)
Now I'll echo other reviewers. I've mentioned before how "Violence isn't the answer to this one" is, 90% of the time, not your ideal library message. Well, here's another great example. As pretty much everyone else said, this game is all about violence. If your game is all about violence - hell, even if it's just partly about it - take the five seconds to change this message to something apropos. David Fisher has two extensions that make this easy.
Implementation wasn't the only thing that made this seem rushed. The prose needed copy editing. There were several mechanical errors, missing commas, extra spaces - it was just messy. In a game that, at least in the walkthrough, is about half textdumps, this isn't good (well, it's never good, but this makes it worse.)
So, long story short: Good concept, poor execution. I've run into this several times this comp. I wonder if there will be future releases.
Read more...
Friday, October 24, 2008
IFcomp08 reviews: Piracy 2.0
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Piracy 2.0
I almost gave up in the beginning. I was in a ship, locked in one room, with some underimplemented objects (the bunks, for instance, that I couldn't enter). I solved a puzzle or two then got stuck, and there was no hint file attached. I was ready to quit and crumple things. But then I noticed a lot of custom commands in the about-text. And a site with feelies. And I wondered if maybe there was more to this that I was missing. I then found about the walkthrough command.
Moral of the story: openings are important. But the game past this was a lot better. It's a pretty decent old school puzzle game. Feelies are a plus. Most of what I found overly fiddly turned out OK in the end. I'm sorry I don't have more detailed notes. I'm winding down, I can tell. At any rate, this is definitely in the top half.
A few notes: The random pirate attacks are trivial to avoid with >UNDO. I know this is standard for any system like that, and it's cheating, really. I just thought I'd mention it.
Piracy 2.0
I almost gave up in the beginning. I was in a ship, locked in one room, with some underimplemented objects (the bunks, for instance, that I couldn't enter). I solved a puzzle or two then got stuck, and there was no hint file attached. I was ready to quit and crumple things. But then I noticed a lot of custom commands in the about-text. And a site with feelies. And I wondered if maybe there was more to this that I was missing. I then found about the walkthrough command.
Moral of the story: openings are important. But the game past this was a lot better. It's a pretty decent old school puzzle game. Feelies are a plus. Most of what I found overly fiddly turned out OK in the end. I'm sorry I don't have more detailed notes. I'm winding down, I can tell. At any rate, this is definitely in the top half.
A few notes: The random pirate attacks are trivial to avoid with >UNDO. I know this is standard for any system like that, and it's cheating, really. I just thought I'd mention it.
Read more...
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Snack Time
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Snack Time
by Renee Choba
Full disclosure time, I suppose. I'm a cat person. I don't like dogs. Yes, I know this means I have no soul.
The concept's been done before, with Ralph in 1996, but that was over a decade ago, so I can give it a pass. This game's pretty much what it says it is: it's cute, it's got enough dog actions implemented, the point of view works. It's not extremely ambitious, but for what it is, it works.
This seems negative. It isn't. I did like this. I'm just probably not the ideal audience for it.
Snack Time
by Renee Choba
Full disclosure time, I suppose. I'm a cat person. I don't like dogs. Yes, I know this means I have no soul.
The concept's been done before, with Ralph in 1996, but that was over a decade ago, so I can give it a pass. This game's pretty much what it says it is: it's cute, it's got enough dog actions implemented, the point of view works. It's not extremely ambitious, but for what it is, it works.
This seems negative. It isn't. I did like this. I'm just probably not the ideal audience for it.
Read more...
Sunday, October 19, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Nightfall
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Nightfall
by Eric Eve
Wow.
It's about time I got to a big, ambitious game. The comp so far was severely lacking them.
Technically, this is excellent - the world is enormous and all of it works perfectly; there are all sorts of convenient things like the auto-examine, the GO TO/CONTINUE, the auto-turn-off of the torch. I don't know if these are custom to this game, or standard in the library, but it's impressive.
And there's so much story, so much location, so much characterization. This is a big game. It's going to take some time to digest. I played this a few days ago, in fact, and I'm still trying to digest it all. If anything, it may be too big - without the walkthrough I never would have gotten anywhere near as far as I did in two hours.
But anyway. Highly, highly impressive stuff. Maybe the best in the comp, though I'm not done playing yet.
Nightfall
by Eric Eve
Wow.
It's about time I got to a big, ambitious game. The comp so far was severely lacking them.
Technically, this is excellent - the world is enormous and all of it works perfectly; there are all sorts of convenient things like the auto-examine, the GO TO/CONTINUE, the auto-turn-off of the torch. I don't know if these are custom to this game, or standard in the library, but it's impressive.
And there's so much story, so much location, so much characterization. This is a big game. It's going to take some time to digest. I played this a few days ago, in fact, and I'm still trying to digest it all. If anything, it may be too big - without the walkthrough I never would have gotten anywhere near as far as I did in two hours.
But anyway. Highly, highly impressive stuff. Maybe the best in the comp, though I'm not done playing yet.
Read more...
Saturday, October 18, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Afflicted
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Afflicted
by Doug Egan
I'll just say right off the bat that this is Not My Kind Of Game; however, I'm going to give it one of the highest scores in the comp. Why?
Implementation depth. The premise - well, the first premise - of the game is excellent. You've got a great excuse to go poking around, and to examine everything, and you get rewarded by a lot of gruesome text. (A minor quibble, though: this command does reveal a lot of objects where articles were left off.) Actions work that go beyond simple examination, too. Smell works, usually, as does eating things, and all sorts of things that would be really gross to do in a place like Nikolai's Bar and Grill.
Sooner or later, in your poking around, you're going to find a severed body part, which brings you to the second premise. This was where it started being Not My Kind Of Game. I'm not a fan of certain horror tropes, so the whole Sofia subplot was not to my taste. It was done well, though, and I like the idea of multiple endings.
The endgame, however, is somewhat less strong. You can go into the same room as Nikolai countless times and all he does is glare at you. With all the violence and body-part-desevering and vampire mayhem that's going on, this seems beyond unrealistic, and lessens the danger level significantly. True, there are other endings, but this is on the way to the "optimal" one, so it should be addressed.
Regardless, it was well-implemented, decently written, and a sight better than a lot of other works this year.
(Last lousy point: I still think there should be plenty that is noteworthy about a mutilated corpse.)
Afflicted
by Doug Egan
I'll just say right off the bat that this is Not My Kind Of Game; however, I'm going to give it one of the highest scores in the comp. Why?
Implementation depth. The premise - well, the first premise - of the game is excellent. You've got a great excuse to go poking around, and to examine everything, and you get rewarded by a lot of gruesome text. (A minor quibble, though: this command does reveal a lot of objects where articles were left off.) Actions work that go beyond simple examination, too. Smell works, usually, as does eating things, and all sorts of things that would be really gross to do in a place like Nikolai's Bar and Grill.
Sooner or later, in your poking around, you're going to find a severed body part, which brings you to the second premise. This was where it started being Not My Kind Of Game. I'm not a fan of certain horror tropes, so the whole Sofia subplot was not to my taste. It was done well, though, and I like the idea of multiple endings.
The endgame, however, is somewhat less strong. You can go into the same room as Nikolai countless times and all he does is glare at you. With all the violence and body-part-desevering and vampire mayhem that's going on, this seems beyond unrealistic, and lessens the danger level significantly. True, there are other endings, but this is on the way to the "optimal" one, so it should be addressed.
