Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction (More info?)
My reviews for the IFComp 2004. I didn't get round to playing all the games
but I got a fair few of them done. The reviews are split into three files.
This is part two.
"The Big Scoop" by Johan Berntsson [5]
"I Must Play" by Geoff FortyTwo [5]
"Who Created The Monster?" by N. B. Horvath [5]
"Splashdown" by Paul J. Furio [5]
"Kurusu City" by Kevin Venzke [4]
"Identity" by Dave Bernazzani [4]
"Murder At The Aero Club" by Penny Wyatt [3]
"Typo" by Peter Seebach, Kevin Lynn, and Flavorplex [3]
Game: The Big Scoop
Author: Johan Berntsson
I have to admit that I didn't warm to this game at first and I actually came
very close to quitting within the first few minutes. But after a while I
seemed to quite get hooked into the storyline, minimal though it isz.
It started, not very impressively, with the player waking up in an apartment
which lacks descriptions for a whole load of items and for those that do
have descriptions, they're often nothing to shout about. I wandered about
the apartment, trying to pick things up, examine things and generally
getting a feel for the game. At the time I didn't like it much. It seemed
pretty uninspired stuff and the writing, while adequate, was never anything
special. Then the police beat down the door and in a line or two of text I
was told I had been arrested and sent to prison for a crime I didn't commit.
I almost gave up then but, as I'd only been playing a couple of minutes at
the time, I decided I'd persevere and give it another go. This time I found
a few more things I hadn't the first time and even thought I might succeed
in getting out of the apartment before the police showed up as I discovered
a window I could open and a tree outside that I thought I should be able to
jump to. But no such luck. The police broke into the apartment, saw me in
the tree and promptly arrested me again and threw me in prison for a crime I
didn't commit.
The third time I hit pay dirt. I won't tell you how because that would
pretty much spoil the puzzle for any potential players and it's a fairly
decent puzzle.
Once I was out of the apartment, the game opened up properly. There was a
switch from the starting character to another one, a reporter, which
unfortunately wasn't very well done. Reading a letter sent to her by the
starting character led the two to a meeting. Conversation with the starting
character was poorly done in that I wasn't actually able to converse with
her at all, but instead I had to sit there meekly and just type "wait" a few
times until she told me what she wanted.
Was the game any good? I'm in two minds. It wasn't very well written and the
characters had so little depth that they might as well have been made of
cardboard, but there was a nice balance as far as the difficulty factor was
concerned. Aside from the opening sequence where it seems you die far too
quickly and far too often for my liking, the rest of the game had the
difficulty set just right. A number of times I came up against problems that
I couldn't for the life of me figure a way of bypassing but after spending
some time thinking about it, it was obvious what needed doing. This isn't a
game weighed down by unnecessary objects and if you happen to find a hose in
one location and a chair in another, it's a sure bet that you're going to
need both of them before too much longer.
On the down side, there are a considerable number of locations that seem to
have been added for the sake of it. They tend to be a line or two long
description-wise and contain nothing to do. A smaller, more compact area
might have been a better idea.
My main quibble would be with the hints system. Now I generally try and shy
away from using the hints until I get really stuck with a game or, in the
case of a game I'm trying to finish in two hours to meet the Comp
requirements, until I feel that I definitely need to look at the hints to
get me past a point that otherwise I might still be struggling with at the
two hour stage. The only problem here is that some of the information you
need to actually progress through the game - namely driving about and
questioning people about various topics - can only be accessed through the
hints system. A much better idea might have been to have the information in
a separate README file or neatly displayed at the start of the game. Of
course, it could be argued that this is information you could figure out for
yourself but I still think it would have been better to give the player this
information right from the start and not accessible via the hints menu.
In conclusion this was a game which fell somewhere between good and bad. The
descriptions were too sparse and the writing lacked depth, but set against
that was the nice difficulty balance I commented on before and the fact that
the game moves along at a decent pace once you get past the overly hard
opening sequence. With more serious polish applied, this might be a fairly
decent game.
5 out of 10
Game: I Must Play
Author: Geoff FortyTwo
This game put me off initially. The intro - you're a kid who hasn't been
able to play any arcade games all day because the big kids have hogged the
machines and not given you the chance - just made me groan. It seemed… I
don't know… corny? But I decided to give it a go and hope I was wrong.
Fortunately the game improves considerably after the poor start. I wandered
round the arcade, didn't manage to play much, tried to leave, discovered I
couldn't and returned. At this point I was a bit disheartened so I cheated
and peeked at the walkthrough. (Hey, it was either that or just quit. I
think I'd played something like half a dozen games in a row before this one
and they'd all been awful so while looking at the walkthrough this early was
hardly sporting, at least it saved me from quitting.) I discovered a few
things to do and even managed to start playing a game.
And that's where I Must Play starts properly for each of the games you play
are a mini game within the game itself. Nice idea. Not as well implemented
as it could have been, however, as the first game I played seemed to consist
of typing out pretty much identical commands again and again until something
more interesting happened. As puzzles go, this was well thought out but as
far as thrilling game play was concerned, it was a bit of a wash. Not to
worry. Onto the second game. This was a little better but seemed very short
and precious little happened. Onto the third one…
And so on.
I struggled to find enthusiasm for the game most of the time. All the games
you get to play are short and not terribly inspired and I felt this, more
than anything, was a big disappointment. The basic idea behind the game is a
good one and it could have resulted in a game that was something quite
remarkable but the way it has been put together is poor. The variety of the
games themselves is good yet the games themselves just aren't interesting
enough in their own right to keep your attention for long enough.
The writing is good, the coding is good and there are precious few bugs. I
hit a potential flaw with my first conversation piece with a kid called Eric
after I asked him about games in general and he responded as if I'd asked
him about a specific game but this was a minor point. In fact, Eric was a
particularly poor conversation piece. Most of his responses to questions
about specific games was that they were linked to other games. Hmmm…
Nice idea. Poor implementation. A second version of this game might be a
good idea with some of the mini-games reworked to make them a little more
appealing. All in all, there was the makings of a good game here but I just
felt bored as I played it disappointed that something better couldn't have
been made of it.
