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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Zarf's Comments on the Competition
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Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 18:03:50 GMT
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It has come to my attention that a lot of people didn't see my comments go
by (at least four have complained.) I am reposting them. If you've seen
them before, I apologize for the waste of bandwidth. 

(Usenet seems a little shakier than usual. I know one person posted a 
three-part set of reviews, and part 2 got to my site 48 hours after parts 
1 and 3. Go figure.)

-----------------------------------------------

Foreword:

This is a very irregular set of comments.

First, it's very widely spread out. I played several games in the first
weekend, with an initial burst of enthusiasm immediately moderating to
sustained critical interest. Then I tapered off (having other projects on
my mind) and played one every few days for pretty much the whole rest of
the voting period. So these reviews (or whatever they are) do *not* all
come from a level playing field. Sorry. Nothing I can do about that.

Second, I tend to focus a lot more on what I don't like than on what I do
like. This probably comes across as harsh criticism. I don't want *anybody*
to get angry or discouraged. I'm trying to point out things that could be
fixed, that's all -- because I have an abiding interest in there being a
*lot of good IF out there*. Ok?

I am including the score I gave to each game. I include it at the bottom of
each review. This is mostly because I wrote each review immediately after
playing each game, but I didn't assign scores until I'd played and
commented on all the games. If the scores don't always seem to line up with
the comments, it's because the comments sometimes go off talking about what
could have been improved, or about some feature which I found interesting
to discuss. Whereas the scores are just about whether I enjoyed the work.

I generally tried to avoid spoilers, but there *are some*.

Off we go.

(Reviews in the order I played them, with my own entry last.)

---------------------- 
* Tapestry

Well, I'm stunned. This is the first game I chose to play, and I chose it
purely on the basis of the title -- oh, a symbolic game, I thought. I'm in
the mood for one of those.

Did I just get incredibly lucky or are they *all* like this? I know mine
isn't -- I wasn't even trying -- but I didn't pull this off when I *was*
trying (last year.)

Ok, I should get more specific. The name "Tim Hunter" is pulled from DC
Comics, of course, unless there's an older folk source I don't know about.
The story is original, though. The story is great. Stories. No, story. This
is one story shown in three orthogonal mirrors. That's use of the IF format
at its finest.

Flow of the action was tightly controlled without feeling confining to the
player. (Except in a couple of places -- I'm thinking of the points where
you try to do an action not consistent with your chosen Path. But that
*has* to be abrupt, because that's the conceit of the story -- that your
actions are constrained to this consistency.) Pay particular attention to
the confrontations with the Wraith, in the Clotho path. My first reaction
was, great, another guess-the-right-thing-to-type puzzle. But that *works*.
It evokes the feeling of panic and pressure, stumbling towards the right
thing to say -- and note that, really, you can't screw up. Random guessing
works, and the resulting storyline reads fine.

The dream scene. I love well-done dream scenes. Looking-glass logic. This
is it. Again, you could call it a guess-the-action puzzle; but in fact
you're guided cleanly through the scene, without much feeling of
manipulation. The author's careful use of detail is a big factor here.
Important things are mentioned; unimportant things are passed over, in a
way that makes it clear they are unimportant (but without leaving the
reader feeling like there was a gap.) This is true of the entire game, not
just the dream scene.

Had to resort to hints once (getting Sarah to go to sleep.)

Involvement: It took me three tries to move my hands to the keyboard to
type one particular command. You know which one. I don't think I can give
the author higher praise than that.

[Note: This was written after playing the first, erroneous upload of
Tapestry (serial number 960911). I haven't gone through the second upload
yet.]

Rating: 10

---------------------- 
* Stargazer

A reasonable depiction of the prologue of a story, though not hugely
distinctive. Rather badly marred by bugs. (In one place, I picked up what
was supposed to be a non-portable rock, causing a puzzle to go badly wrong.
In another, the eloquent farewell speech of Garthan was immediately
followed by a random "Hello" message from him.) The author is clearly
trying to pull in a background for your character, religion and friends and
so on, but I wasn't convinced. I felt like I was doing things for no
reason.