Regardless, it was well-implemented, decently written, and a sight better than a lot of other works this year.
(Last lousy point: I still think there should be plenty that is noteworthy about a mutilated corpse.)
Read more...
Thursday, October 16, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: A Martian Odyssey
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A Martian Odyssey
by Horatio
A good start, but ultimately disappointing.
When you're describing space, you really can't resort to simple one-line descriptions. I don't know what these places look like. I want a sense of wonder. I want to be able to picture them as if I'm really there. This was more like a diorama of space, with little captions: "Earth," "Mars," "Alien." I've dragged this out twice in this round of IFcomp reviews, which makes me the equivalent of the music reviewers I constantly gripe about for name-dropping Kate Bush everywhere, but... seriously, man, go play Photopia and notice its description.
The blurb for the text mentions that one of the "points" of this game was communication. Specifically, learning how to communicate with the aliens. The problem is that the game really doesn't accomplish this. I wasn't quite sure that I had figured things out at all. For a comparison, "The Edifice" by Lucian Smith has a fantastic - and much talked about - language puzzle. Granted, it took a hell of a lot of coding, but it was worth it.
Points for music - a lot more can be done with this in IF; it's uncharted territory - even if it sounded like generic space-atmospherica (ye gods, did I really type that?) at times.
I realize I've dragged out two comparisons here, none of which really are the same sort of work. I just think a lot more could have been done with this. The appeal of crash landing games is to explore and take in an unfamiliar, maybe beautiful, maybe terrifying place. This seemed like a sketch of one.
And if your game involves sleeping, "sleep" really, really should work. Really.
A Martian Odyssey
by Horatio
A good start, but ultimately disappointing.
When you're describing space, you really can't resort to simple one-line descriptions. I don't know what these places look like. I want a sense of wonder. I want to be able to picture them as if I'm really there. This was more like a diorama of space, with little captions: "Earth," "Mars," "Alien." I've dragged this out twice in this round of IFcomp reviews, which makes me the equivalent of the music reviewers I constantly gripe about for name-dropping Kate Bush everywhere, but... seriously, man, go play Photopia and notice its description.
The blurb for the text mentions that one of the "points" of this game was communication. Specifically, learning how to communicate with the aliens. The problem is that the game really doesn't accomplish this. I wasn't quite sure that I had figured things out at all. For a comparison, "The Edifice" by Lucian Smith has a fantastic - and much talked about - language puzzle. Granted, it took a hell of a lot of coding, but it was worth it.
Points for music - a lot more can be done with this in IF; it's uncharted territory - even if it sounded like generic space-atmospherica (ye gods, did I really type that?) at times.
I realize I've dragged out two comparisons here, none of which really are the same sort of work. I just think a lot more could have been done with this. The appeal of crash landing games is to explore and take in an unfamiliar, maybe beautiful, maybe terrifying place. This seemed like a sketch of one.
And if your game involves sleeping, "sleep" really, really should work. Really.
Read more...
IFcomp 08 reviews: Red Moon
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Red Moon
by Jonathan Hay
Surprise! It was all a dream. ZOMG!
The author was right - I DID hit myself when I figured out the ending. But not because of some sort of intuitive leap I should have made, because this is one of the oldest cliches in the books. It's even on IF Wiki.
Technically it was OK, no major bugs. The writing was serviceable, although it did lapse into cliche at times. That's a problem, though, when you're trying things and seeing the same text over and over again. It better be good writing if that's going to happen.
I'm not opposed to this "perform actions multiple times" mechanic. I'm experimenting with it myself. But this doesn't really pull it off well. For example, let's take the "opening the door" ending. The first time you open the door, you get a pat message. The second time, you get the same message with an extra punctuation mark. This isn't nearly enough. It's indistinguishable from a "You can't do that" message.
That's part of it. The other problem is that the progression is off, and so is the logic. I know it's a dream, but still. I could understand if performing actions twice revealed more and more information, or perspectives, or focus, etc. It doesn't work that way. Examining the walls repeatedly just seems like you're switching up the descriptions for color. Repeating some actions twice gives the same message. Sometimes, it gives you the same message three times. There's no indication that you need to keep going.
The other half of this is a knowledge puzzle. The hard thing about knowledge puzzles is trying to make the PC's knowledge correspond with the player's knowledge. Here, I figured out that I was some sort of animal, but couldn't do anything with it.
I was also irritated by the sister. I had originally written NPC here, but there isn't much to distinguish her from any other object. To lapse into I6 terms for a second, she doesn't have a life routine. In other words, she's scenery. Which isn't fine. She's a person. People are not scenery, even frightened people.
So: An okay coding exercise, but not enough for a comp entry. The author does ask for other games to learn from, which is good. I suggest the winners of previous IF competitions and XYZZY Awards. (In particular, Delusions by C. E. Forman has a section that's somewhat similar.)
Red Moon
by Jonathan Hay
Surprise! It was all a dream. ZOMG!
The author was right - I DID hit myself when I figured out the ending. But not because of some sort of intuitive leap I should have made, because this is one of the oldest cliches in the books. It's even on IF Wiki.
Technically it was OK, no major bugs. The writing was serviceable, although it did lapse into cliche at times. That's a problem, though, when you're trying things and seeing the same text over and over again. It better be good writing if that's going to happen.
I'm not opposed to this "perform actions multiple times" mechanic. I'm experimenting with it myself. But this doesn't really pull it off well. For example, let's take the "opening the door" ending. The first time you open the door, you get a pat message. The second time, you get the same message with an extra punctuation mark. This isn't nearly enough. It's indistinguishable from a "You can't do that" message.
That's part of it. The other problem is that the progression is off, and so is the logic. I know it's a dream, but still. I could understand if performing actions twice revealed more and more information, or perspectives, or focus, etc. It doesn't work that way. Examining the walls repeatedly just seems like you're switching up the descriptions for color. Repeating some actions twice gives the same message. Sometimes, it gives you the same message three times. There's no indication that you need to keep going.
The other half of this is a knowledge puzzle. The hard thing about knowledge puzzles is trying to make the PC's knowledge correspond with the player's knowledge. Here, I figured out that I was some sort of animal, but couldn't do anything with it.
I was also irritated by the sister. I had originally written NPC here, but there isn't much to distinguish her from any other object. To lapse into I6 terms for a second, she doesn't have a life routine. In other words, she's scenery. Which isn't fine. She's a person. People are not scenery, even frightened people.
So: An okay coding exercise, but not enough for a comp entry. The author does ask for other games to learn from, which is good. I suggest the winners of previous IF competitions and XYZZY Awards. (In particular, Delusions by C. E. Forman has a section that's somewhat similar.)
Read more...
Sunday, October 12, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Escape from the Underworld
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Escape from the Underworld
by Karl Beecher
An average game, averagely done.
The writing was average; there were a few clever bits, a few not-so-clever (I think everyone comes up with Name T. Occupation sometime in his/her life). I did run into a response or two in first person when the rest of the game is in second; also, a few grammatical errors. Some guess-the-verb issues ("remove hinges" should really work, as should "remove hinges with screwdriver"). The puzzles were mostly of an average difficulty; some easier, some harder. The ending wasn't all that satisfying, but I guess that's inherent in games that out-and-out say there will be sequels.