5 out of 10
Game: Who Created The Monster?
Author: N. B. Horvath
Ever play a game that starts and doesn't give you a clue as to what it's
about? Well, Who Created The Monster? is one such game. The title made me
think it was some kind of fantasy game or perhaps something along the
Frankenstein line with the player off to discover who made the big guy with
the bolt through his neck, but in fact you play a journalist in the future
trying to discover… well, I'm not sure really. Something to do with the past
and Saddam Hussein and which Western nation brought him to power. Even after
I'd played through half of the game, I was still wondering just what it was
about or why my character was so interested in this story.
It's a nice enough game though. The first location - referred to as the
"McDonald's of Baghdad" - convinced me I was playing a comedy game but the
rest is perfectly serious. There are a fair few locations, all reasonably
well described without being overly detailed. There's a kind of charm to
some of the locations which adds considerably to the game's playability.
Although there are strange things as well that don't do the playability
factor, or any kind of realism, any favours. A terrorist appears randomly in
one location and makes several not very successful attempts to kill me.
Despite being shot by him on one occasion, I was still able to shoot him
back whereupon he disappeared in a puff of smoke. Does this sort of thing
happen in real life? I can't say as I've ever noticed it but then I've never
actually shot at, and been shot by, a terrorist so I guess I could be
mistaken. Stranger still, the terrorist, or maybe just an identical version,
pops up in the same location later on and attacks me once more. And the last
strange thing about the terrorist? Well, there's a guard standing right by
the terrorist as he's busy trying to shoot me but he seems pretty
unconcerned by this brutal turn of events and doesn't try to help me out at
all. Definitely strange. And don't even get me started on the question of
just why this terrorist is trying to shoot me, or why the police don't show
up and arrest him (or me for shooting him) or how I can wander around with a
bullet hole in me and yet be strangely unaffected…
Making progress is fairly easy once you've got your bearings. Talk to a few
people, try a few commands which you figure should work, and you're away. I
got quite a way before I resorted to the walkthrough and even then I was
convinced (maybe wrongly as it happens) that I could have got quite a bit
further if I'd tried harder.
Parts of the game smack of laziness. There are several embassies you can
visit, all of which seem pretty much identical in appearance: there's the
main entrance, a room above where the ambassador sits, and a room below with
a locker where a guard is watching TV. Definite laziness occurs with the
room below as if you open the locker in one location, it's open in the
others as well. It's also a little jarring seeing the same location
displayed in the basement of each embassy and I felt that some variation
would have worked wonders.
Overall Who Created The Monster? is a nice enough game which doesn't really
explain things and just leaves the player to pretty much figure it out for
himself. Several things in the game - the terrorist being the main one -
make no sense and I was also curious as to why my journalist starts the game
not armed with any kind of journalist tools but instead a rifle, and one
with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bullets to boot. On top of that,
there were messages that flash up on screen from time to time with snippets
of world history in them. The first time I saw one of these, it was tagged
onto the end of a location description and I assumed it referred to the
location in question. Not so. It was an interesting means of conveying
information about the game but I was never really sure if it meant anything
or was just designed as filler.
5 out of 10
Game: Splashdown
Author: Paul J. Furio
This was fairly decent although as with a lot of the games in the IFComp, it
also had a number of problems with it that I felt let it down somewhat.
Splashdown is set aboard a spaceship on which you, along with 499 others,
are a colonist on your way to a bigger, better, brighter world. In theory
anyway. In practice, the spaceship has just started to run into a few
problems and you, as it would happen, are the only one of the 500 colonists
who has awakened. So the job of saving everyone falls squarely on your
shoulders.
This isn't an original idea - and indeed I seem to think I might have played
something similar to it a few years back - but it's not a bad idea all told.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch that only the player has awakened out of
a potential 500 possible awakeners but I guess it just wouldn't be the same
if there was a couple hundred of you running around. There'd also be a lot
less to do.
Making progress to begin with is an easy enough process. You struggle your
way out of your cryotube - a favourite toy of science fiction novels for
decades - and make your first cursory steps around the damaged spaceship.
Two of the first items I stumbled across - some bolts and metal scraps -
couldn't be examined which didn't fill me with a whole lot of enthusiasm for
the rest of the game, but as pretty much everything else seems to have been
covered past that point, I'm guessing they were an anomaly and easily
forgiven. Further on your travels you come across a helpful robot called
Spider who happily accompanies you along and can be used to repair things
that are a bit beyond your own capabilities.
The first problem I encountered was in relation to a computer. Despite a
sheet of paper giving instructions on how to get it to work, I still
struggled with the guess the verb specifics. A list of options is displayed
after you type "computer, display help screen" but after that it becomes
rather more confusing. Picking a few of the things from the help screen and
putting computer and a comma before them didn't produce any meaningful
response and it wasn't long before I was weakening to the temptation to look
at the walkthrough. Yes, a walkthrough, something so many games in this Comp
have required but which so few seem to have included. There seemed to be
quite a bit of exact verb usage with the commands as far as the computer was
concerned which was a hassle to say the least. In the end, rather than
trying to figure out which commands needed typing in, I just typed them word
for word from the walkthrough. Problem solved. It's kind of disappointing
that I had to resort to the walkthrough there as I was enjoying the game up
to that point but either the puzzle with the computer was too hard for me
(very probable considering how often I find myself getting stuck in modern
IF games) or I'm just not the patient sort who wants to sit there for an
eternity trying to figure them out. In any case, if I'd struggled with the
computer for as long as it took to figure out what I needed to type to get
any further (assuming I ever did hit upon the right solution), I imagine I'd
still have been stuck there when the two hour deadline rolled round. So
cheating here, as far as I'm concerned, was justified.
All in all, not a bad game. I didn't play to the end but it'll certainly be
one game I'll be coming back to in the future to see if I can finish it off.
