Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction (More info?)
I know it's been a while, but I've only just finished playing them.
Good things about The Fire Tower: it's beautifully and lovingly
described. It automatically puts things back in my pack when I want
to move on.
Bad thing about it: I keep being stopped from doing the things I want
to do. The inability to pick flowers has a reason behind it, so fair
enough (though I'd rather be told not to break the rules and then find
myself able to do so on a second attempt). But I wanted to paddle in
Tom's Creek, and it wouldn't let me do that either. As soon as I'd
taken off my shoes and socks, my character decided to put them back on
again. Worst of all, I kept arriving at junctions with
exciting-sounding exits and being told I didn't want to take them.
Here's one:
"Aside from idle curiosity, there's really no need to head deeper into
the campground."
I would have thought that idle curiosity was the point of the
exercise. If the things that looked like junctions were really
junctions, the piece would have been a more worthy winner of the show.
As it is, it doesn't really exploit "the I in IF, the Interactivity
of Interactive-Fiction".
Swanglass suffers similarly (so sexy, sibillance). More
interactivity, please. One of these days Yoon Ha Lee is going to
write a game that blows my mind, I can smell it in the wisp of wind
that strokes the forest.
Last Ride of the Night has a go at the interactivity issue – there are
apparently multiple endings – but there are still lots of responses of
the "you decide not to" variety. Oddly, the judges seemed to be
annoyed by this more here than with The Fire Tower, which I thought
was more blatant about it. Still, perhaps that's because The Fire
Tower was more forgivable in other areas – Last Ride of the Night
hasn't been constructed with a park ranger's painstaking love for the
feel of everything. It isn't bad, but it does claim not to know the
word "leak" after saying "You look up to see a leak in the ceiling."
Flametop has the opposite problem. Lots of interactivity (the number
of game states is at least ten to the power of however many knobs
there are) but no interesting consequences and relatively
unimaginitive writing.
The Battle of Walcot Keep is ambitious and has a promising concept,
but its implementation is terribly, terribly unwieldy. I want to see
Walcot Keep (wielded).
So overall, the competition shows people with interesting ideas going
to a fair (enormous in two cases) amount of effort but never managing
to nail everything in one game. Or not everything _I'm_ after, at any
rate. But that's sort of encouraging: above all, every entry in the
show is using it to experiment imaginatively.
I know it's been a while, but I've only just finished playing them.
Good things about The Fire Tower: it's beautifully and lovingly
described. It automatically puts things back in my pack when I want
to move on.
Bad thing about it: I keep being stopped from doing the things I want
to do. The inability to pick flowers has a reason behind it, so fair
enough (though I'd rather be told not to break the rules and then find
myself able to do so on a second attempt). But I wanted to paddle in
Tom's Creek, and it wouldn't let me do that either. As soon as I'd
taken off my shoes and socks, my character decided to put them back on
again. Worst of all, I kept arriving at junctions with
exciting-sounding exits and being told I didn't want to take them.
Here's one:
"Aside from idle curiosity, there's really no need to head deeper into
the campground."
I would have thought that idle curiosity was the point of the
exercise. If the things that looked like junctions were really
junctions, the piece would have been a more worthy winner of the show.
As it is, it doesn't really exploit "the I in IF, the Interactivity
of Interactive-Fiction".
Swanglass suffers similarly (so sexy, sibillance). More
interactivity, please. One of these days Yoon Ha Lee is going to
write a game that blows my mind, I can smell it in the wisp of wind
that strokes the forest.
Last Ride of the Night has a go at the interactivity issue – there are
apparently multiple endings – but there are still lots of responses of
the "you decide not to" variety. Oddly, the judges seemed to be
annoyed by this more here than with The Fire Tower, which I thought
was more blatant about it. Still, perhaps that's because The Fire
Tower was more forgivable in other areas – Last Ride of the Night
hasn't been constructed with a park ranger's painstaking love for the
feel of everything. It isn't bad, but it does claim not to know the
word "leak" after saying "You look up to see a leak in the ceiling."
Flametop has the opposite problem. Lots of interactivity (the number
of game states is at least ten to the power of however many knobs
there are) but no interesting consequences and relatively
unimaginitive writing.
The Battle of Walcot Keep is ambitious and has a promising concept,
but its implementation is terribly, terribly unwieldy. I want to see
Walcot Keep (wielded).
So overall, the competition shows people with interesting ideas going
to a fair (enormous in two cases) amount of effort but never managing
to nail everything in one game. Or not everything _I'm_ after, at any
rate. But that's sort of encouraging: above all, every entry in the
show is using it to experiment imaginatively.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram