ADAM CADRE'S REVIEWS

6th Place: The Knapsack Problem
     The goal here is to take objects of varying weight and value
and stuff them into the title container.  Not exactly an enthralling
premise, but I gave it a whirl... and not once but twice, it scolded
me that I had not found the optimal solution and then printed out an
"optimal list" identical to mine.  Booooo!

3rd Place (tie): Flotsam
     If there was an actual game here, I couldn't find it.  Instead
it seemed to be what the IF Art Show would call a "landscape," an
implementation of a place, in this case a dismal one populated by
dismal people.  Fair enough, but the pruning of visited choices
seemed fairly haphazard.  I could run a loop through some fits of
examination and conversation an infinite number of times, and others
only once; if the deciding factor was whether new branches might pop
up later salient to the adventure that finally reared its head, I never
saw any evidence of such.

3rd Place (tie): One Week
     Life as board game.  It's your turn.  Will you play a Study
card and take a Scholarship chip, or play a Work card and take some
funny-colored money from the bank?  Or perhaps you'll play Go Out,
and draw from the Mystery Date deck.  Will he be a dream or a dud?
Will your prom be held on Broadway or Baltic Avenue?  Of course,
being compared to a board game is just fine if you're trying to
write, well, a board game.  If you're trying to write a story, on
the other hand...

3rd Place (tie): Escape From a Planet Filled With Monkeys
     Not much to say about this one.  I didn't even get especially
far, since the game with the stones was so freaking annoying.
Names that are simply other words spelled backwards are also rather
cringeworthy -- Stephen Ratliff is not a role model.  Oh, and there
was some crashing.  But, um, good effort.

2nd Place: Kingdom Without End
     So, here's one approach to the confines of this comp: write a
game that has a menu of options rather than a parser for seemingly
no reason.  That is, instead of telling a story with options like,
"A) go to the moon; B) dress up like Mr. T; C) eat some nachos",
implement a world traversable in the usual way and then list options
that would be perfectly standard possibilities in a conventional
adventure game: go north, look at the object, that sort of thing.
The setting is also fairly standard -- you're exploring the excavated
remains of an ancient civilization, a plot that's been kicking around
for decades -- but that said, the details are quite fascinating and
the piece as a whole is well written. It's very interesting; I just
don't know why it's here, other than that the regular comp is still
five months away.

1st Place: A Dark and Stormy Entry
     And here's the other approach.  You're a writer, and you start
off trying to come up with a setting for your new piece; there are,
of course, infinite possibilities; you could implement a billion of
them and the game still probably wouldn't be able to handle what most
people would type in.  So instead, you get to choose from a handful.
Will it be Scotland?  Or Io?  Or tied to a kite?  The utter
arbitrariness of the choices can be maddening -- especially when
there's only one, as when the only moral you can select is that Cheese
Is Good -- but luckily, this is more than made up for by the fact that
most any course you choose will range from amusing to hilarious (with 
a few serious ones thrown in for good measure.)  This
is the one that people will still be playing a year from now.