5 out of 10
Game: Kurusu City
Author: Kevn Venzke
I have to confess to not being very impressed with this game. While there's
nothing terrible with it, at the same time there's nothing very good about
it either. It's just a fairly average and uninspired game that seems to fall
somewhere between good and bad.
The storyline didn't say much to me to begin with. You, Miki Maeda, a
schoolgirl, have decided to overthrow the robots who rule over Kurusu City.
How you're going to go about this isn't stated and as you start the game
without a single weapon to hand it's unlikely brute force is going to
achieve much. Handled better, this might have been an amusing intro to the
game as a single schoolgirl strives valiantly to overthrow a robot
dictatorship but here it was handled poorly and the feeling I got afterwards
was that the idea was perhaps hit upon on the spur of the moment.
Your apartment is a sparsely described place. The bathroom description is a
couple of lines long and none of the normal things you might expect to find
in a bathroom - bath, sink, shower, cabinets, etc - can be interacted with
meaningfully, although examining the bath does for some reason tell me that
there's nothing special about the shower.
Move from the apartment and you find yourself in Kurusu City proper.
Unfortunately it's not a very interesting place. All the streets are
labelled as "city street" and the descriptions of them are nothing to write
home about. The same lack of decent descriptions bugs most of the locations
in the game. You're often told what you can see with no flair applied to the
descriptions which does not make for a very riveting read.
The score is a strange one. It starts at a lowly 0 and can go as high as 7
(although I didn't have the patience to get beyond a 2 myself despite over
an hour spent on the game) and seems to be awarded for things like skipping
out of school (+1 point) but not for destroying a robot in the showers. As
the whole aim of the game is to free Kurusu City from the robots, I'd have
thought destroying one of them would have counted for quite a bit more than
playing truant.
Conversation is poorly handled. It's not possible (at least as far as I
discovered) to ask questions of the NPCs you meet and instead you just type
"talk to [name]" and the game takes over and says something for you. This
isn't a satisfying way of handling conversation at all and isn't helped much
by the fact that quite often you end up saying pretty silly things (talking
to the nurse produces the response from the player of "you're curvy!" As the
main character is female this is a kind of strange thing to say.)
Conversations are also repeated so it's possible to speak to people multiple
times and get the exact same response each time. I'm not going to harp on
about mimesis breaking here but this sort of thing doesn't speak well for
the realism of the NPCs.
Hints for the game come supplied in a README file but as these are all in
code (albeit an easy one) I didn't bother with them. Personally I've never
seen the point of putting the hints in code, especially if they're in a
separate file. If you've opened up the file knowing it to be a hints file
then surely it stands to reason that you want to see the hints? Coding them
is just likely to annoy people. It did me anyway.
Realism clearly wasn't applied to this game and the way it plays often gave
me the impression the writer was trying for a comedy game, although if so he
didn't succeed very well because there's nothing comical going on here.
There are several instances of trying to walk in a certain direction outside
the Authority Tower and being zapped by a robot, knocked unconscious,
awaking, and then being able to do the same thing again and again. On a
couple of occasions, I found myself moved from the Authority Tower to my
school; the second of these dumped me into a maths class whereby I was
unable to leave or answer a simple question and instead had to sit there and
wait a countless amount of times before more robots turned up and, for some
reason that wasn't explained at the time, promptly threw me in jail. Several
moves later I died.
At that stage I was just about ready to quit anyway so after being blasted
by the robot passing by my jail cell, I decided to blast this game out and
try something else.
4 out of 10
Game: Identity
Author: Dave Bernazzani
Games starting in cryotubes seem to be a fave amongst IF writers for this
year's Comp as this is the second one in a row I've played. I wonder what
the fascination is? Hey, if you see one called The Cryotube Game in next
year's IFComp, you'll know I've succumbed to the urge.
Identity has you, the player, awakening in his cryotube as, yes you guessed
it, an emergency has begun and the spaceship is on the verge of being
destroyed. Kind of makes you wonder why anyone in their right mind would
ever set foot inside a cryotube… Your aim is, basically, to survive.
So out of the cryotube you go. Or not as the case may be. Getting out of the
cryotube highlights one of this game's annoying flaws: tedious puzzles. No
simple "open cryotube" or "unlock cryotube" here. Examining the cryotube
informs me that it's still latched but not even "unlatch cryotube" will
work. Now if there's one thing I've never been especially fond of in IF
games, it's ones that start you in a locked first location and you have to
really struggle to escape. It just seems so… oh, I dunno… boring. Give the
player something nice and easy to begin with, to make them play your game
and perhaps even enjoy it. Don't hit them with a boring puzzle from the word
go and expect them to thank you for it.
I almost quit. Almost. But in the end I had a look at the hints and just
typed in the commands from there to get me out of the cryotube. Cheating?
Yes. But then this review wouldn't have been very complimentary if all I'd
had to base it on was the first location. Does that justify cheating? I'll
let someone else decide.
Once out of the cryotube, I expected the game to open up a bit more.
Unfortunately I was disappointed. I'm in another locked location (or two
locked locations this time actually) and faced with another struggle to get
any further. Back to the hints. In all fairness, getting out of this set of
locations and to the escape pod (another locked location!) isn't that hard
and even for someone who's never been much good at puzzles I doubt it would
have presented too many problems. But - and here's the real kicker - I just
couldn't find the willpower to explore all the options that would have led
me to the escape pod. I've never liked games that you have to literally claw
your way out of one location only to find yourself in another location
that's equally as hard to get out of. It's just not the sort of thing I've
ever been fond of.
So while I can appreciate that this game is reasonably well written and has
a couple of good puzzles to its name - the one with the goat is a nice one
to say the least - I just couldn't find any kind of enthusiasm for it. I
play these sort of games for enjoyment value and, to me anyway, a struggle
to simply leave the start location is too much like hard work for my tastes.