Rating: 2

---------------------- 
* Aayela

A very simple story piece, but wonderfully descriptive. A great incarnation
of the "It is dark" problem; the fact is, you can do quite a lot in pitch
darkness -- but you never forget that you're blind. This comes across just
fine in the game.

The leitmotif is music. (Uh, sorry. :-) The scene of acting within the
context of music works well. I know I'm not being very articulate here, but
what can I say? The author tried to do something small very well, and
succeeded. Maybe "set-piece" is the phrase I'm looking for, but I don't
mean it pejoratively.

(BTW: I suspect the author was smirking when he had your character start
out with a sword which gets lost, a brass lantern which burns out, and a
"rezrov" scroll which gets used up on the first move.)

Rating: 7

---------------------- 
* Punkirita Quest One: Liquid

Can't say I'm very impressed -- or rather, I *am* impressed by the writing,
but probably not the way the author intended. Ok, I'll be honest: "The Eye
of Argon" comes to mind. But leaving that aside...

The story is a short magical sequence, reasonably clever. (The gimmick was
stored in the walkthough file for some reason; it should have been visible
in an introduction or "about" command.) The timing is a little strange. You
have to use the right command at the right time; early doesn't work, or
give any indication that it will work later.

Rating: 1

---------------------- 
* Small World

Average implementation, gorgeous concept. And concept is more important in
my book. I was thoroughly delighted by everything I saw. Angels and devils
and tiny little people! Heh. And the scoring system. Heh heh.
Fire-retardant pants!

Unfortunately, it's easier to complain than to praise, so here's what
annoyed me. The very strict action constraints, mostly. I spent a lot of
time typing a command, getting a warning, trooping around to where I could
perform the action, and typing it again. But this didn't annoy me a *lot*
because it *was* such a small world. Every mistake is fatal, pretty much,
but that's why the warning system was there. (I can't imagine playing the
game without it. There are places where "examine" is a fatal mistake.)

Not all the actions made a whole lot of sense; I relied on the hints a lot.
But I was usually pretty satisfied once I read the hints. There were a
couple more verbs that should have worked, but this can be fixed in future
releases.

I liked the tight focus: one or two objects per room, and most standard
verbs explicitly disabled. It kept things in perspective, so to speak. You
are large; most of what's around you is too small to notice.

Rating: 9

---------------------- 
* Phlegm

Aggressively normal in implementation, but the author was obviously
interested in one thing: farce. He got it. CLONG! An approach to reality so
close as to leave me slightly cross-eyed. Especially the first time Leo
spoke. Some of the game is "merely" silly -- in the best sense of the word
-- and some is inspired lunacy. I knew what the elephant was for as soon as
I laid eyes on it.

A few design problems -- I had verb troubles with the haystack, for
example. Nothing unfixable.

Rating: 8

---------------------- 
* Wearing the Claw

Nice idea for a theme and story, but kind of hard to follow. I, uh, never
did find that carving that's supposed to explain what the coat does. That
probably didn't help.

The author seemed to be too eager to explain things. The whole illusion
motif got spelled out before I really had a chance to recognize it. Or
maybe I wouldn't have recognized it before I won, but that's more because
the game is so small than any deficit in the writing. The three tests went
by too quickly to really differentiate the magic in the game from its
surroundings. Did that make sense? Probably not; it's two in the morning.
Basically, I'm saying that the fortress would have felt better if it were
filled out with the same amount of care and detail that went into the
village and beach.

Another thing that left me somewhat adrift was the switches between
illusion and reality. There was no message that led me to believe that
anything had changed. Maybe the author intended that effect, the world
changing without any sensation of change -- it's certainly a disorienting
effect when it really happens to you. But it's hard to convey in IF. For
example, at one point I did something that affected my perceptions, without
realizing it. Then I typed a command which (of course) didn't work. So I
scrolled the text window up to see what I'd done wrong. If I'd typed "look"
I would have seen the difference, but I had no reason *not* to scroll up
instead. Some kind of message about changed perceptions would have fixed
all that. Even a simple "Something changes." (The hints are very explicit
on this subject, which leads me to believe that other people got confused
too.)

Oh, and it would have been cool if there had been another layer of
deception. Just my personal story-telling preference. Plots with only one
stratum are too common.

