Re: Ah Ha! The Results of the First Annual "Iffys".


Fri, 06 Oct 1995 18:51:54 +0100

Carl Muckenhoupt (carl@fox.earthweb.com) wrote:

> Toonesia or The One for third place ... I don't remember which. They were
> both pretty-good-but-not-excellent.
>
> I'd put both of them in the category of "could have been written in AGT with
> no appreciable decline in quality".

Hmm, I don't know about this... Surely the authoring system used to write a
game of this length (so size limitations are not an issue) is only really
apparent in the flexibility of the parser and the user interface? Both games
mentioned have, I think, the standard TADS parser and `look and feel'.

As I said before though, I did find both a bit *too* short and easy.
Reconsidering that assessment a bit I might say that THE ONE was necessarily
short. I'd agree with someone else who's name I can't remember (he's tucked
away in the `Hello?' thread) who ventured the opinion that THE ONE, out of
all the games in the competition, probably came closest to `sudden IF'. The
same person also pondered that, due to this nature of the game, if the author
had concentrated more on the focus of the game (the actual fishing) then the
game as a whole would have benefitted. I agree, for me this aspect was just
a little too "sudden", but on the whole this game captured and transmitted
the feel of going fishing, and I've never been fishing in my life! It made a
simple tale take on epic proportions.

TOONESIA, I thought (again, someone else mentioned this too) could have been
improved by making the characters more `in yer face' as they were in the
original cartoons -- the game needed to be more frantic, more active. It was
a shame names had to be changed, as this detracted from the atmosphere. One
aspect of this game that I think is a real achievement is the way that the
author has captured the very visual and visceral nature of cartoons in his
writing. This was only really let down by the characterisation problems, and
the appearance of Bugs's trail as he zoomed along underground, which I
couldn't visualize for a few minutes.

-- 
Jools Arnold                                          jools@arnod.demon.co.uk