I wish I could come up with something more substantive to say about this. It's not terrible. Everything basically works how it's supposed to. It's just that, around this time in the comp, I want a game to absolutely stop me in my tracks. This one, when I get around to curving scores, doesn't look likely to break 5 or 6. Oh well.
Escape from the Underworld
by Karl Beecher
An average game, averagely done.
The writing was average; there were a few clever bits, a few not-so-clever (I think everyone comes up with Name T. Occupation sometime in his/her life). I did run into a response or two in first person when the rest of the game is in second; also, a few grammatical errors. Some guess-the-verb issues ("remove hinges" should really work, as should "remove hinges with screwdriver"). The puzzles were mostly of an average difficulty; some easier, some harder. The ending wasn't all that satisfying, but I guess that's inherent in games that out-and-out say there will be sequels.
I wish I could come up with something more substantive to say about this. It's not terrible. Everything basically works how it's supposed to. It's just that, around this time in the comp, I want a game to absolutely stop me in my tracks. This one, when I get around to curving scores, doesn't look likely to break 5 or 6. Oh well.
Read more...
IFcomp 08 reviews: Ananachronist
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Ananachronist
by Joseph Strom
I feel cheated.
The game starts out promisingly. It's a fiddly puzzle game, and I'm not a puzzle fiddler solver, but I had just finished whining on ifMUD about how there are way too many Message Games in this comp and I'd be overjoyed if I could just hit a game that wasn't trying to bludgeon me over the head with portentous THEME.
So we have a promising opening, a promising puzzle premise (alliteration not intended.) The writing, aside from some spelling/grammatical errors, was strong. This might seem backwards, but at this point in the comp I'm preferring good writing that needs proofreading to mediocre writing that is grammatically flawless.
I had to resort to hints, but I caught on to what was happening fairly quickly. And then I get to stuff like:
#Reactor
You can see reactor airlock and a reactor chamber (empty) here.
Granary
You can see a broken container (empty) here.
EEEAGH.
For this second one, examining the container reveals that it is, in fact, a broken barrel of oats. All the synonyms work OK, and the oats are implemented, but still. You know what it reminds me of? A New Day, from 1997; the room with the ducks that aren't actually implemented. Only, of course, there was a reason for that.
It turns out that this was a turning point, of sorts; it was where I lost the author's wavelength. I turned to the walkthrough, except that I got lost somewhere and the final command didn't work.
It's a shame, really. The writing was excellent. The premise seemed solid. There were a few annoying technical issues (the process of putting X on pedestal then entering the portal got very tedious after the third time; disambiguation issues, a few implementation gaps), but nothing unfixable. If the beginning of this had been entered in IntroComp, I'd love it. As it stands, it seems rushed.
Ananachronist
by Joseph Strom
I feel cheated.
The game starts out promisingly. It's a fiddly puzzle game, and I'm not a puzzle fiddler solver, but I had just finished whining on ifMUD about how there are way too many Message Games in this comp and I'd be overjoyed if I could just hit a game that wasn't trying to bludgeon me over the head with portentous THEME.
So we have a promising opening, a promising puzzle premise (alliteration not intended.) The writing, aside from some spelling/grammatical errors, was strong. This might seem backwards, but at this point in the comp I'm preferring good writing that needs proofreading to mediocre writing that is grammatically flawless.
I had to resort to hints, but I caught on to what was happening fairly quickly. And then I get to stuff like:
#Reactor
You can see reactor airlock and a reactor chamber (empty) here.
Granary
You can see a broken container (empty) here.
EEEAGH.
For this second one, examining the container reveals that it is, in fact, a broken barrel of oats. All the synonyms work OK, and the oats are implemented, but still. You know what it reminds me of? A New Day, from 1997; the room with the ducks that aren't actually implemented. Only, of course, there was a reason for that.
It turns out that this was a turning point, of sorts; it was where I lost the author's wavelength. I turned to the walkthrough, except that I got lost somewhere and the final command didn't work.
It's a shame, really. The writing was excellent. The premise seemed solid. There were a few annoying technical issues (the process of putting X on pedestal then entering the portal got very tedious after the third time; disambiguation issues, a few implementation gaps), but nothing unfixable. If the beginning of this had been entered in IntroComp, I'd love it. As it stands, it seems rushed.
Read more...
IFcomp 08 reviews: Channel Surfing
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Channel Surfing
by Mike Vollmer
I'll get it out of the way: this did not work for me. First, the technical stuff.
I maintain that I could not have guessed "CHANGE CHANNEL TO __" without the hints. Probably because there was no indication that the remote control had any buttons, or any features to use. If a remote control has no controls, is it still a remote control? The first game show irritated me since I couldn't guess the proper response. No real game show would do this. I'd get kicked off the show after, say, two incorrect guesses.
There were a few other technical issues (after Steve ran off to the bathroom, he was still in the room description; when Julian attacks you there is no indication that he's doing anything but lollygagging around; this calls for a change in initial description at least.) If you give me a bunch of men and don't let me use 'man' to refer to them, I get very pissy.
Now then. Message. Setting it up in these simplistic terms is flawed. There is no mass conspiracy; there are no government agents hijacking people and hooking them up to machines to reprogram their brain. It doesn't work like that. Reducing the issues here to a black-and-white Grand Conspiracy Narrative is both a false argument and completely unhelpful. Look. I'm not going to argue with you about the evils of television, commercial influence on people's thinking, or the hypocrisy of politicians. But you have to realize just how often these themes have been hashed over. You have to present them in an original way for the story to work. Right now, it's almost as black-and-white as the television/politics/advertising that's being satired.
And then, at the end, you quote T. S. Eliot. But "The Hollow Men" worked a lot better than this, because it doesn't beat you over the head (or Tase you, I guess) with the stick (Taser?) of obviousness. If Eliot had just written a few strophes of "This world really sucks, and there's no hope left," it wouldn't have nearly as much resonance. The ending, too, was a good try at imagery but, still, the whole grotesque-bodies-hooked-up-to-machines trope has been done before, many many times - the most recent example I have is WALL*E.
How, then, do you accomplish resonance? It's not a clear-cut thing, of course, but some tips (this, by the way, goes for all the other authors of Message Games in the comp. I'll exempt Buried in Shoes from this, because I'm thinking it worked.)
1) Put away the Message Stick. If your story works, we'll grasp the theme without your bludgeoning us with it. Be subtle. Instead of textdumps about your Point, present a world, with characters, possibly a world and characters gone terribly wrong.
2) Read everything, and play everything. If you're writing, say, a dystopia like this, familiarize yourself with as many other works in the same genre as possible - successful, so you can see what works; unsuccessful, so you can see what doesn't; all of them, so you can see what's been done before. Side effect: You gain a wider grounding in literature, and that's always good. Since this is IF, play as much as you can. Start with the most influential games. Granted, it's hard to tell what's influential when games are recent, but IF has been around for decades. There have been influential games. Play them.
3) Implement your game. Really implement it. The best idea in the world can still suck if you don't implement it. Don't rely on your beta testers. Be one yourself. Try as hard as you can to break your game, and when you succeed (not if, when), fix it. This doesn't mean give up beta testing, of course, but help your testers out a bit.
Channel Surfing
by Mike Vollmer
I'll get it out of the way: this did not work for me. First, the technical stuff.