Rating: 5

---------------------- 
* The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass Of Sherbet

I was pretty darn pleased with this one. It goes to show that you can be
original without being experimental -- and please don't take that as a
criticism. I read plenty of non-experimental genre fiction.

Sherbet's setting is particularly clever, a world clearly descended from
ancient Quendor, but advanced beyond the age of Magic to a baroque
Ruritanian scenario. (This comes across very nicely in your character's
reactions to various levels of technology.) The plot brings you into a
corner of the old world, though, so it becomes a lot more familiar as you
progress. Now that I come to think about it, this is even more clever than
it seems; a game written in the style of the Infocom fantasy titles,
without either ignoring the issue of the similarity *or* being explicitly
set in that era.

The writing and level of description were fine. The interaction wasn't so
good -- a lot of missing synonyms, some of which were confusing in their
missingness. (I found myself checking the hints a lot, often to find that I
*had* thought of the correct solution but had been unable to phrase it
right. On the plus side, this kind of flaw is easily fixed.) In a few
places, though, the required actions were too convoluted for my tastes. And
in one spot at the end, I reached a total dead-end because of something I
forgot to do earlier; there was no obvious way to tell what I'd forgotten.

The scenario is a little strangely presented, too. Your character has a
"secret mission" which you-the-player are not aware of. You have to infer
it from hints in the game. It's not hard to figure out, especially by
virtue of where the plot takes you. But it's the kind of thing I don't like
in a game.

On the whole, though, I liked Sherbet. Engaging plot, a nicely-sketched
antagonist. Fun.

Rating: 7

---------------------- 
* Ralph

Short, nice idea, and well-focussed, if not tremendously exciting. It does
what it sets out to do -- it makes you think like a dog. (Or rather, it
makes you *behave* like a dog. As the author says, it's an awfully smart
dog.)

Extra points for the way the dog regards the annoying kid.

On the other hand, I did not in fact solve the puzzle. (On the third hand
-- hind paw, I guess -- I should have thought of the action that I missed.
Oh well.)

Rating: 5

---------------------- 
* Of Forms Unknown

I feel like I should just post the author's intro here, without commentary.
But that wouldn't get the point across. In brief:

"Originally, it began as a game trying to emulate SO FAR: psychological,
allegorical, with a non-traditional plot. However, time constraints [...]
didn't allow time enough for me to do what I wanted with the plot."

Yeah, pretty much. I felt somewhat queasy at being imitated, all the way
through this game. I was only somewhat relieved to read the above note
(when I finished) and discover that at least the author did it
deliberately.

Perhaps I am jaundiced, because I know exactly what I was intending with
_So Far_ (and "Weather"), so I know what went into them. Unfortunately, not
much seems to have gone into "Forms", in spite of an apparently allegorical
cast to the ending. But this wasn't backed up by anything in the game. Did
I miss anything? I can only judge from what I saw, so I must judge it not
very good.

Three puzzles, more or less. The first seemed to be a cut-down version of a
more interesting plan (I was expecting the dials to do more than they did.)
The second was very arbitrary, with an object breaking for no apparent
reason to keep the plot in line. Hmph. The third (final) puzzle was
reasonable.

(Also there's this acknowledgement to "my girlfriend, Nicole Maxwell..."
Well, no wonder! You have to have years of pent-up misery to write
something like _So Far_. Drop that gink, Nicky, it'll be the biggest favor
you ever did him. Now, I'm always free for dinner; drop by the DC area, we
can eat Indian food and talk about the future of interactive literature...)

(Seriously: I think the lesson here is, take whatever time the work needs.
Not everything needs to be entered in the competition. (I came up with the
greatest idea for a game, on Sunday, Oct. 20th... Haven't decided if I'm
going to write it.))

(If you *do* decide you must make a particular deadline, don't sacrifice
quality for speed. Just work more. Sleep less. Food is unnecessary.
Homework is unnecessary. Relationships are... uh, never mind.)

Rating: 3

---------------------- 
* In The End

Is it well written? Yes, it is extremely well written. We will now spend
the rest of this article talking about the "gimmick" (the author's choice
of word.)