4 out of 10
Game: Murder At The Aero Club
Author: Penny Wyatt
I have to admit that when I saw the title of this game, the first thing that
went through my mind was that it was a game about somebody being murdered at
a club for chocolate bars. I'm not quite sure why I thought that but it made
me chuckle for a bit. Unfortunately the rest of the game just made me groan.
It's a detective game alright. Some poor unfortunate has got himself offed
at the local Aero Club - which isn't, as I originally thought, anything to
do with chocolate bars but instead a club where a lot of people who fly
aeroplanes like to hang out. You have to discover why the poor unfortunate
was murdered and bring his killer to justice. Piece o' cake.
It starts off promising. Nice introduction, decent style of writing and even
a reasonable amount of depth. But as soon as the intro has finished and you
start the game proper, the flaws begin to show through. Virtually no items
have descriptions which is never the hallmark of a good game. Standing in a
garden outside the Aero Club, I'm unable to examine the walls, front door,
the club itself, the path I'm standing on or any of the aircraft nearby.
This same lack of care bogs down the rest of the game and most locations
contain at least a few items that can't be examined despite the fact that
you can see them clearly. In a detective game - which is supposed to be
about carefully studying your environment for potential clues - this is
especially bad.
One nice touch is a notebook you carry with you in which you make notes
about the murder as you move around the game. Well, I say nice touch but it
doesn't really work. Notes get added about very strange things indeed. I
examined a few planes and found notes in my notebook, despite the fact that
at the time I examined them I had no way of knowing what relevance, if any,
they had to the murder. Yet later on I found a torque with some bloodstains
on it which for some reason wasn't considered important enough to warrant a
place in my notebook. At about the same time I questioned some fellow and
got a very suspicious response when I asked him a question about an
inspector who had come visiting the Aero Club, but that, too, didn't warrant
an entry in my notebook.
Conversation is handled in the unhelpful "ask [someone] about [something]"
format which has never been a favourite of mine. Here it's not quite as bad
as I was able to get a response to several different subjects - always a
nice thing - but little care has been made to make the NPCs seem like real
believable people as opposed to cardboard cutouts with a few programmed
responses. They repeat the same phrases over and over again and seem to show
little annoyance about being questioned on the same subject a dozen times or
more. It's also not helped much by the fact that asking certain people
questions about different subjects gives the same response.
In the Club itself (free of chocolate bars alas), I came across more
annoyances. One NPC is busy doing some flight planning and despite the fact
that I'm a detective here to investigate a murder, I'm told when trying to
question him that he's busy so I probably shouldn't disturb him. Er… what?
By rights, the whole place should be cordoned off and the residents
questioned one by one until the murderer is brought to justice but here we
have someone who I can't even question because he's busy? No wonder so many
killers go free if all they have to do to escape justice is pretend to be
busy…
If all that sounds bad, wait till you step into the office and encounter
some truly appalling game writing. Examine the bin and you'll be told
there's some junk inside. Examine the junk and - guess what - "you can't see
any such thing". Trying to empty the bin results in a wonderful message "the
rubbish bin can't contain things" even though there's some non-examinable
rubbish inside it! And what about the noticeboard which contains notices and
announcements which you can't even read!
I gave up then. I'd like to think I was fair with this game and gave it a
decent chance to impress me but there were so many things wrong with it that
it really should never have been entered into the IFComp in the first place.
I'll grudgingly admit that the writing was better than I'd normally expect
to see in a game where everything else is so bad but that's the only
positive thing I'm saying. It's also the only reason why I'm giving this
game a 3 and not a 1 which is what it would otherwise have received.
3 out of 10
Game: Typo
Author: Peter Seebach, Kevin Lynn, and Flavorplex
Sometimes you play a game which just turns you right off from the word go.
Unfortunately this was one of them.
I'm not entirely sure what the game is about as the introduction doesn't
really say, but the gist of it seems to be that you're some kind of test
subject for a new project which can fix typos. If that is what the game is
about then it's surely got to rate as one of the worst settings I've ever
come across for a game. If not, well… a nice introduction which actually
stated a few things would have been much appreciated. I've never been a big
fan of games that I start playing without a clue as to what I'm even doing.
So the game begins. I'm in a room with nothing much to see or do. I wander
along to the south and the first thing I try to examine - a cabinet - isn't
even there. Ouch! Not a good way to start the game. After a bit more
wandering I was told the test had started properly and a machine appeared
before me in the middle of the chamber. A machine with lots of things
attached to it and things to examine and interact with and… and there I felt
my interest just waning. It isn't that I don't like puzzles - I do (most of
the time anyway). It's just that the ones here are presented in such an
uninteresting manner that it's hard to sustain any kind of interest. Games
are supposed to be fun. This is anything but. There are a couple of hoses
which need to be connected to various parts of the machine; there's a thin
wire which also needs putting somewhere; there's a manual which might
potentially have made this part of the game a little more interesting but
it's so poorly implemented that it doesn't. The idea behind the manual is
that you look up topics in it relating to the machine and it gives you a
helping hand. In theory anyway. In practice, it took me several attempts to
find anything potentially useful. It's further complicated by the fact that
you have to type "look up white hose in manual" to get it to work instead of
"look up white hose" which might be a minor point to raise, but it's one
that annoyed me no end and resulted in a lot more typing than was really
necessary.
One thing about the game that struck me as a good idea, though one that
doesn't really work that well, is the correction facility. You type in a
command that's wrong and the facility jumps in and corrects it to what it
believes you typed. Now if this worked perfectly it would be an ingenious
little tool but as it often corrects words that were right in the first
place it's a bit of a wasted effort. Nice idea but nothing more.
All in all, I'd have liked to have made a better go at this game to see what
happens when the machine is up and running but as it comes without a
walkthrough (and the hints file is especially poor) I just gave up.
Performing a multitude of tedious actions designed to get a strange machine
to work might have seemed like a good idea on paper but in an actual game
it's slightly less interesting than the science classes I was forced to
attend as a schoolboy. It's certainly not the sort of thing I'd ever want to
see in a text adventure.