I maintain that I could not have guessed "CHANGE CHANNEL TO __" without the hints. Probably because there was no indication that the remote control had any buttons, or any features to use. If a remote control has no controls, is it still a remote control? The first game show irritated me since I couldn't guess the proper response. No real game show would do this. I'd get kicked off the show after, say, two incorrect guesses.
There were a few other technical issues (after Steve ran off to the bathroom, he was still in the room description; when Julian attacks you there is no indication that he's doing anything but lollygagging around; this calls for a change in initial description at least.) If you give me a bunch of men and don't let me use 'man' to refer to them, I get very pissy.
Now then. Message. Setting it up in these simplistic terms is flawed. There is no mass conspiracy; there are no government agents hijacking people and hooking them up to machines to reprogram their brain. It doesn't work like that. Reducing the issues here to a black-and-white Grand Conspiracy Narrative is both a false argument and completely unhelpful. Look. I'm not going to argue with you about the evils of television, commercial influence on people's thinking, or the hypocrisy of politicians. But you have to realize just how often these themes have been hashed over. You have to present them in an original way for the story to work. Right now, it's almost as black-and-white as the television/politics/advertising that's being satired.
And then, at the end, you quote T. S. Eliot. But "The Hollow Men" worked a lot better than this, because it doesn't beat you over the head (or Tase you, I guess) with the stick (Taser?) of obviousness. If Eliot had just written a few strophes of "This world really sucks, and there's no hope left," it wouldn't have nearly as much resonance. The ending, too, was a good try at imagery but, still, the whole grotesque-bodies-hooked-up-to-machines trope has been done before, many many times - the most recent example I have is WALL*E.
How, then, do you accomplish resonance? It's not a clear-cut thing, of course, but some tips (this, by the way, goes for all the other authors of Message Games in the comp. I'll exempt Buried in Shoes from this, because I'm thinking it worked.)
1) Put away the Message Stick. If your story works, we'll grasp the theme without your bludgeoning us with it. Be subtle. Instead of textdumps about your Point, present a world, with characters, possibly a world and characters gone terribly wrong.
2) Read everything, and play everything. If you're writing, say, a dystopia like this, familiarize yourself with as many other works in the same genre as possible - successful, so you can see what works; unsuccessful, so you can see what doesn't; all of them, so you can see what's been done before. Side effect: You gain a wider grounding in literature, and that's always good. Since this is IF, play as much as you can. Start with the most influential games. Granted, it's hard to tell what's influential when games are recent, but IF has been around for decades. There have been influential games. Play them.
3) Implement your game. Really implement it. The best idea in the world can still suck if you don't implement it. Don't rely on your beta testers. Be one yourself. Try as hard as you can to break your game, and when you succeed (not if, when), fix it. This doesn't mean give up beta testing, of course, but help your testers out a bit.
Read more...
Saturday, October 11, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Buried In Shoes
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Buried In Shoes
by Kazuki Mishima
I've sat here for five minutes trying to figure out how to word this review. You see, I genuinely can't decide if this worked or not.
It's about the Holocaust. That raises the stakes. If this works, it has to work. Not only that, but it has to work on a par with all the other literature, film, etc. which has been written about it.
In a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with this; it's excellent. Breaking it down like this seems wrong, but technically it's extremely well implemented. The prose is competent, even good. There were a couple of genuinely upsetting moments, like getting on the slab in the museum.
I guess what I'm ambivalent about is the length. It seemed far too short. All the scenes were fleshed out well, but I never really got a sense of characterization. Granted, this is much better than some of the other works this year (Grief, Freedom) at accomplishing characterization, but I still felt like more could have been done; the characters seemed rather static. Time played into this. Wouldn't the guard have thrown you out after some time? He had no qualms about yanking you off the slab. Wouldn't the houes have been invaved? Along another path, some of the items were a bit puzzly to find, mainly the photo (which I only found through the walkthrough.) In a puzzle game it wouldn't be an issue, but the game told me I wouldn't be looking for puzzles, so in my first run-through I blew right by them.
None of these problems were major, though. I'm leaning towards "this game worked." On its scale, at least. Ask me in a few days and I may change my opinion for better or worse.
Buried In Shoes
by Kazuki Mishima
I've sat here for five minutes trying to figure out how to word this review. You see, I genuinely can't decide if this worked or not.
It's about the Holocaust. That raises the stakes. If this works, it has to work. Not only that, but it has to work on a par with all the other literature, film, etc. which has been written about it.
In a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with this; it's excellent. Breaking it down like this seems wrong, but technically it's extremely well implemented. The prose is competent, even good. There were a couple of genuinely upsetting moments, like getting on the slab in the museum.
I guess what I'm ambivalent about is the length. It seemed far too short. All the scenes were fleshed out well, but I never really got a sense of characterization. Granted, this is much better than some of the other works this year (Grief, Freedom) at accomplishing characterization, but I still felt like more could have been done; the characters seemed rather static. Time played into this. Wouldn't the guard have thrown you out after some time? He had no qualms about yanking you off the slab. Wouldn't the houes have been invaved? Along another path, some of the items were a bit puzzly to find, mainly the photo (which I only found through the walkthrough.) In a puzzle game it wouldn't be an issue, but the game told me I wouldn't be looking for puzzles, so in my first run-through I blew right by them.
None of these problems were major, though. I'm leaning towards "this game worked." On its scale, at least. Ask me in a few days and I may change my opinion for better or worse.
Read more...
Friday, October 10, 2008
IFcomp reviews: Cry Wolf
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
First impression: Needs more beta testing. This is to be expected - it's the author's first game - but still. The implementation was OK, but patchy in spots. I ran into a couple "blank responses." The bottles are buggy, and I broke the game by messing with them. A lot of actions that should have been one-time happened a lot. (For example, the wolf consumed the first steak an awful lot of times.) I had major issues getting out of the first scene, even with the walkthrough at hand. I got stuck again in the third scene, and by then, time was up.
Minor gripe, and not just about this game: One thing I'm noticing a lot this comp is forgotten pluralnames. I instinctively type "x them" or "get them" and when this doesn't work for something plural I get pissy. It isn't that difficult to set.
Now for the story. As soon as I saw Marissa I knew what was going on. I'm not sure if that's what was supposed to happen, but it was. To be honest, the implementation issues detailed above distracted me from the story at hand. It wasn't bad, by any means, but wasn't great either.
That said, this is a decent start and with fleshing out - and more testing - could be quite good.
First impression: Needs more beta testing. This is to be expected - it's the author's first game - but still. The implementation was OK, but patchy in spots. I ran into a couple "blank responses." The bottles are buggy, and I broke the game by messing with them. A lot of actions that should have been one-time happened a lot. (For example, the wolf consumed the first steak an awful lot of times.) I had major issues getting out of the first scene, even with the walkthrough at hand. I got stuck again in the third scene, and by then, time was up.
Minor gripe, and not just about this game: One thing I'm noticing a lot this comp is forgotten pluralnames. I instinctively type "x them" or "get them" and when this doesn't work for something plural I get pissy. It isn't that difficult to set.
Now for the story. As soon as I saw Marissa I knew what was going on. I'm not sure if that's what was supposed to happen, but it was. To be honest, the implementation issues detailed above distracted me from the story at hand. It wasn't bad, by any means, but wasn't great either.
That said, this is a decent start and with fleshing out - and more testing - could be quite good.
Read more...
