Then, something else happened. I escaped the one room, fully expecting to have won the game, but instead moved into a realm that was even more bizarre than the one I had left, by several orders of magnitude in fact. I thought, because the "talking object" room was so well-done, that it was the whole of the game. Not so. To discuss further specifics about what proceeds from that first scene would, I think, be to move into the realm of spoilers, so I'll just say this: the game turns out to be a string of scenarios, none of which conform to IF conventions of plot, setting, or character. Of these, the first scene is probably the most successful, but each has interesting merits. Certainly the first scene's thoroughness of implemementation is not lost on the others. Consider, for example, this startling disambiguation question:
>x young Which young do you mean, the young man, the marking, the young man's head, the young man's hands, the young man's skin, the young man's feet, the young man's head of hair, the young man's forehead, the young man's eyebrows, the young man's eyes, the young man's eyelashes, the young man's ears, the young man's nose, the young man's mouth, the young man's chin, the young man's neck, the young man's fingers, the young man's thumbs, the young man's torso, the young man's arms, the young man's legs, or the young man's hips?The game displays an almost overwhelming capacity for describing scenery objects and making them available to various verbs. Strangely, though, where this strategy would normally heighten immersion quite a bit, it somehow fails to do so here, at least for me. I think this is because most all the game's scenes are quite abstract and surreal, and thus I had a difficult time relating to them. Part of this is just my personal taste -- I'm not overfond of highly stylized IF, and even last year's outstanding For A Change left me feeling rather cold and distanced. The other part of it, I would contend, is that the kind of disconcerting scenes presented in TEME actively work against immersion rather than for it.
There are other things working against the game as well, such as the number of bugs in the implementation. To choose a small example, there is one point when you need to use one object to pry another object, but using the verb "pry" doesn't work. Using the verb "cut" does, even though the response indicates that you're prying. To choose a large example, about midway through, the whole game crashed so hard that it brought down my entire system. Now granted, I'm running Windows, so crashing the system is not all that impressive a feat. Still, I don't expect an IF game to do it. I'll certainly grant the possibility that the crash had to do with the combination of apps I was running at that time, but the whole experience left me feeling rather wary of TEME. In other sections, the solution to the puzzle seemed pretty much entirely arbitrary. Of course, because the game operates on such a rarefied level, it's quite possible that the solution made perfect sense but just went way over my head. Either way, it's not a lot of fun trying to solve a puzzle whose eventual solution (when you extract it from help messages on Deja) just makes you say, "I was supposed to come up with that?" So yes, the game is flawed, and it's also rather inaccessible, but it's still a stimulating experiment in avant-garde IF. It was nothing like any piece of IF I'd ever seen, and that's what I liked about it.
Rating: 7.5
Please pardon me. This is something like my 47th comp game. I'm running low on sleep. I'm cranky, and my mood was not improved by the extremely frustrating two hours I just spent with a game that responds like a lobotomized Inform. The first command I type when I'm playing a game for review is "script", so that I can have a transcript to refer to as I write the review. The next command I type is "verbose". When the game recognized neither of these, I began to get a sinking feeling. My subsequent experiences didn't make me feel any better at all. Experimentation soon revealed that the game only recognizes an extremely limited set of verbs and nouns, far too few to provide any sense of smooth gameplay whatsoever. Now, as I often say when I review homebrewed games, I admire what it did achieve. The desire to write an IF engine from scratch is foreign to me, but I certainly can respect it in others, and it would take a better programmer than I to create even the parser in Crulistan, let alone the strong parsers of the established IF development systems. Nonetheless, achievement though it is, Crulistan's parser is woefully insufficient. When you've just gone through several dozen games whose parsers have a very high level of quality by default, stepping into Crulistan feels like a jail cell in more ways than one.