3 out of 10
My reviews for the IFComp 2004. I didn't get round to playing all the games
but I got a fair few of them done. The reviews are split into three files.
This is part two.
"The Big Scoop" by Johan Berntsson [5]
"I Must Play" by Geoff FortyTwo [5]
"Who Created The Monster?" by N. B. Horvath [5]
"Splashdown" by Paul J. Furio [5]
"Kurusu City" by Kevin Venzke [4]
"Identity" by Dave Bernazzani [4]
"Murder At The Aero Club" by Penny Wyatt [3]
"Typo" by Peter Seebach, Kevin Lynn, and Flavorplex [3]
Game: The Big Scoop
Author: Johan Berntsson
I have to admit that I didn't warm to this game at first and I actually came
very close to quitting within the first few minutes. But after a while I
seemed to quite get hooked into the storyline, minimal though it isz.
It started, not very impressively, with the player waking up in an apartment
which lacks descriptions for a whole load of items and for those that do
have descriptions, they're often nothing to shout about. I wandered about
the apartment, trying to pick things up, examine things and generally
getting a feel for the game. At the time I didn't like it much. It seemed
pretty uninspired stuff and the writing, while adequate, was never anything
special. Then the police beat down the door and in a line or two of text I
was told I had been arrested and sent to prison for a crime I didn't commit.
I almost gave up then but, as I'd only been playing a couple of minutes at
the time, I decided I'd persevere and give it another go. This time I found
a few more things I hadn't the first time and even thought I might succeed
in getting out of the apartment before the police showed up as I discovered
a window I could open and a tree outside that I thought I should be able to
jump to. But no such luck. The police broke into the apartment, saw me in
the tree and promptly arrested me again and threw me in prison for a crime I
didn't commit.
The third time I hit pay dirt. I won't tell you how because that would
pretty much spoil the puzzle for any potential players and it's a fairly
decent puzzle.
Once I was out of the apartment, the game opened up properly. There was a
switch from the starting character to another one, a reporter, which
unfortunately wasn't very well done. Reading a letter sent to her by the
starting character led the two to a meeting. Conversation with the starting
character was poorly done in that I wasn't actually able to converse with
her at all, but instead I had to sit there meekly and just type "wait" a few
times until she told me what she wanted.
Was the game any good? I'm in two minds. It wasn't very well written and the
characters had so little depth that they might as well have been made of
cardboard, but there was a nice balance as far as the difficulty factor was
concerned. Aside from the opening sequence where it seems you die far too
quickly and far too often for my liking, the rest of the game had the
difficulty set just right. A number of times I came up against problems that
I couldn't for the life of me figure a way of bypassing but after spending
some time thinking about it, it was obvious what needed doing. This isn't a
game weighed down by unnecessary objects and if you happen to find a hose in
one location and a chair in another, it's a sure bet that you're going to
need both of them before too much longer.
On the down side, there are a considerable number of locations that seem to
have been added for the sake of it. They tend to be a line or two long
description-wise and contain nothing to do. A smaller, more compact area
might have been a better idea.
My main quibble would be with the hints system. Now I generally try and shy
away from using the hints until I get really stuck with a game or, in the
case of a game I'm trying to finish in two hours to meet the Comp
requirements, until I feel that I definitely need to look at the hints to
get me past a point that otherwise I might still be struggling with at the
two hour stage. The only problem here is that some of the information you
need to actually progress through the game - namely driving about and
questioning people about various topics - can only be accessed through the
hints system. A much better idea might have been to have the information in
a separate README file or neatly displayed at the start of the game. Of
course, it could be argued that this is information you could figure out for
yourself but I still think it would have been better to give the player this
information right from the start and not accessible via the hints menu.
In conclusion this was a game which fell somewhere between good and bad. The
descriptions were too sparse and the writing lacked depth, but set against
that was the nice difficulty balance I commented on before and the fact that
the game moves along at a decent pace once you get past the overly hard
opening sequence. With more serious polish applied, this might be a fairly
decent game.
5 out of 10
Game: I Must Play
Author: Geoff FortyTwo
This game put me off initially. The intro - you're a kid who hasn't been
able to play any arcade games all day because the big kids have hogged the
machines and not given you the chance - just made me groan. It seemed… I
don't know… corny? But I decided to give it a go and hope I was wrong.
Fortunately the game improves considerably after the poor start. I wandered
round the arcade, didn't manage to play much, tried to leave, discovered I
couldn't and returned. At this point I was a bit disheartened so I cheated
and peeked at the walkthrough. (Hey, it was either that or just quit. I
think I'd played something like half a dozen games in a row before this one
and they'd all been awful so while looking at the walkthrough this early was
hardly sporting, at least it saved me from quitting.) I discovered a few
things to do and even managed to start playing a game.
And that's where I Must Play starts properly for each of the games you play
are a mini game within the game itself. Nice idea. Not as well implemented
as it could have been, however, as the first game I played seemed to consist
of typing out pretty much identical commands again and again until something
more interesting happened. As puzzles go, this was well thought out but as
far as thrilling game play was concerned, it was a bit of a wash. Not to
worry. Onto the second game. This was a little better but seemed very short
and precious little happened. Onto the third one…
And so on.
I struggled to find enthusiasm for the game most of the time. All the games
you get to play are short and not terribly inspired and I felt this, more
than anything, was a big disappointment. The basic idea behind the game is a
good one and it could have resulted in a game that was something quite
remarkable but the way it has been put together is poor. The variety of the
games themselves is good yet the games themselves just aren't interesting
enough in their own right to keep your attention for long enough.
The writing is good, the coding is good and there are precious few bugs. I
hit a potential flaw with my first conversation piece with a kid called Eric
after I asked him about games in general and he responded as if I'd asked
him about a specific game but this was a minor point. In fact, Eric was a
particularly poor conversation piece. Most of his responses to questions
about specific games was that they were linked to other games. Hmmm…
Nice idea. Poor implementation. A second version of this game might be a
good idea with some of the mini-games reworked to make them a little more
appealing. All in all, there was the makings of a good game here but I just
felt bored as I played it disappointed that something better couldn't have
been made of it.