Thursday, October 9, 2008
IFcomp 08: reviews: Grief
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
I'd like to propose a corollary to The Player Will Get It Wrong: The Player Is An Asshole. For example, if you have an NPC, sooner or later the player is going to try to kill the NPC. The standard Inform parser response ("Violence isn't the answer to this one.") rarely works here, for two reasons: A) it implies there's a puzzle that might not exist, and B) the NPC might just be your adorable son. This should never, ever happen:
>x thomas
(Thomas)
He is five and a half years old and the most important thing in the world. It's funny. When you were younger, you couldn't imagine ever having children. Now you can't imagine living without him.
>kill him
Violence isn't the answer to this one.
This would be bad enough anywhere else, but in an earnest, heart-string-tugging, sentimental, earnest game, it's horrible.
As you probably figured out within the first few turns, Thomas eventually dies. The most straightforward way for Thomas to die, apparently, is in a car crash. Cue up the Photopia comparisons. But Photopia worked, and this doesn't. Here's why:
- Mediocre writing. Everything was as bland as could be. There was no emotional subtlety; you were either cartoonishly happy or cartoonishly devastated. The deaths poor Thomas could face were the most obvious ones imaginable. I'm sure you could figure most of them out without playing. On the technical side, there were numerous grammar and punctuation errors which suggested a lack of polish.
- Poor characterization. Photopia worked because Alley is a thoroughly developed character. No, that's wrong. "Character" is the wrong word. Alley is a thoroughly amazing person. There's no character anymore. She's real. Thomas, on the other hand, is a cipher. We don't even know what he looks like. All we know is that his mom/dad thinks he's wonderful. Most parents think the same about their kids. There's more individuality in stock photos. So when he dies, there isn't any impact, because human nature means people can't care about ciphers. It's like reading an obituary of a stranger. The most you'll get is "Oh, that's sad."
- A few incongruous responses. To take one example, >x sandbox doesn't fit with the tone of the game (although it'd a great response somewhere else.) This also extends to IF in-jokeyness. This is really not the place for stuff like "You help him get dressed and make sure that he is as good looking as ever!" or, especially, ***You have died inside***, which just... doesn't work.
The walkthrough got on my nerves, too. How would you like your son to go today? It's like a dinner menu. Surely a game which claims to plumb emotional depths can have something with a little more finesse.
It's not that this game is totally unsalvageable; it's that this game failed. Why did it fail? Because it attempts to take an event, such as grief, and construct a Sweeping, Generic Embodiment of it. The problem is that sweeping, generic embodiments simply don't work as well. Almost any writing-advice book or article or advisor will tell you to be specific, to use specific details, etc. If I'm presented with a sketchy abstraction, it's very difficult to care. If I'm presented with a person, I can care.
I'd like to propose a corollary to The Player Will Get It Wrong: The Player Is An Asshole. For example, if you have an NPC, sooner or later the player is going to try to kill the NPC. The standard Inform parser response ("Violence isn't the answer to this one.") rarely works here, for two reasons: A) it implies there's a puzzle that might not exist, and B) the NPC might just be your adorable son. This should never, ever happen:
>x thomas
(Thomas)
He is five and a half years old and the most important thing in the world. It's funny. When you were younger, you couldn't imagine ever having children. Now you can't imagine living without him.
>kill him
Violence isn't the answer to this one.
This would be bad enough anywhere else, but in an earnest, heart-string-tugging, sentimental, earnest game, it's horrible.
As you probably figured out within the first few turns, Thomas eventually dies. The most straightforward way for Thomas to die, apparently, is in a car crash. Cue up the Photopia comparisons. But Photopia worked, and this doesn't. Here's why:
- Mediocre writing. Everything was as bland as could be. There was no emotional subtlety; you were either cartoonishly happy or cartoonishly devastated. The deaths poor Thomas could face were the most obvious ones imaginable. I'm sure you could figure most of them out without playing. On the technical side, there were numerous grammar and punctuation errors which suggested a lack of polish.
- Poor characterization. Photopia worked because Alley is a thoroughly developed character. No, that's wrong. "Character" is the wrong word. Alley is a thoroughly amazing person. There's no character anymore. She's real. Thomas, on the other hand, is a cipher. We don't even know what he looks like. All we know is that his mom/dad thinks he's wonderful. Most parents think the same about their kids. There's more individuality in stock photos. So when he dies, there isn't any impact, because human nature means people can't care about ciphers. It's like reading an obituary of a stranger. The most you'll get is "Oh, that's sad."
- A few incongruous responses. To take one example, >x sandbox doesn't fit with the tone of the game (although it'd a great response somewhere else.) This also extends to IF in-jokeyness. This is really not the place for stuff like "You help him get dressed and make sure that he is as good looking as ever!" or, especially, ***You have died inside***, which just... doesn't work.
The walkthrough got on my nerves, too. How would you like your son to go today? It's like a dinner menu. Surely a game which claims to plumb emotional depths can have something with a little more finesse.
It's not that this game is totally unsalvageable; it's that this game failed. Why did it fail? Because it attempts to take an event, such as grief, and construct a Sweeping, Generic Embodiment of it. The problem is that sweeping, generic embodiments simply don't work as well. Almost any writing-advice book or article or advisor will tell you to be specific, to use specific details, etc. If I'm presented with a sketchy abstraction, it's very difficult to care. If I'm presented with a person, I can care.
Read more...
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Berrost's Challenge
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Berrost's Challenge
by Mark Hatfield
OK, so upon reading the intro and >about, I have several bodes-not-well items: wall of text intro, five items hidden in the village, inventory limits and - ye gods - "sleep and hunger daemons." You're bloody right I can't abide them; this is 2008.
Oh, how nice, you reduced my Wit score by 1. I can play this game too! See, I just reduced your game score by 1!
Seriously. There's innovation, and there's gimmickry. Hint: Displaying my bulk and weight as fractions in my character description is not innovation. If you must do this, at least do it behind the scenes.
So that got me off to a nice grumpy start. Apparently my curmudgeondom set my Concentration, whatever that is, to 100%. All the better to notice the multiple grammatical errors, portable objects in room descriptions, daemon message overload, etc.
Oh. I died by jumping into the well. It took me THREE press-any-keys for you to tell me this.
Suspecting I wasn't giving this game a fair enough chance, I decided to play it in earnest, gritting my teeth through the errors and genericness and badness. I immediately realized it was going to take me way longer than two hours to do this. So maybe there's a spectacle of an ending that makes up for all of the rest. What I saw was merely generic quest stuff. Which might fly ten years ago, but then again, probably not.
Berrost's Challenge
by Mark Hatfield
OK, so upon reading the intro and >about, I have several bodes-not-well items: wall of text intro, five items hidden in the village, inventory limits and - ye gods - "sleep and hunger daemons." You're bloody right I can't abide them; this is 2008.
Oh, how nice, you reduced my Wit score by 1. I can play this game too! See, I just reduced your game score by 1!
Seriously. There's innovation, and there's gimmickry. Hint: Displaying my bulk and weight as fractions in my character description is not innovation. If you must do this, at least do it behind the scenes.
So that got me off to a nice grumpy start. Apparently my curmudgeondom set my Concentration, whatever that is, to 100%. All the better to notice the multiple grammatical errors, portable objects in room descriptions, daemon message overload, etc.