I don't think I liked it (the gimmick, I mean.) Maybe this has more to do
with the way I write IF than the way I play it. I like to thread story and
motivation into the results the player gets to his actions. In this game (I
will not lay aside the word, mostly out of stubbornness) -- in this game,
there are no results. So I don't feel any motivation. It may sound dumb,
but I didn't even think of typing "kill me" until I read the walkthrough. I
wanted to go talk to someone, go to sleep, go wake up the girl and get into
her pants. I couldn't do any of that, so I sat in the chair and typed
"wait" until I got bored and read the walkthrough. Was that (part of) what
you, the author, intended? If not, then the game didn't work for me. It did
not communicate the story to me fully.

Next time, leave in "save" and "restore". *Yes*, I *know* you took them out
for a reason. I don't think it was sufficient reason. I got tired of going
through the beginning moves, and this happened before I thought I had seen
everything. So I got out TXD and dumped out all the game text and read
that. (As it happened, I had seen most of the story paths by then.) Are you
disappointed in me? Fortunately, my goal isn't to impress you.

Leaving out "save" and "restore" made the game too boring to experiment
with as much as I usually do. I don't mean the effect was a total failure;
it set an atmosphere in which things mattered -- especially dealing with
Annie -- random experimentation was obviously discouraged because I was
dealing with a human being, here. But by the same token, I didn't get as
much out the program as you put into it. Maybe that part *was* what you
intended. I don't know.

I shall briefly break ranks and compare "In The End" to "Tapestry", the
other entry I have played (thus far) whose storytelling truly impressed me.
"Tapestry" was a little more cliched, a little less interesting, a little
less well-told. But I liked it more. Of course, it's hard to separate my
reaction to "End"'s gimmick from my reaction to "End"'s miserable
depressing awful theme. I suspect the themes have more to do with my
ratings than the gimmicks -- because "Tapestry" was also, in a sense,
puzzle-less. It did have complicated actions which were hard to accomplish,
but not any harder than getting Annie to like you. On the other hand,
"Tapestry" did require player involvement in more places, and gave more
feedback and more positive reinforcement when I got through each "puzzle".
I think it comes down to motivation again, and (as the "About" text notes)
"End"'s theme precludes motivation in any event.

But I still give "Tapestry" a higher score. There. That's the bottom line.

PS: I think you should have left the walkthrough out. Anyone who complained
should get an aggrieved look. Let 'em change their vote if they thought you
acted wrongly.

Rating: 6

---------------------- 
* Alien Abduction?

A good story; unfortunately, totally undermined by implementation flaws.
It's possible to bypass important parts of the plot. (This is not
deliberate, as far as I can tell from the walkthrough.) Most puzzles
require a precise syntax, no synonyms, and it's often somewhat non-standard
IF syntax. Room descriptions, while well-written, refer to objects that
aren't actually implemented.

Programming aside, the game is nicely designed (although I think I've had
enough Mastermind now, thank you very much.) The scenario makes sense, with
a touch of looking-glass logic. There's a certain tendency to tell the
player how to react, rather than evoking the effect through prose, but only
in a few places.

Rating: 5

---------------------- 
* The Maiden of the Moonlight

Ghosts in a dark Scottish manor. I like it. The atmosphere is almost
perfect -- very monochromatic, grey and black; my only complaint is that it
wasn't really very scary. Just quiet.

The puzzles fit very smoothly. I didn't get all of them without hints, but
I've gotten rather lazy after, what, fourteen games played now. I'm
resorting to hints faster than I should. I didn't find any solutions that
were actually illogical, although some of the actions were pretty obscure.
Not obscure in what you're supposed to do; they made perfect sense in terms
of the situation. I mean obscure in that I was never inspired to think of
them, or think that the goals they accomplished were important. (Is that
too obscure? Uh, getting the rug was the biggest example. That and finding
the crypt key. Here's a better way to put it: the useful items didn't stand
out from the scenery very well. Because, I hasten to add, the scenery was
so nicely detailed.)

(Come to think of it, all my complaints are that "Maiden" is too
well-written and well-designed! Gonna have to up my rating or something.)

The finale is very tight on timing, but I'd have to be pretty hypocritical
to complain about that.

I like the title effect. The author gives the same information elsewhere in
the game, as a nudge, but I'd already gotten it by then.

Oh, it's after midnight now. Halloween has started. Good timing.