Perversely, rather than drawing attention away from these limitations, the game's design seems instead to want to emphasize its flaws. It consists of a string of situations which require very specific solutions, and the game usually neglects to implement any alternatives, even if just to tell the player that they won't work. For example, the initial puzzle of escaping from a cell might seem to hinge around going through the window. Yet by no combination of verbs and nouns (and belive me, I tried a lot of them) can you convey to the game that you want to try this. It's fine if the game doesn't want to allow it, but not even to implement it? Inexcusable. Then, when I finally did figure out how to escape the cell, then spent another half-hour trying to guess the right sequence of commands (with very little useful feedback from the game) for the next section, I found myself outside the prison, and the game, unbeknownst to me, was in an unwinnable state. I only learned this after much frustration and failed brute-force attempts at puzzle-solving sent me back, in desperation, to the initial scene. Turns out there are two ways to escape the prison, but only one of them will allow you to proceed further in the game. The game gives no indication whatsoever of this situation, and because so little is implemented, I found it easy to believe that the "wrong" solution I had found was the one and only solution to the prison puzzle. So, the one time an alternate solution was implemented, it was only an extremely elaborate red herring -- what an infuriating design choice, especially in a game where so few things work. Once I did get further, I almost immediately found myself stuck in another situation where the solution was a mystery and the game didn't recognize 90% of the things I tried. Compounding this problem, no walkthrough is provided. In fact, when you type "help", the game chides you, "Oh come on now. This game is ridiculously easy.". Yeah, if you wrote it, maybe. Then again, the author credit seems to allude to the disavowal that film directors sometimes issue on projects that have escaped their control. Of course, with an IF game, there's really nobody to wrest control from the author, so this allusion is puzzling to say the least. But nobody can say it's not justified.
Rating: 2.1
These choices, especially the first two, step away from the conventions pioneered by games like Zork and Adventure, and the gains that they provide in character and plot are taken out of interaction. In some cases, the tradeoff is handled with so much skill that I didn't even realize how little interaction was really available until my second play-through. In others, the seams showed rather more. The game provides the player with a number of yes/no decision points, but few of them seem to make much difference. In addition, there appear to be some places in which the right thing to do is far from obvious -- I was never able to get to one of the game's successful endings because my ability to interact with the characters was so limited, and manipulation of the environment so curtailed, that I was unable to guess the proper action, and therefore never found happiness for the PC. It didn't help that the game's meager hint system almost always came up with the response "You ponder your situation, but nothing comes to mind.". This is one case in which a bundled walkthrough would have helped me a lot -- it may have just demonstrated that I wasn't reading the author's mind properly, but on the other hand it may have demonstrated that I was being incredibly dense and overlooking an obvious clue. Instead, I was exhorted to email the author for help. I did so, and eight hours later I haven't heard back, so I'm going ahead with this review. Authors, allow me to suggest that not providing hints or a walkthrough with a comp entry is detrimental to your chances of doing well in that competition. I've only got a few days left, and several more games to get through -- I don't have time to wait around for a reply, and I think many judges are in the same boat. In a non-comp game, omitting the walkthrough can prompt players to post hint requests, or to email you, and this is a good thing. In a competition game, though, when the players are under time pressure and are committed to playing as many of the games as possible anyway, this strategy only ensures that they will be delayed and annoyed if they get stuck. Not the recipe for a high rating.
