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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: No Time to Squeal and Kallisti (spoilers)
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Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 10:54:29 GMT
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Jonathan Penton <unlikely@flash.net> wrote:
>And here is the controversy. RESTORE and QUIT work as advertised, but
>RESTART takes you on to Chapter Two. Many people, at this point, restored
>their game, attempting to win the first chapter of the game, which is quite
>unwinnable.
>
>I didn't do this, because I didn't have a saved game.
[snip]
>Would I have been annoyed with this game if I did have a saved
>game, and restored it, only to find myself losing again? I really, really,
>doubt it. I don't understand the controversy surrounding the use of
>metacommands. IF is a genre, not a single game. Different IF games will play
>by different rules.

I'm not complaining about 'the use of metacommands'.  I'm
complaining about the use of seeming-metacommands as non-meta
commands.

IF is a genre, not a single game. Different IF games can
play by different rules, but they shouldn't play by different
metacommands. That's the whole point of metacommands--to be
meta. They are part of the user-interace used to manipulate
whether one is playing the game or not, not part of the in-game
user-interface.

One can attempt to cross those levels, but it's incredibly
dangerous. Shrapnel does it in a particularly safe way--there's
a totally unexpected death--so unexpected nobody is very
likely to simply close their interpreter at that point (although
it wouldn't surprise me if SOMEBODY out there did), and then
you SEEM to be at a metacommand prompt, but you're really not,
and you're _not_given_the_option_ to fail to discover that.

NTTS gives you a seeming metacommand prompt, and even allows
you to use several metacommands successfully at that prompt,
leaving the prompt.  But one of the metacommands is not what
it seems, is not documented anywhere, there is no reason to
think that typing the secretly-not-metacommand RESTART will
have any effect other than as a metacommand RESTART, and
there is thus no reason for inherent a player to want to type it
over the other metacommands. The fact that some players will
indeed type it doesn't make it a good design.

To put it a different way, and the reason why even once is
too many times, the only way I solved this--and the only
way I was going to solve this, given my play style--was
by reading the walkthough--which is bad in and of itself.
But really that's not the point; messing with metacommands
is just The Wrong Thing [tm].

SeanB
(In fact, the inability to restart properly without going and
deleting some secret files is also rather annoying, and is
also, IMO, The Wrong Thing.)