Rating: 8

---------------------- 
* Delusions

It is clear that a tremendous amount of thought, talent, and effort went
into Delusions. So why did I hate it?

Good question. Let me think.

I think, quite honestly, that there's too much *there*. The focus falls
apart; it tries to do everything at once. This thing is *huge*, I should
start off by saying that. It's the first game that I was unable to finish
in two hours -- and that's two hours *with* the all the hints. I started
reading hints early, and rapidly degenerated into total reliance on them.
Eventually I got stuck trying to sharpen the pencil, I realized it was
three in the morning, and I thought, wait, haven't I spent two hours
already? Oh, thank god. I have an excuse to stop playing.

Let me back up. Technically, Delusions is very, very good. I had a very
solid feeling for the environment, the various characters moving around,
the machines I could interact with. It had, in fact, the offhand richness
of detail that I associate with the better Infocom work. The music in the
ocean, I loved it.

And then the plot started, and my god, there is *all this plot*. There's
the fish plot, and the you-learning-about-yourself plot, and the evil
computer program plot, and the using-the-GUI gimmick, and the
using-the-simulation gimmick, and the repeating universe head surgery plot,
and then then unlocking-your-door plot, and then the plot after that, and
that's where I gave up, because I had long since lost track of why I
actually cared about any of this. Any one of these, or perhaps two, would
have been an engaging competition entry. All of them together left me
feeling like, like, I don't know what.

Let me give an example. The GUI computer. It's a cute idea. It could have
been developed on its own, and been interesting. In Delusions, however, it
was a distraction from the plot it was part of. It took too much time and
effort for me to deal with, when I was already trying to understand the
rules of the repeating-universe scenario.

The repeating-universe gag. It's a cute idea. It could have been developed
on its own. But there was too much else going on, and I couldn't figure out
what was important and what was background. It just all felt kludgy. (A
head gizmo *and* drugs? How am I supposed to sort this out? I have to do X,
and then Y and X together, and then... I forget. And the sensory thing
certainly didn't seem to have enough information available; at one point I
turned off touch, passed out, and woke up with my back tingling from the
cold metal or some such thing. It would have taken extensive
experimentation for me to figure out how to solve that section, and
experimentation was a *pain in the ass* because you have to juggle the
stupid GUI computer *and* the drugs-and-alarm-clock gimmick, every time you
try another combination... no. no. no. That was when I started reading the
hints *before* trying to solve puzzles on my own.)

The learning-about-yourself plot. This is a great idea. It could have been
developed on its own. In Delusions, it was completely swamped. I didn't
follow up on any of it, or realize that progress was being made towards a
goal, because there was this other thing to do and suddenly an evil lunatic
has me tied up and is screaming nonsense at me! I think it was supposed to
be profound nonsense, but I wanted to slap the lunatic upside the head
(preferably with a crowbar) and tell him to get a grip, for chrissake.

The traitor-in-the-lab plot. By the time it started, I didn't care. Did it
tie into any of the other plots? Don't ask me; I never sharpened the
pencil.

I am now trying to count how many Critical Moments there are in Delusions.
I think I encountered three; presumably there would be a fourth at the end.
What? Sally Callahan on a binge couldn't stay interested through that many
climaxes.

Too many stories. Edit. Make it a trilogy. Or pace it out so that only one
or two things are happening at a time; then it would be a full-length game,
but a focussed full-length game. Or just chop the hell out of it.
*Something*.

[Footnote, several weeks later: Email discussions have brought up the point
that I'm a fine one to complain about complex interlocked puzzles, after "A
Change in the Weather". I reply, yeah, bite me. If the *plot* held
together, I'd be motivated to play with all the gizmos. And say what you
like, but the endgame of "Weather" was (1) focussed down to a single plot
idea and a single puzzle, and (2) very short, especially if you got it
wrong and had to try again. Twice as much does not mean better.]

Rating: 4

---------------------- 
* Reverberations

A brief and somewhat lunatic action caper. The world is rather
thinly-described for my taste, and the implementation could use more
synonyms, but the story comes across very well.

(Ok, it's a short review. It was a pretty short game.)

(Well, one more comment: I have now played enough of the puzzle where you
have to repeat your command several times to convince the parser to do it.
Ok?)