Oh. I died by jumping into the well. It took me THREE press-any-keys for you to tell me this.
Suspecting I wasn't giving this game a fair enough chance, I decided to play it in earnest, gritting my teeth through the errors and genericness and badness. I immediately realized it was going to take me way longer than two hours to do this. So maybe there's a spectacle of an ending that makes up for all of the rest. What I saw was merely generic quest stuff. Which might fly ten years ago, but then again, probably not.
Read more...
IFcomp08 reviews: Everybody Dies
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Everybody Dies
by Jim Munroe
I knew this was going to be good from the beginning. There's an actual voice here, the author got someone to do illustrations - people probably aren't going to lavish time on a piece of crap -
And overall, I quite liked this. The beginning, I'll admit it, turned me off a bit - I don't mind unsympathetic protagonists in theory, but this particular type of mookish jackass tends to get glorified - but once I activated my "Graham is not perfect and isn't portrayed as such" mindset, everything was A-OK. All the characters have distinct voices - sure, they're mostly variations on the cynical retail worker, but then, so are most cynical retail workers. They were distinctive enough, at any rate, for me to tell them apart when they worked in tandem (and for me to tell their object descriptions apart. I'm a sucker for stuff like this.)
There were a *few* implementation bothers/guess-the-verbs (a lot of them had to do with either Ranni trying to giving Patrick orders, or Lisa trying to dispatch the mom and kid; I wanted to examine some things that I couldn't, like Patrick's special brand of shitsplosion), but this was otherwise thorough. The branching worked especially well. When you can pull a knife on someone, and later get called out for doing so (to take one example), you know the game's working well. There are probably other branches that I missed, and I enjoyed what poking around I did.
"Everybody Dies" didn't totally blow me away, but was otherwise excellent, and one of the best entries so far.
Everybody Dies
by Jim Munroe
I knew this was going to be good from the beginning. There's an actual voice here, the author got someone to do illustrations - people probably aren't going to lavish time on a piece of crap -
And overall, I quite liked this. The beginning, I'll admit it, turned me off a bit - I don't mind unsympathetic protagonists in theory, but this particular type of mookish jackass tends to get glorified - but once I activated my "Graham is not perfect and isn't portrayed as such" mindset, everything was A-OK. All the characters have distinct voices - sure, they're mostly variations on the cynical retail worker, but then, so are most cynical retail workers. They were distinctive enough, at any rate, for me to tell them apart when they worked in tandem (and for me to tell their object descriptions apart. I'm a sucker for stuff like this.)
There were a *few* implementation bothers/guess-the-verbs (a lot of them had to do with either Ranni trying to giving Patrick orders, or Lisa trying to dispatch the mom and kid; I wanted to examine some things that I couldn't, like Patrick's special brand of shitsplosion), but this was otherwise thorough. The branching worked especially well. When you can pull a knife on someone, and later get called out for doing so (to take one example), you know the game's working well. There are probably other branches that I missed, and I enjoyed what poking around I did.
"Everybody Dies" didn't totally blow me away, but was otherwise excellent, and one of the best entries so far.
Read more...
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Magic
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Magic
by Geoff Fortytwo
Well, this was a relief. I was a bit iffy going into this game - magic being one of the tropiest of tropes that ever troped - but "magic," used here, is less "spells and D&D" and more "stage magician being harangued by those awful kids."
It also provided me with my first genuine laughs of the comp! (Well, technically second, if you count beta.) First when Rupert the Rabbit made his grand appearance, next when I found the list of "instructions."
I had a few quibbles, though. The room descriptions could have been fleshed out more. Saying that a place looks a lot different doesn't mean much when I don't know what it looked like in the first place. I wanted to be able to listen and smell a lot more than I could. I insist I made the game unwinnable by closing the lid to the magic trunk when I didn't have light. The META scroll text seemed a bit too...meta (yeah, it's probably part of the joke, but still.) Some people are probably going to have issues with the punny nature of this puzzle, but it worked fine for me, at least in the beginning. As the game went on, however, I drifted further and further away from that wavelength and turned to the walkthrough. This may be more my fault (I suck at puzzles) than that of the game, but it's worth noting.
There were a few minor technical issues and bits of awkwardness but in general I had to go looking for them. Everything else worked pretty well for me, and it was refreshing to play a game that had obvious time put into it.
P.S. It's true; rabbits *are* evil, and I have the wounds of this summer to prove it.
Magic
by Geoff Fortytwo
Well, this was a relief. I was a bit iffy going into this game - magic being one of the tropiest of tropes that ever troped - but "magic," used here, is less "spells and D&D" and more "stage magician being harangued by those awful kids."
It also provided me with my first genuine laughs of the comp! (Well, technically second, if you count beta.) First when Rupert the Rabbit made his grand appearance, next when I found the list of "instructions."
I had a few quibbles, though. The room descriptions could have been fleshed out more. Saying that a place looks a lot different doesn't mean much when I don't know what it looked like in the first place. I wanted to be able to listen and smell a lot more than I could. I insist I made the game unwinnable by closing the lid to the magic trunk when I didn't have light. The META scroll text seemed a bit too...meta (yeah, it's probably part of the joke, but still.) Some people are probably going to have issues with the punny nature of this puzzle, but it worked fine for me, at least in the beginning. As the game went on, however, I drifted further and further away from that wavelength and turned to the walkthrough. This may be more my fault (I suck at puzzles) than that of the game, but it's worth noting.
There were a few minor technical issues and bits of awkwardness but in general I had to go looking for them. Everything else worked pretty well for me, and it was refreshing to play a game that had obvious time put into it.
P.S. It's true; rabbits *are* evil, and I have the wounds of this summer to prove it.
Read more...
IFcomp 08 reviews: The Lighthouse
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
The Lighthouse
by Eric Hickman and Nathan Chung
No, no, THIS is the absolute worst IF game in history. This has to be a deliberate joke. I refuse to believe someone - wait, no, TWO people - submitted this to the competition thinking that it had a chance of winning. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but come on.
I suspect this review is taking up more space than the source code, but I really advise the authors to read First-Timer Foibles. Play scavenger hunt.
The Lighthouse
by Eric Hickman and Nathan Chung
No, no, THIS is the absolute worst IF game in history. This has to be a deliberate joke. I refuse to believe someone - wait, no, TWO people - submitted this to the competition thinking that it had a chance of winning. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but come on.
I suspect this review is taking up more space than the source code, but I really advise the authors to read First-Timer Foibles. Play scavenger hunt.
Read more...
Monday, October 6, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: The Absolute Worst IF Game In History
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
The Absolute Worst IF Game In History
by Dean Menezes
Annoyotron came out in 1999. You're almost a decade late. That is all.
The Absolute Worst IF Game In History
by Dean Menezes
Annoyotron came out in 1999. You're almost a decade late. That is all.
Read more...
IFcomp 08 reviews: Recess At Last
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Recess At Last
by Gerald Aungst
This game felt rushed. Everything worked, technically, but only on a surface level; it didn't take much poking and prodding to reveal cracks: items left undescribed or unimplemented, parser messages that don't make sense (most of the stuff with >read for instance) grammatical errors, guess-the-verb problems, etc. The text was misleading at times; some actions, like you giving the teacher the envelope, either didn't happen or were reported as happening twice. An entire location (the West Playground) doesn't seem to have a room description at all.
