Gareth's competition comments


11 Oct 1995 11:24:51 GMT

I was deluged with work around the beginning of September (two
conference papers to prepare, a ninety-page technical report to write,
not to mention actually doing any work on my PhD), so I never got around
to playing all the competition games! Here's what I thought about the
ones I did play (in no particular order). There are teensy spoilers for
"The Mind Electric" and "Toonesia".

[If you want to follow up in detail on one particular game, please
change the subject line or start a new thread!]

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY by Leon Lin

This is my favourite of the games I've played so far. The puzzles may
not be up to much, but who cares? The writing is superb, atmospheric,
and very funny. I usually find myself impatient with long sequences of
text in adventure games, but even though "The One that Got Away" was
brimful with text, I enjoyed it (I spent much more time thinking of
things to ask Bob about than I did trying to catch any fish). I suppose
I have a soft spot for this kind of American pioneer folklore (I'm a fan
of Paul Bunyan, too, especially the Auden/Britten opera).

I found myself laughing out loud at some of the more purple passages,
especially the example game sequence in the pamphlet: "`Curse you, Doby
the Mackrel, curse you!' Pete exclaims, shaking his fist at the sea.
`From Hell's heart I stab at thee.'"

I hope that Lin writes more interactive fiction, and that he continues
to orient his work towards string characters, letting the puzzles fade
into the background where they belong.

One nitpick: if you type "kiss bob", then Bob replies, "I've been lonely
since the missus died." but according to his other speeches, he has been
mourning his first love Nellie all his life and has never married: "I
always thought Nellie might come back, and I've waited, just minding
this store, but I guess it'll never be." (I think it's a good sign when
characters have enough background that you can worry about consistency
like this).

A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER by Andrew Plotkin

This was a fun experiment and a deserved winner. I found it very
challenging, but it wasn't outright impossible (unlike one or two of the
other games in the competition), so I think the difficulty was
well-judged. Three aspects were excellent: the quality of the writing,
the changing descriptions of the scenery, and the way the components of
the puzzle interacted. The way the descriptions changed during sunset
reminded me of my decision in "Christminster" to keep the player indoors
from seven p.m. until ten so that I didn't have to write descriptions of
the sun going down. Andrew Plotkin tackled this head on and the result
was very impressive.

What I didn't like was the very short time limit and the way it was
incredibly easy to get stuck. To finish "A Change in the Weather"
required an enormous amount of patience: going back to a saved game,
trying something new, observing the consequences, going back again and
trying something else, and on and on. The puzzles themselves were quite
elegant, but I didn't appreciate them very much because I was a bit
fatigued by the process of solving them. I also felt the game lacked
for NPCs (the fox was better than nothing, I suppose), and the dream was
just wilfully obscure.

TOONESIA by Jacob Weinstein

I enjoyed this one: it captures the flavour of the cartoons it
pastiches, and makes excellent use of the logic of the cartoon world it
takes place in: I found all of the puzzles were solvable on the first
attempt.

I agree with Palmer Davis who said that the characters were too static;
in a real cartoon, Bugs would appear near the start and Fudd would make
three or four different unsuccessful attempts to kill him before the
cartoon ended.

There were a few problems with the descriptions (e.g., the directions on
the mesa were reversed), and a few minor bugs (e.g., you could type
"enter hole" from the mesa and get there directly, rather than messing
about with the blindfold).

ALL QUIET ON THE LIBRARY FRONT by Michael Phillips

I imagine Graham feels embarrassed rather than pleased; I know I would.

DETECTIVE parodied by Christopher Forman

I'm only aware of "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" through the genre of
MST3k parodies on Usenet, so I really have no idea how faithfully
Christopher Forman reproduced the flavour of the television program. I
thought it was interesting as a one-off, and I did find bits of it
funny, but a lot of it was completely meaningless to me (especially the
introduction and the endgame) and I probably wouldn't play another
similar game.

Bad films are interesting because they are the result of the labours of
intelligent adults who should have known better (tens or even hundreds
of talented people were involved in their production), and because
millions of dollars were wasted on their production. On the other hand,
"Detective" was probably the result of a couple of hours' work by a
twelve-year-old kid, whose main mistake was to upload it to a bulletin
board for the world to laugh at (even though the adventure games I wrote
when I was twelve were a lot better than "Detective", I still have more
sense than to let anyone see them now!).

I think that parody of adventure games is very tricky: most adventure
games sit rather uneasily on the dividing line between seriousness and
humour (think of the ongoing Flathead jokes in the "Zork" series, or the
ridiculous names of the spells in "Enchanter" et al). There are some
supposed parodies of Infocom games at the IF-archive ("Pork" and
"Disenchanted"), but they end of being pastiche rather than parody or
satire, and rather weak pastiches at that.

THE MIND ELECTRIC by Jason Dyer

I quite enjoy the kind of game where I am plunged into a new universe
with unfamiliar but logical laws which I can discover by experimentation
and careful thinking, and "The Mind Electric" seemed to promise that.
But it didn't deliver. The world it presented made no sense of itself,
and still made no sense when interpreted as some kind of "Neuromancer"-
style virtual reality (i.e., the objects and landscapes are visual
representations of programs and data in the memory of a network of
computers). I didn't feel as though I was in a world with logical laws
that I could deduce; I felt instead that I was in a world where an
ad-hoc rationalisation could be produced for any event, however
meaningless.

For example, the cube wants (I presume) to tell me the number of a box
which I should search. The easiest way for it to do this would be
binary chop (e.g., two blinks for too high, one blink for too low). Or
it could just blink the number ("The cube blinks four times, then
pauses, then blinks three times, then pauses..."). But instead it
insists on playing "Mastermind" with me, which might have been
appropriate in "Magic Toyshop", but not in a life and death situation!

Even ignoring the debate about the nature of the puzzles, it was just a
dull game! The backstory (how I got into this mess in the first place,
and who the mysterious character is who is trying to get me out) sounded
much more interesting than what actually happened in the game. A
character or two would have made it much more interesting.

TUBE TROUBLE by Richard Tucker

I played this game on a BBC micro several years ago, and I was very
impressed by the neatness and complexity of the puzzle: I had a feeling
of going round and round on a complex Heath-Robinson mechanism that I
had to nudge a little bit each time it went round until finally I could
step off where I wanted. I did my to best to capture this feeling in
the opening sequence of "Christminster".

It does seem a bit thin by today's standards, and some aspects are a bit
contrived (e.g., not eating on the platform; the time limit at the end),
but I think that's evidence of how far amateur IF has come.

UNDO by Neil Demause

"Modernism" already did this. Boring.

[Before I played this game, I suddenly had the idea: What about a game
in which you can type "undo" on the very first turn and step backwards
into whatever happened before the game started? (Consider this idea
donated into the public domain, if anyone wants to use it)]

--
Gareth Rees