Rating: 5

---------------------- 
* Fear

Oh, oh, oh, what do I think? A good plan, but the execution didn't work for
me. Damn.

I was always behind in picking up where I was supposed to be, in the plot.
The pacing was off. I picked up the book, and was away facing one set of
fears before I knew that I was troubled with them. Then I solved that phase
of the game, and was back, and discovered the arriving police, which
explained why I was trying to face these fears in the first place. You see?
Solutions before problems.

The writing, in detail, was fine. (The one thing I *did* know was that I
was embroiled in a nightmare. That fact pushed in on me from all
directions, and it was very satisfyingly claustrophobic.)

Then there's the puzzles. Way too disconnected for me. I didn't get the
idea of the dark puzzle at all, not without reading the hints; then I was
thinking, oy, no wonder the author stuck all this cruft onto the statues --
there's no elegant way to communicate the point of this puzzle. The duck
puzzle was atmospheric, but a totally different atmosphere from the main
game. Ditto for the crystal dome. (I didn't stumble on "listen to crystal",
either, but at that point I'd gotten somewhat impatient.)

I've always been a heavily puzzle-based author, of course, but this game
might actually have worked best without any puzzles in the flashback
scenarios at all. Or at least much more straightforward ones. Just scenes
*dealing* with the three subjects would have been as effective, without
distracting from the plot. As an example -- the dark scenario, but without
the statues. I liked the beginning of it; you're crawling around, doing
things in the dark. (Although I played "Aayela" before "Fear", and I think
that did a better job of the dark thing.)

Rating: 4

---------------------- 
* A Piece of Mind

This may be, I kid not, the most clever entry I've played yet. There's a
lot of very subtle stuff going on -- starting with the use of
first-person-past-tense in the introduction, switching to
first-person-present-tense in the main story, did you notice that? The
author is going in and paying serious attention to the relationship between
the player and the protagonist, and the nature of the simulated game world
in front of you. This is the same sort of territory that "Delusions"
covers, but "Piece" worked a hell of a lot better for me.

Some of this is the bantering tone of the writing. This is a great
demonstration of the potential of first-person IF; the protagonist comes
through beautifully as a personality in his own right. Game text as spoken
dialog, rather than exposition. (I don't know whether the game's weak
spelling and grammar are deliberate or just the author's mistakes; I don't
care, either. Spelling should be fixed eventually, but the slang and run-on
sentences should be left as they are, you hear me?)

The storyline alternates being compelling and comic, and just when you
think the question of your position as player has been swept under the rug,
whammo. The ending doesn't shy away from, well, anything. (Assuming I have
reached the ending. The author blithely ignored the requirement to include
complete spoilers -- his walkthrough cuts off at the very last scene -- a
decision I can only applaud at this point. "This point" meaning that I'm
staring at the final screen, totally uncertain as to whether I've done it
right. As the author obviously intended. As opposed to other contest
entries, where authors submitted to having the "right" answers blazoned on
their shirt sleeves. Foo on that. And you were wondering why my entry was a
non-game which had no story to give away...?)

Well. I guess I should find some bad things to say. One spot of
"guess-the-verb", not too hard to fix. A few more scenery objects that
could have been implemented. A couple of bugs, a lot of spelling errors. A
*whole* lot of places where the author forgot to put a backslash between
lines of text.

On the author hand (I really meant to type "other hand" there, but I'll
leave it the way it is!) there are all the guitar hints, which the author
claims he really did improvise on the spot. That's worth a bonus point by
itself.

PS: Played a little more; found a different ending. That's cool. I had
tried the correct action, I think, but that synonym didn't work -- add it
to the bug list. Mmm. Maybe.

Rating: 9

---------------------- 
* Kissing the Buddha's Feet

I kiss *somebody's* feet. This is short and perfect. (Well, not *perfect*
per se; there are several little syntax annoyances, and there seems to be
no way to see the skateboard unless you know it's there. And too much
looking under, inside, and behind things. But this is fixable.)

The six characters are very snappily presented. They're not deep
characters, but this is not a deep game; it's silly and the personalities
are on the right level for that. Not stereotypes, mind you.

(Six characters, one of which is you, I should add. Didn't I comment on an
earlier game saying that it was a good argument for first-person writing
for characterization? This one is a good argument for second-person writing
for characterization.)