5 out of 10
Game: Who Created The Monster?
Author: N. B. Horvath
Ever play a game that starts and doesn't give you a clue as to what it's
about? Well, Who Created The Monster? is one such game. The title made me
think it was some kind of fantasy game or perhaps something along the
Frankenstein line with the player off to discover who made the big guy with
the bolt through his neck, but in fact you play a journalist in the future
trying to discover… well, I'm not sure really. Something to do with the past
and Saddam Hussein and which Western nation brought him to power. Even after
I'd played through half of the game, I was still wondering just what it was
about or why my character was so interested in this story.
It's a nice enough game though. The first location - referred to as the
"McDonald's of Baghdad" - convinced me I was playing a comedy game but the
rest is perfectly serious. There are a fair few locations, all reasonably
well described without being overly detailed. There's a kind of charm to
some of the locations which adds considerably to the game's playability.
Although there are strange things as well that don't do the playability
factor, or any kind of realism, any favours. A terrorist appears randomly in
one location and makes several not very successful attempts to kill me.
Despite being shot by him on one occasion, I was still able to shoot him
back whereupon he disappeared in a puff of smoke. Does this sort of thing
happen in real life? I can't say as I've ever noticed it but then I've never
actually shot at, and been shot by, a terrorist so I guess I could be
mistaken. Stranger still, the terrorist, or maybe just an identical version,
pops up in the same location later on and attacks me once more. And the last
strange thing about the terrorist? Well, there's a guard standing right by
the terrorist as he's busy trying to shoot me but he seems pretty
unconcerned by this brutal turn of events and doesn't try to help me out at
all. Definitely strange. And don't even get me started on the question of
just why this terrorist is trying to shoot me, or why the police don't show
up and arrest him (or me for shooting him) or how I can wander around with a
bullet hole in me and yet be strangely unaffected…
Making progress is fairly easy once you've got your bearings. Talk to a few
people, try a few commands which you figure should work, and you're away. I
got quite a way before I resorted to the walkthrough and even then I was
convinced (maybe wrongly as it happens) that I could have got quite a bit
further if I'd tried harder.
Parts of the game smack of laziness. There are several embassies you can
visit, all of which seem pretty much identical in appearance: there's the
main entrance, a room above where the ambassador sits, and a room below with
a locker where a guard is watching TV. Definite laziness occurs with the
room below as if you open the locker in one location, it's open in the
others as well. It's also a little jarring seeing the same location
displayed in the basement of each embassy and I felt that some variation
would have worked wonders.
Overall Who Created The Monster? is a nice enough game which doesn't really
explain things and just leaves the player to pretty much figure it out for
himself. Several things in the game - the terrorist being the main one -
make no sense and I was also curious as to why my journalist starts the game
not armed with any kind of journalist tools but instead a rifle, and one
with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bullets to boot. On top of that,
there were messages that flash up on screen from time to time with snippets
of world history in them. The first time I saw one of these, it was tagged
onto the end of a location description and I assumed it referred to the
location in question. Not so. It was an interesting means of conveying
information about the game but I was never really sure if it meant anything
or was just designed as filler.
5 out of 10
Game: Splashdown
Author: Paul J. Furio
This was fairly decent although as with a lot of the games in the IFComp, it
also had a number of problems with it that I felt let it down somewhat.
Splashdown is set aboard a spaceship on which you, along with 499 others,
are a colonist on your way to a bigger, better, brighter world. In theory
anyway. In practice, the spaceship has just started to run into a few
problems and you, as it would happen, are the only one of the 500 colonists
who has awakened. So the job of saving everyone falls squarely on your
shoulders.
This isn't an original idea - and indeed I seem to think I might have played
something similar to it a few years back - but it's not a bad idea all told.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch that only the player has awakened out of
a potential 500 possible awakeners but I guess it just wouldn't be the same
if there was a couple hundred of you running around. There'd also be a lot
less to do.
Making progress to begin with is an easy enough process. You struggle your
way out of your cryotube - a favourite toy of science fiction novels for
decades - and make your first cursory steps around the damaged spaceship.
Two of the first items I stumbled across - some bolts and metal scraps -
couldn't be examined which didn't fill me with a whole lot of enthusiasm for
the rest of the game, but as pretty much everything else seems to have been
covered past that point, I'm guessing they were an anomaly and easily
forgiven. Further on your travels you come across a helpful robot called
Spider who happily accompanies you along and can be used to repair things
that are a bit beyond your own capabilities.
The first problem I encountered was in relation to a computer. Despite a
sheet of paper giving instructions on how to get it to work, I still
struggled with the guess the verb specifics. A list of options is displayed
after you type "computer, display help screen" but after that it becomes
rather more confusing. Picking a few of the things from the help screen and
putting computer and a comma before them didn't produce any meaningful
response and it wasn't long before I was weakening to the temptation to look
at the walkthrough. Yes, a walkthrough, something so many games in this Comp
have required but which so few seem to have included. There seemed to be
quite a bit of exact verb usage with the commands as far as the computer was
concerned which was a hassle to say the least. In the end, rather than
trying to figure out which commands needed typing in, I just typed them word
for word from the walkthrough. Problem solved. It's kind of disappointing
that I had to resort to the walkthrough there as I was enjoying the game up
to that point but either the puzzle with the computer was too hard for me
(very probable considering how often I find myself getting stuck in modern
IF games) or I'm just not the patient sort who wants to sit there for an
eternity trying to figure them out. In any case, if I'd struggled with the
computer for as long as it took to figure out what I needed to type to get
any further (assuming I ever did hit upon the right solution), I imagine I'd
still have been stuck there when the two hour deadline rolled round. So
cheating here, as far as I'm concerned, was justified.
All in all, not a bad game. I didn't play to the end but it'll certainly be
one game I'll be coming back to in the future to see if I can finish it off.