The details of the games were pretty much spot on, but - and perhaps this is just a reflection of my tastes - I would have liked to see a bit more satire. If there's anything worth satirizing, public elementary school is it: the heaps of busy-work assigned, the hoops kids jump through to evade even that, the complicitness of everyone involved because of stress or overwork or just not caring. The game's treatment seemed like straight description which, while functioning at the most literal sense, isn't all that evocative.
The tone was off, too. It seemed less "fourth grade boy" than "adult writing as an overly cheerful, sanitized fourth grade boy." For example: The word search. The first thing fourth-grade boys do, when confronted with a word search, isn't take it at face value: "This is a word search with science words." They scan it for dirty words that got past the computer. A lot of them are good for an "ASS" or two. (While we're on the subject of dirty words, surely a game about a fourth grade boy would have a response that isn't "Real adventurers do not use such language."!) The same with Mrs. McClintock's description - fourth grade boys would never use something like "plain" as a pejorative.
There's potential here; it just needs to be fleshed out more, and maybe with a more, for lack of a better term, weaponized approach.
Recess At Last
by Gerald Aungst
This game felt rushed. Everything worked, technically, but only on a surface level; it didn't take much poking and prodding to reveal cracks: items left undescribed or unimplemented, parser messages that don't make sense (most of the stuff with >read for instance) grammatical errors, guess-the-verb problems, etc. The text was misleading at times; some actions, like you giving the teacher the envelope, either didn't happen or were reported as happening twice. An entire location (the West Playground) doesn't seem to have a room description at all.
The details of the games were pretty much spot on, but - and perhaps this is just a reflection of my tastes - I would have liked to see a bit more satire. If there's anything worth satirizing, public elementary school is it: the heaps of busy-work assigned, the hoops kids jump through to evade even that, the complicitness of everyone involved because of stress or overwork or just not caring. The game's treatment seemed like straight description which, while functioning at the most literal sense, isn't all that evocative.
The tone was off, too. It seemed less "fourth grade boy" than "adult writing as an overly cheerful, sanitized fourth grade boy." For example: The word search. The first thing fourth-grade boys do, when confronted with a word search, isn't take it at face value: "This is a word search with science words." They scan it for dirty words that got past the computer. A lot of them are good for an "ASS" or two. (While we're on the subject of dirty words, surely a game about a fourth grade boy would have a response that isn't "Real adventurers do not use such language."!) The same with Mrs. McClintock's description - fourth grade boys would never use something like "plain" as a pejorative.
There's potential here; it just needs to be fleshed out more, and maybe with a more, for lack of a better term, weaponized approach.
Read more...
Sunday, October 5, 2008
IFcomp 08 reviews: Opening Night
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Opening Night
by David Batterham
The game starts promisingly enough. I like theatre and historical games, both of which are under-represented in IF.
More could have been done. When I think of Broadway, I think sumptuous - rich colors, dazzling stagecraft, everything so much bigger than in real life. And this is from someone who's seen several plays. Someone like the PC would have even more of a sense of wonder. The prose, while competent and mostly error-free, didn't quite capture this for me. A lot of it, I think, was quantity; there were plenty of short responses, concise where I was hoping for lavish. The implementation was similar - while nothing stood out as glaringly bad, there was a lot more that could have been done, especially with listen/touch/etc. Some objects didn't have descriptions. At times, it felt a bit rushed.
Now for the ending, introducing war into the scene. Part of it worked for me - encountering a giant hole in the theatre all of a sudden is effectively jarring - but part of it was strangely detached. Mostly the exposition. More, for instance, could have been done with Miranda Lily's first performance. Since the PC is already waiting in the seat, there could have been less exposition and more showing the player what, exactly, is going on onstage. _So Far_, for instance, did this well. Here, there's only abstractions, and when the game tells me I need to catch my breath, I'm not sure why. The second performance gets a lot more of this right, for what it's worth.
The above gives the impression that I didn't enjoy this. I did. It coheres, it's solid. I think what's missing is scope. As it stands right now, it's a bit small. We're dealing with love and war and death; these themes deserve maximalism that just isn't here. I know there's a two-hour time limit, but I wasn't in danger of overshooting it. Think bigger, grander, wider, more theatrical, even cinematic. The game's by no means bad, though.
Opening Night
by David Batterham
The game starts promisingly enough. I like theatre and historical games, both of which are under-represented in IF.
More could have been done. When I think of Broadway, I think sumptuous - rich colors, dazzling stagecraft, everything so much bigger than in real life. And this is from someone who's seen several plays. Someone like the PC would have even more of a sense of wonder. The prose, while competent and mostly error-free, didn't quite capture this for me. A lot of it, I think, was quantity; there were plenty of short responses, concise where I was hoping for lavish. The implementation was similar - while nothing stood out as glaringly bad, there was a lot more that could have been done, especially with listen/touch/etc. Some objects didn't have descriptions. At times, it felt a bit rushed.
Now for the ending, introducing war into the scene. Part of it worked for me - encountering a giant hole in the theatre all of a sudden is effectively jarring - but part of it was strangely detached. Mostly the exposition. More, for instance, could have been done with Miranda Lily's first performance. Since the PC is already waiting in the seat, there could have been less exposition and more showing the player what, exactly, is going on onstage. _So Far_, for instance, did this well. Here, there's only abstractions, and when the game tells me I need to catch my breath, I'm not sure why. The second performance gets a lot more of this right, for what it's worth.
The above gives the impression that I didn't enjoy this. I did. It coheres, it's solid. I think what's missing is scope. As it stands right now, it's a bit small. We're dealing with love and war and death; these themes deserve maximalism that just isn't here. I know there's a two-hour time limit, but I wasn't in danger of overshooting it. Think bigger, grander, wider, more theatrical, even cinematic. The game's by no means bad, though.
Read more...
IFcomp 08 reviews: Freedom
This is a review of a game in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. This text is so spoilers do not show up in the RSS feed. That would be less than polite. The feed is set to truncated, not full. You should only be seeing this paragraph, not the review itself. By the way, there are SPOILERS in the review. I repeat, SPOILERS. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers. You have been warned.
Freedom
by Anonymous
This game is intended to simulate "the world that socially anxious people live in every day," and I feel like an asshole saying this, but it doesn't really work.
Look, I can empathize with social anxiety. I have many of the symptoms. But if you're going to do a realistic game like this, you should work on it so that all your messages make sense. Someone with severe social anxiety disorder is not going to respond, for example:
>x me
As good-looking as ever.
If you have a bed, you really should implement getting onto/into it, because if everything's going to hell, or if there's even a possibility of it, the first thing I want to do is crawl into bed and never come out. Sleeping should also work, for the same reason. Turning on the TV should work, although I don't do that. You should be able to read your books and watch your DVDs. You should, in short, be able to participate in all the distractions that people turn to instead of facing the real world. I know about this.
This first scene, as it turns out, is indicative of the rest of the game. Items left barely implemented, locations barely fleshed out. This would be bad enough in any other game, but if you're trying to present the world of social anxiety, you absolutely have to present that world as fully as you can. There can't be abandonitis. There just CAN'T. The world to people with social anxiety, at least as it plays out with me, appears full of people upon people, each one of whom is judging you at this very moment, each one of which absolutely matters.