Even if I had been able to win the game, I still would have had to
contend with the numerous bugs that appear in it. At various points, the
game referred to an object that wasn't there, or allowed me to take
objects that should have been unavailable, or absconded with one of my
possessions after I dropped it, or permitted travel in a direction that
should have been forbidden (putting me in a room with the description
"
Rating: 7.3
On the other hand, Wrecked is definitely a better showcase for ADRIFT
than is Marooned. Those extraneous newlines that I blamed on the ADRIFT
system in my review of Marooned turned out to be that game's doing --
they're nowhere to be found in Wrecked. Many more first-level nouns are
implemented, making the auto-complete option work much better, though it
still doesn't work flawlessly. Also, there's no starvation puzzle in
Wrecked, which sets to rest my fears that such a puzzle is standard
issue in every ADRIFT game. However, just being a better game than
Marooned doesn't make Wrecked a great game in itself. One part of the
reason why I didn't care for Wrecked is that it just feels very dated to
me. It's an old-school adventure, something that might have fit
comfortably into the mainstream circa 1983 or so. You know the kind: you
find a bowling ball with a button on the side, and when you push the
button, the ball opens up to reveal a sapphire bracelet, which you then
give to the sailor on the dock, who will reward you with a chicken pot
pie that you can feed to the vicious warthog, allowing you to sneak into
his lair and retrieve the bag of marbles, etc. etc. Everything is pretty
much thrown together without any rhyme or reason, loosely grouped
together under a threadbare rubric of plot and setting. Like I said,
old-school. Unfortunately for Wrecked, the old school of IF lost its
accreditation some time ago. To my mind, senseless grouping of stuff
without any indication of internal consistency is something IF has
outgrown, like mazes and starvation puzzles. Seeing it in a year 2000
competition entry isn't going to score a lot of points from me.
However, even if I were willing to set aside the deep flaws in both the
parser and the design of the game, there would still be the matter of
the bugs. Most severe among these is the game-killing bug I encountered
about an hour and 45 minutes into the game: despite all conditions being
correct, I was unable to complete a critical puzzle, even though I knew
from a previous play session that it was possible to complete this
puzzle. Because ADRIFT makes a habit of overwriting old save files with
the current save unless you explicitly tell it to do otherwise (by
selecting "save as" from the menu bar -- typing "save" will overwrite
without prompting), I would have had to start from scratch and wind my
way once more through all the nonsensical contortions required by the
game's plot, and there was no guarantee that I wouldn't encounter the
same bug again. That bug ended my dealings with Wrecked, but there were
other errors along the way. The voice was in first person, but would
occasionally slip into second person. Sometimes the game failed to
recognize rather important objects. In one supremely frustrating
section, the game adamantly refused to recognize the word "keyhole,"
despite a promiently featured keyhole in the location; it responded to
all commands along the lines of "put key in keyhole" with "I can't put
anything inside the small key." In short, between the bugs, the parser,
the hype, and the lack of any kind of logic, Wrecked wasn't a lot of
fun, and it's not likely to win many converts to ADRIFT. No matter how
many times it insists that ADRIFT rocks.
Rating: 4.0
Twisting the knife even further is the fact that all of these paragraphs
are very, very badly written. Missing commas, misspellings, incorrect
words, sentence fragments, misplaced modifiers, and many more errors
make appearances over and over and over again. Here, I'll choose an
example at random: "If knowledge of how the Chinese navigated had
reached the West research in this field may not have preceded." Even if
we ignore the fact that there should definitely be a comma between
"West" and "research", we are still left with the question: preceded
what?
This file has nothing to offer as IF. Its writing is difficult,
sometimes impossible, to understand. It might make an interesting
pamphlet, if somebody who is fluent in English gave it a major editorial
overhaul. What it's doing in an interactive fiction competition remains
an unanswered question.
Rating: 1.1
So playing OTOS wasn't something I enjoyed. However, it occurs to me
that a program like this has the potential to be an excellent beta-
testing tool, precisely because it is so brainless. In fact, I tried
feeding it a little bit of information from Being Andrew Plotkin, and it
found a bug almost instantly! (You can pick up the copier in the initial
scene. Who knew?) In its current form, this game still wouldn't even be
all that useful for that purpose, because it expects output in much too
rigid a form, and because it is ill adapted to sudden changes in
circumstance, or even to things like finding objects inside other
objects. Still, it might catch a few things that humans wouldn't catch,
because most humans (Michael Kinyon and a few blessed others excepted)
wouldn't think to try the sort of senseless commands that OTOS attempts.
