MARK SILCOX'S REVIEWS 

6th Place: The Knapsack Problem, by Leonard Richardson

A dressed-up optimization problem rather than a game in any strict sense, 
this one nonetheless has its charm. You have to figure out how to fit as
many objects of different weights into a traditional IF-ers finite inventory
repository without getting stuck in the Djinni's cave. I'm afraid I did so 
very, very many problems of this sort in high school math that I couldn't be 
bothered to fiddle with my tally of objects for very long, but I still ran 
the file a good half-dozen times just to watch the game generate random but 
highly funny names for each of its heavy artifacts. Playing this for a while 
would be a good way to "warm up" before starting out on a Graham Nelson game,
maybe.

5th Place: One Week, by Papillon

A nicely-written rendering of the week in a teenaged girl's life leading up
to the prom and a college entrance exam. Papillon gets the idiom of a fairly conventional,
slightly stressed, diary-keeping teenage girl just about right, and there are some
sweet little moments - e.g. the description of "blackening ovals like christmas 
tree lights" on a multiple choice examination. My main reservation had to do with what seemed
to be the fairly loose connection between decisions made within the game and the 
rewards handed out at the end - after one run-through during which I spent almost every 
waking hour studying, I was chastised for being a slacker and told that I'd be a dud at
university! Like, no way!

4th Place: Escape from A Planet Filled With Monkeys, by Randall M! Gee

The title pretty much says it all. A  Douglas Admas-y sci-fi yarm with more 
than enough good laugh lines to justify setting aside a fair chunk of time on 
a rainy Tuesday evening. Randall's decision to put in exactly one rather difficult 
puzzle halfway into the yarn (a long game looosely resembling Mancala with a friendly
orangutan) struck me as a little TOO weird - it took me ages to work out the game's 
decision procedure, and although I felt cheerfully smug for a few moments after doing so,
by that time I had sorta forgotten what was happening in the story. It IS worth doing, 
though, if only for the sake of the extra joke that comes as a prize. My only other 
complaint is that the ending was rather abrupt.

3rd Place: A Dark and Stormy Entry, by Lord Lulwer-Bytton

More good jokes, and one or two genuine flourishes of brilliant literary pastiche in this one,
which uses the device of CYOA-style storytelling to depict the various sorts of decisions 
involved in creating a work of fiction from scratch. A fairly clever spin on the restrictions 
imposed by the contest rules, though I have to confess that I've read so very many 
writer's-workshoppy, "post-modern" pieces in which the author extemporizes about 
the agonies of writer's block that after a while I found the effect somewhat bludgeoning.
The legendary Lord Bytton is an unquestionably gifted writer, though, and although
no particular gamestate was singled out by the author as constituting a "win,"
the episode with the ficus plant left me with the cozy feeling of having scored
an unsought but indisputable victory.

2nd Place: Flotsam, by Jamie Murray

This game charts the mundane tasks and interactions of a student reluctantly employed at 
an even-nastier-than-the-norm Irish pub, in what I thought was a wonderfully vitriolic
and turgid style of writing. The "oleaginous chuckle" of one punter will be following
me around for days. This one also uses the restrictions of a CYOA interface cleverly 
to keep the apparent pointlessness of the character's activities clearly in the 
foreground, without making this fact about them too horribly frustrating to the player, as
one could imagine happening in a similar game that used a traditional IF parser. At the end, 
more or less without warning, there's a lovely little "liftoff" as the protagonist ambiguously
transcends his surroundings. This last feature raised the status of the game for me well above
the merely worthwhile and into the realms of the truly memorable. 

1st Place: Kingdom Without End, by Shannon Cochran

What starts off looking like an almost weirdly conventional seek-the treasure puzzle game
quickly transforms into a wise and graceful philosophical reflection on the kinds of tasks
that such games ask us to do. The puzzles are constructed cleverly to gently prod the player 
into using his/her wits while at the same time wondering whether anything more's going on here that 
a curiously facile rehash of other, similar but more challenging amusements. And by entertaining
just these thoughts we play right ito the hands of the author, whose ultimate aim is to ask us
the most serious and important question that this medium is equipped to raise - why are we so 
ready to beleive that we DESERVE to be given a happy ending? A small, instant classic of 
interactive writing. Well done, Shannon!