And call me heartless, but I was left totally unmoved by the ending scene. You haven't presented me with an actual person, just a cipher, and I can't care about ciphers. Sorry. That isn't the only reason it's problematic, though. The scene manages to be both saccharine and cynical at the same time. Saccharine, because it's the same sentimentality that you get everywhere; cynicism, because it's presented as an IF puzzle. One reviewer called it the "winning action." I'm not saying IF can't be emotional, but in order for it to work there has to be some subtlety. This would be the sledgehammer approach.
The premise behind the game is decent, even admirable; however, in order for it to work, it needs implementation. Part of what makes IF effective is allowing the player to enter a richly crafted world. And the more work you put into that world, the more the player can take out of it. It's worth reworking.
Freedom
by Anonymous
This game is intended to simulate "the world that socially anxious people live in every day," and I feel like an asshole saying this, but it doesn't really work.
Look, I can empathize with social anxiety. I have many of the symptoms. But if you're going to do a realistic game like this, you should work on it so that all your messages make sense. Someone with severe social anxiety disorder is not going to respond, for example:
>x me
As good-looking as ever.
If you have a bed, you really should implement getting onto/into it, because if everything's going to hell, or if there's even a possibility of it, the first thing I want to do is crawl into bed and never come out. Sleeping should also work, for the same reason. Turning on the TV should work, although I don't do that. You should be able to read your books and watch your DVDs. You should, in short, be able to participate in all the distractions that people turn to instead of facing the real world. I know about this.
This first scene, as it turns out, is indicative of the rest of the game. Items left barely implemented, locations barely fleshed out. This would be bad enough in any other game, but if you're trying to present the world of social anxiety, you absolutely have to present that world as fully as you can. There can't be abandonitis. There just CAN'T. The world to people with social anxiety, at least as it plays out with me, appears full of people upon people, each one of whom is judging you at this very moment, each one of which absolutely matters.
And call me heartless, but I was left totally unmoved by the ending scene. You haven't presented me with an actual person, just a cipher, and I can't care about ciphers. Sorry. That isn't the only reason it's problematic, though. The scene manages to be both saccharine and cynical at the same time. Saccharine, because it's the same sentimentality that you get everywhere; cynicism, because it's presented as an IF puzzle. One reviewer called it the "winning action." I'm not saying IF can't be emotional, but in order for it to work there has to be some subtlety. This would be the sledgehammer approach.
The premise behind the game is decent, even admirable; however, in order for it to work, it needs implementation. Part of what makes IF effective is allowing the player to enter a richly crafted world. And the more work you put into that world, the more the player can take out of it. It's worth reworking.
Read more...
Friday, October 3, 2008
October 3, 2008: Google 2001
Check this out.
Google, circa 2001. Make of it what you will. I'm somewhat narcissistic so of course the first thing I did was google myself. I don't know what to make of the fact that I had a web presence in 2001. Not much of one, but for what it's worth, I discovered:
- That, circa 2001, I could not spell "gynarchy." (Local spelling bee. I was not producing incisive feminist analysis of anything in 2001.)
- That, circa 2001, I wrote a poem. And put it on the Internet with my full name. What was I thinking?! (Actually, upon further thought, I'm pretty sure it was for a class assignment, but still.)
Before now, it was lost to the mists of time. But it isn't anymore! I do believe it stands up with the works of the great doggerel artists of our time:
Puffy white balls of
white clouds are floating
across the sky
continually.
Fluffy cumulus clouds,
or flat stratus.
Cumulonimbus clouds
can start a storm,
Even airplanes can leave
a trail of clouds
adding to the cloudy
jumble in the sky.
.....Yes. Make of that what you will.
Google, circa 2001. Make of it what you will. I'm somewhat narcissistic so of course the first thing I did was google myself. I don't know what to make of the fact that I had a web presence in 2001. Not much of one, but for what it's worth, I discovered:
- That, circa 2001, I could not spell "gynarchy." (Local spelling bee. I was not producing incisive feminist analysis of anything in 2001.)
- That, circa 2001, I wrote a poem. And put it on the Internet with my full name. What was I thinking?! (Actually, upon further thought, I'm pretty sure it was for a class assignment, but still.)
Before now, it was lost to the mists of time. But it isn't anymore! I do believe it stands up with the works of the great doggerel artists of our time:
Puffy white balls of
white clouds are floating
across the sky
continually.
Fluffy cumulus clouds,
or flat stratus.
Cumulonimbus clouds
can start a storm,
Even airplanes can leave
a trail of clouds
adding to the cloudy
jumble in the sky.
.....Yes. Make of that what you will.
Read more...
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
An open letter to software developers
So I'm looking, again, for a way to organize my music collection. My needs and the software out there do not mesh. Here's something I have yet to find:
A wiki-like personal information management system. "Wiki-like," not a wiki, because:
- Single-user. I don't need anyone else to see it. I don't *want* anyone else to see it.
- Not hosted on a web server. There's absolutely no need to put this online.
But "wiki-like," like a wiki, because:
- The basic structure works really well. I want to go to a page about Kristin Hersh, and then click on Learn To Sing Like A Star, and then click on In Shock, and then click back to Kristin Hersh, and have it be seamless. You could do that in HTML, but that has a plethora of seams.
- Ideally the software would at least *look* self-contained. I don't really care how messy things are on the back end, as long as I can open it up and be presented with a nice, friendly, neat exterior, rather than having to dig through 1000 files looking for the one that's the home page, then sort through 1000 more. Again, if this happens behind the scenes, fine.
Here are the features which are absolutely necessary:
- No bloody CamelCase. I don't ever want to have to type in KristinHersh because that looks idiotic, and if you make me type in LearnToSingLikeAStar I will probably never speak to you again.
- A category system as close to MediaWiki's as possible, if not identical. I know there's been talk about changing it, which I don't understand; it's perfect, at least in execution. It falls apart, perhaps, if you have 1000 people with 1000 ideas of how that category tree should be trimmed, but I'm one person.
- Text formatting. Bold and italic at the very least.
- Link capability.
If anyone knows of something like this I'll be overjoyed.
A wiki-like personal information management system. "Wiki-like," not a wiki, because:
- Single-user. I don't need anyone else to see it. I don't *want* anyone else to see it.
- Not hosted on a web server. There's absolutely no need to put this online.
But "wiki-like," like a wiki, because:
- The basic structure works really well. I want to go to a page about Kristin Hersh, and then click on Learn To Sing Like A Star, and then click on In Shock, and then click back to Kristin Hersh, and have it be seamless. You could do that in HTML, but that has a plethora of seams.
- Ideally the software would at least *look* self-contained. I don't really care how messy things are on the back end, as long as I can open it up and be presented with a nice, friendly, neat exterior, rather than having to dig through 1000 files looking for the one that's the home page, then sort through 1000 more. Again, if this happens behind the scenes, fine.
Here are the features which are absolutely necessary:
- No bloody CamelCase. I don't ever want to have to type in KristinHersh because that looks idiotic, and if you make me type in LearnToSingLikeAStar I will probably never speak to you again.
- A category system as close to MediaWiki's as possible, if not identical. I know there's been talk about changing it, which I don't understand; it's perfect, at least in execution. It falls apart, perhaps, if you have 1000 people with 1000 ideas of how that category tree should be trimmed, but I'm one person.
- Text formatting. Bold and italic at the very least.
- Link capability.
If anyone knows of something like this I'll be overjoyed.
Read more...
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