In the past few years, the last comp game I've played has always been
one of the best entries in the entire competition. 2000 broke that
streak, but it also established the greatest volume of quality output
I've ever seen in an IF comp. Even many of the games that I didn't
personally care for, I found interesting or worthy as ideas. So perhaps
it's appropriate that my long and frantic road of judging ends with this
game, whose idea is so daring and out there that I can't help but
respect it a little, even though it didn't really show me a good time.
Rating: 3.1
WRECKED by Campbell Wild
There are several points in Wrecked where the game collars you to
proclaim just how awesome its development system is. For example, you
meet someone who (surprise surprise!) just happens to be coding an
ADRIFT game on a nearby computer. Ask her about it, and she'll say to
you, "I'm making an ADRIFT adventure. I've tried using Inform, TADS and
Hugo, but I'd say ADRIFT is by far the best." In another location, you
can gain some points with the command "write graffiti," something I
would never have thought to do without the handy walkthrough to prod me.
The graffiti the game chooses to write? "ADRIFT rocks!" Apparently,
Wrecked suspects that its own merits are not enough to convince you of
ADRIFT's supremacy, but that if it just shouts slogans at you once in a
while, that might do the trick. For me, the former was true, but the
latter, predictably, was not. I've already catalogued the shortcomings
of ADRIFT in my review of Marooned, so I don't see the need to rehash
them here -- the bottom line is that ADRIFT isn't a bad system overall,
and has some nifty features to recommend it, but its parser (which is
MORE IMPORTANT THAN NIFTY FEATURES) is substandard, its model world
needs work, and it's still lacking in key functions like UNDO and
SCRIPT. A random NPC might think it beats Inform, TADS, and Hugo, but a
quick conversation with this NPC demonstrates that her powers of
discernment are, after all, rather limited. The game's self-hyping
moments are offputting, as it would have been if Graham Nelson had
chosen to have "Inform RUELZ!" scribbled on the side of the house in
Curses, or if the spaceship in Deep Space Drifter had been named the USS
TADS Is Supreme.
WHAT-IF? by David Ledgard
"What-IF?" is an excellent name for this zcode file. The only one I can
think of that would fit as well would be "Where's the IF?" Here's what
happens when you run this file: you get a menu, asking you to select an
"alternatate" history from a list of seven choices. When you make a
selection, What-IF? spits out several screensful of text and then brings
you back to the menu. That's it. No prompt (other than the menu prompt),
no PC, no locations, no objects, really no game at all. Talk about your
puzzleless IF!
ON THE OTHER SIDE by Antonio Márquez Marín as Lumpi
Here we have what has to be the most audacious game idea in the 2000 IF
competition. OTOS reverses the typical roles of game and player -- it
asks you where it is, what it can see, and where the exits are, and
then issues you a command based on that information. Then you're
supposed to respond to the command, then it gives you another command,
etc. -- the game takes the role of the player and the player takes the
role of the game. Now this is a gutsy idea. Crazy, but gutsy. It blurs
the line between the pleasures of playing IF and the pleasures of
writing IF in ways that weren't a lot of fun to experience, but might
make excellent fodder for an entry to that academic journal that Dennis
Jerz has posted about once or twice in the last few months. I was
initially so taken aback by the idea that I just kept feeding blank
lines to the game -- its response commands were along the lines of
"scream", "sleep", "xyzzy", and finally, "quit." Then, trying to get
into the spirit of things, I typed "Kensington Gardens" and a bit more
Trinity stuff from memory. The game, to my surprise, did not follow a
pre-scripted routine, but tried things like "open Gardens" and "talk to
Gardens" and such -- still fairly nonsensical, but at least somewhat
adapted to what I had typed. In fact, it appears I could have done some
fancier stuff, but I found the instruction manual (not to mention what
few other sentences the game provided) pretty incomprehensible, so I
didn't even try it. Even if I had, though, I think I would still have
quickly found myself bored, because the game so radically alters the
balance I'm used to feeling when playing IF. Now that I was in the
position of outputting the majority of the text, knowing that the only
one listening was a brainless automaton, the whole thing started to feel
like a major waste of time.
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