5 out of 10
Game: Kurusu City
Author: Kevn Venzke
I have to confess to not being very impressed with this game. While there's
nothing terrible with it, at the same time there's nothing very good about
it either. It's just a fairly average and uninspired game that seems to fall
somewhere between good and bad.
The storyline didn't say much to me to begin with. You, Miki Maeda, a
schoolgirl, have decided to overthrow the robots who rule over Kurusu City.
How you're going to go about this isn't stated and as you start the game
without a single weapon to hand it's unlikely brute force is going to
achieve much. Handled better, this might have been an amusing intro to the
game as a single schoolgirl strives valiantly to overthrow a robot
dictatorship but here it was handled poorly and the feeling I got afterwards
was that the idea was perhaps hit upon on the spur of the moment.
Your apartment is a sparsely described place. The bathroom description is a
couple of lines long and none of the normal things you might expect to find
in a bathroom - bath, sink, shower, cabinets, etc - can be interacted with
meaningfully, although examining the bath does for some reason tell me that
there's nothing special about the shower.
Move from the apartment and you find yourself in Kurusu City proper.
Unfortunately it's not a very interesting place. All the streets are
labelled as "city street" and the descriptions of them are nothing to write
home about. The same lack of decent descriptions bugs most of the locations
in the game. You're often told what you can see with no flair applied to the
descriptions which does not make for a very riveting read.
The score is a strange one. It starts at a lowly 0 and can go as high as 7
(although I didn't have the patience to get beyond a 2 myself despite over
an hour spent on the game) and seems to be awarded for things like skipping
out of school (+1 point) but not for destroying a robot in the showers. As
the whole aim of the game is to free Kurusu City from the robots, I'd have
thought destroying one of them would have counted for quite a bit more than
playing truant.
Conversation is poorly handled. It's not possible (at least as far as I
discovered) to ask questions of the NPCs you meet and instead you just type
"talk to [name]" and the game takes over and says something for you. This
isn't a satisfying way of handling conversation at all and isn't helped much
by the fact that quite often you end up saying pretty silly things (talking
to the nurse produces the response from the player of "you're curvy!" As the
main character is female this is a kind of strange thing to say.)
Conversations are also repeated so it's possible to speak to people multiple
times and get the exact same response each time. I'm not going to harp on
about mimesis breaking here but this sort of thing doesn't speak well for
the realism of the NPCs.
Hints for the game come supplied in a README file but as these are all in
code (albeit an easy one) I didn't bother with them. Personally I've never
seen the point of putting the hints in code, especially if they're in a
separate file. If you've opened up the file knowing it to be a hints file
then surely it stands to reason that you want to see the hints? Coding them
is just likely to annoy people. It did me anyway.
Realism clearly wasn't applied to this game and the way it plays often gave
me the impression the writer was trying for a comedy game, although if so he
didn't succeed very well because there's nothing comical going on here.
There are several instances of trying to walk in a certain direction outside
the Authority Tower and being zapped by a robot, knocked unconscious,
awaking, and then being able to do the same thing again and again. On a
couple of occasions, I found myself moved from the Authority Tower to my
school; the second of these dumped me into a maths class whereby I was
unable to leave or answer a simple question and instead had to sit there and
wait a countless amount of times before more robots turned up and, for some
reason that wasn't explained at the time, promptly threw me in jail. Several
moves later I died.
At that stage I was just about ready to quit anyway so after being blasted
by the robot passing by my jail cell, I decided to blast this game out and
try something else.
4 out of 10
Game: Identity
Author: Dave Bernazzani
Games starting in cryotubes seem to be a fave amongst IF writers for this
year's Comp as this is the second one in a row I've played. I wonder what
the fascination is? Hey, if you see one called The Cryotube Game in next
year's IFComp, you'll know I've succumbed to the urge.
Identity has you, the player, awakening in his cryotube as, yes you guessed
it, an emergency has begun and the spaceship is on the verge of being
destroyed. Kind of makes you wonder why anyone in their right mind would
ever set foot inside a cryotube… Your aim is, basically, to survive.
So out of the cryotube you go. Or not as the case may be. Getting out of the
cryotube highlights one of this game's annoying flaws: tedious puzzles. No
simple "open cryotube" or "unlock cryotube" here. Examining the cryotube
informs me that it's still latched but not even "unlatch cryotube" will
work. Now if there's one thing I've never been especially fond of in IF
games, it's ones that start you in a locked first location and you have to
really struggle to escape. It just seems so… oh, I dunno… boring. Give the
player something nice and easy to begin with, to make them play your game
and perhaps even enjoy it. Don't hit them with a boring puzzle from the word
go and expect them to thank you for it.
I almost quit. Almost. But in the end I had a look at the hints and just
typed in the commands from there to get me out of the cryotube. Cheating?
Yes. But then this review wouldn't have been very complimentary if all I'd
had to base it on was the first location. Does that justify cheating? I'll
let someone else decide.
Once out of the cryotube, I expected the game to open up a bit more.
Unfortunately I was disappointed. I'm in another locked location (or two
locked locations this time actually) and faced with another struggle to get
any further. Back to the hints. In all fairness, getting out of this set of
locations and to the escape pod (another locked location!) isn't that hard
and even for someone who's never been much good at puzzles I doubt it would
have presented too many problems. But - and here's the real kicker - I just
couldn't find the willpower to explore all the options that would have led
me to the escape pod. I've never liked games that you have to literally claw
your way out of one location only to find yourself in another location
that's equally as hard to get out of. It's just not the sort of thing I've
ever been fond of.
So while I can appreciate that this game is reasonably well written and has
a couple of good puzzles to its name - the one with the goat is a nice one
to say the least - I just couldn't find any kind of enthusiasm for it. I
play these sort of games for enjoyment value and, to me anyway, a struggle
to simply leave the start location is too much like hard work for my tastes.