The atmosphere is frenetic, which is of course the point of the story.
People constantly wandering around doing things. *Annoying* things. Heh.
Which is of course the point of *your* character.

Lots of terribly cute side comments.

You know, I just realized that this is "a college game". I hate college
games. I didn't make the connection until well after I'd finished. Am I
inconsistent? All the time, yes, but not in this instance. This game
doesn't use any of the overused tropes of the college IF cliche (exploring,
re-creation of real locations, in-jokes over-explained.)

Not difficult; I figured out all the puzzles quickly, except for finding
the skateboard. Mmm, and getting the TV off.

Rating: 9

---------------------- 
* Rippled Flesh

Ok, I give up. This is the game that I don't bother to finish, even with
the walkthrough.

Strangely, there *were* things I liked. It was a nightmare. Things didn't
make sense. Weird things appearing in empty rooms. Random fragments of
horror coming and going through the story like, well, nothing in
particular.

The author's unique genius for constructing sentences is as evident as it
was in "Liquid".

Rating: 2

---------------------- 
* Stalker

This is the last game I have the resources to play. I got stuck, looked
through the hints, and the game called me a cheater.

My patience, I discovered, had ended with the previous game. I turned this
one off and didn't bother to play through to the end.

Rating: none given.

---------------------- 
* Lists And Lists

Ok, I get this space to explain myself -- a luxury I rarely allow myself,
so listen up.

It was a joke, ok? A *one-line* joke.

"Yeah, I implemented Lisp for the Z-machine". There are probably only a few
hundred people on the *planet* who have an inkling of why that is a silly
thing to do. And most of you are reading this now. It probably ranks as one
of the most obscure in-jokes of all time. (The fact that I had to write a
whole Lisp manual to make the joke work makes it funnier, I hope, although
actually it probably just makes me look more pig-headed.)

But I didn't write Lists hoping to win. Recently (today is Oct. 26) I've
seen a few people saying that Lists was the best contest entry they've
played to date. What? Jesus Flippin' Mohawk Christ! It's not *fun*, don't
you get it? It's not *fiction*, ok? It's *schoolwork*! The manual is the
most interesting *part* of it and that's not even *interactive*!

As I wrote Lists -- the work of three whole days, plus extra to do the
manual -- I had this repeated vision of someone saying, "Lisp for the
Z-machine! Ha! Ha! That Zarf, what a clever guy! Three out of ten." And
then going on to a real game.

That's what I *hope* you all said. If Lists gets as high as third place,
I'm going to sulk.

But I promised to explain myself. Actually, this was partially inspired by
Dave Baggett's musings, many months ago, that he wanted to write IF in Lisp
(or Scheme.) "Whoa," I thought, "I bet I can do a Lisp engine which I can
play under my extremely terrific MaxZip interface! That'd be cool." So I
whipped it out.

The obvious next step is a "dump" facility, that lets you write the program
structures you've created out into a file. Preferably an Inform 6 link
module, so that you can link them back into a game file you're writing.
Easy enough to do -- then you can have a game partially written in Inform
and partially in Scheme, with the Scheme controlling as much of the game as
you need it to. Or, of course, an pure-Scheme IF system. Although frankly
the memory limits are pretty painful.

For added fun, recall that Muddle, Infocom's design language, was
Lisp-like. If one had the source for it, one could undoubtedly port it to
my engine, and run it on the Z-machine. Wrap your head around that...

Oh well. By the time you see this, I'll know how well I did. But you can
see what *I* scored myself as.

[Postscript: It's a few days later, and I've gotten email that started "Are
you kidding?" Thank god someone noticed.]

Rating: 2

----------------------

Scoreboard:

10 Tapestry
9 Small World
9 Piece of Mind
9 Kissing the Buddha's Feet
8 Phlegm
8 Maiden of the Moonlight
7 The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet
7 Aayela
6 In the End
5 Alien Abduction
5 Ralph
5 Reverberations
5 Wearing the Claw
4 Delusions
4 Fear
3 Of Forms Unknown
2 Lists and Lists
2 Stargazer
2 Rippled Flesh
1 Punkirita Quest One: Liquid


-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