4 out of 10
Game: Murder At The Aero Club
Author: Penny Wyatt
I have to admit that when I saw the title of this game, the first thing that
went through my mind was that it was a game about somebody being murdered at
a club for chocolate bars. I'm not quite sure why I thought that but it made
me chuckle for a bit. Unfortunately the rest of the game just made me groan.
It's a detective game alright. Some poor unfortunate has got himself offed
at the local Aero Club - which isn't, as I originally thought, anything to
do with chocolate bars but instead a club where a lot of people who fly
aeroplanes like to hang out. You have to discover why the poor unfortunate
was murdered and bring his killer to justice. Piece o' cake.
It starts off promising. Nice introduction, decent style of writing and even
a reasonable amount of depth. But as soon as the intro has finished and you
start the game proper, the flaws begin to show through. Virtually no items
have descriptions which is never the hallmark of a good game. Standing in a
garden outside the Aero Club, I'm unable to examine the walls, front door,
the club itself, the path I'm standing on or any of the aircraft nearby.
This same lack of care bogs down the rest of the game and most locations
contain at least a few items that can't be examined despite the fact that
you can see them clearly. In a detective game - which is supposed to be
about carefully studying your environment for potential clues - this is
especially bad.
One nice touch is a notebook you carry with you in which you make notes
about the murder as you move around the game. Well, I say nice touch but it
doesn't really work. Notes get added about very strange things indeed. I
examined a few planes and found notes in my notebook, despite the fact that
at the time I examined them I had no way of knowing what relevance, if any,
they had to the murder. Yet later on I found a torque with some bloodstains
on it which for some reason wasn't considered important enough to warrant a
place in my notebook. At about the same time I questioned some fellow and
got a very suspicious response when I asked him a question about an
inspector who had come visiting the Aero Club, but that, too, didn't warrant
an entry in my notebook.
Conversation is handled in the unhelpful "ask [someone] about [something]"
format which has never been a favourite of mine. Here it's not quite as bad
as I was able to get a response to several different subjects - always a
nice thing - but little care has been made to make the NPCs seem like real
believable people as opposed to cardboard cutouts with a few programmed
responses. They repeat the same phrases over and over again and seem to show
little annoyance about being questioned on the same subject a dozen times or
more. It's also not helped much by the fact that asking certain people
questions about different subjects gives the same response.
In the Club itself (free of chocolate bars alas), I came across more
annoyances. One NPC is busy doing some flight planning and despite the fact
that I'm a detective here to investigate a murder, I'm told when trying to
question him that he's busy so I probably shouldn't disturb him. Er… what?
By rights, the whole place should be cordoned off and the residents
questioned one by one until the murderer is brought to justice but here we
have someone who I can't even question because he's busy? No wonder so many
killers go free if all they have to do to escape justice is pretend to be
busy…
If all that sounds bad, wait till you step into the office and encounter
some truly appalling game writing. Examine the bin and you'll be told
there's some junk inside. Examine the junk and - guess what - "you can't see
any such thing". Trying to empty the bin results in a wonderful message "the
rubbish bin can't contain things" even though there's some non-examinable
rubbish inside it! And what about the noticeboard which contains notices and
announcements which you can't even read!
I gave up then. I'd like to think I was fair with this game and gave it a
decent chance to impress me but there were so many things wrong with it that
it really should never have been entered into the IFComp in the first place.
I'll grudgingly admit that the writing was better than I'd normally expect
to see in a game where everything else is so bad but that's the only
positive thing I'm saying. It's also the only reason why I'm giving this
game a 3 and not a 1 which is what it would otherwise have received.
3 out of 10
Game: Typo
Author: Peter Seebach, Kevin Lynn, and Flavorplex
Sometimes you play a game which just turns you right off from the word go.
Unfortunately this was one of them.
I'm not entirely sure what the game is about as the introduction doesn't
really say, but the gist of it seems to be that you're some kind of test
subject for a new project which can fix typos. If that is what the game is
about then it's surely got to rate as one of the worst settings I've ever
come across for a game. If not, well… a nice introduction which actually
stated a few things would have been much appreciated. I've never been a big
fan of games that I start playing without a clue as to what I'm even doing.
So the game begins. I'm in a room with nothing much to see or do. I wander
along to the south and the first thing I try to examine - a cabinet - isn't
even there. Ouch! Not a good way to start the game. After a bit more
wandering I was told the test had started properly and a machine appeared
before me in the middle of the chamber. A machine with lots of things
attached to it and things to examine and interact with and… and there I felt
my interest just waning. It isn't that I don't like puzzles - I do (most of
the time anyway). It's just that the ones here are presented in such an
uninteresting manner that it's hard to sustain any kind of interest. Games
are supposed to be fun. This is anything but. There are a couple of hoses
which need to be connected to various parts of the machine; there's a thin
wire which also needs putting somewhere; there's a manual which might
potentially have made this part of the game a little more interesting but
it's so poorly implemented that it doesn't. The idea behind the manual is
that you look up topics in it relating to the machine and it gives you a
helping hand. In theory anyway. In practice, it took me several attempts to
find anything potentially useful. It's further complicated by the fact that
you have to type "look up white hose in manual" to get it to work instead of
"look up white hose" which might be a minor point to raise, but it's one
that annoyed me no end and resulted in a lot more typing than was really
necessary.
One thing about the game that struck me as a good idea, though one that
doesn't really work that well, is the correction facility. You type in a
command that's wrong and the facility jumps in and corrects it to what it
believes you typed. Now if this worked perfectly it would be an ingenious
little tool but as it often corrects words that were right in the first
place it's a bit of a wasted effort. Nice idea but nothing more.
All in all, I'd have liked to have made a better go at this game to see what
happens when the machine is up and running but as it comes without a
walkthrough (and the hints file is especially poor) I just gave up.
Performing a multitude of tedious actions designed to get a strange machine
to work might have seemed like a good idea on paper but in an actual game
it's slightly less interesting than the science classes I was forced to
attend as a schoolboy. It's certainly not the sort of thing I'd ever want to
see in a text adventure.
3 out of 10
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram