Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction (More info?)
Note: If you haven't already played the games, you may want to hold off
on reading these. They are not very spoilery, but I may ruin the
surprise of a few things.
Whom the Telling Changed:
Technically a polished and well-made piece of work, and one which
allows for some real variety of outcome. Unfortunately, playing it felt
a lot like negotiating hypertext, which I find tremendously
off-putting. I realize, now, that I could've turned off the boldfaced
text; maybe later if I have time I will replay in that style and see
what difference it makes for me. I can see that it might well be
frustratingly difficult to play the game *without* that aid, though.
I also found the generic frame story dull and a little distant,
especially set against the specific cultural background of the
Gilgamesh tale. The characters in the internal story were far more
compelling than those in the "real world". I realize that some of this
is because the frame has to be flexible as to the PC's gender and
attitude, so it tends to make all his/her relationships a little vague
and hypothetical as well.
But I can see that there's good stuff here. All in all, a strong
effort, and I found myself wishing that I'd been more engaged by it.
Second Chance:
Couldn't load up with my version of MacSCARE. Went to the SCARE website
and established that I did have the latest version. Downloaded jasea
instead; installed jasea; got a startup screen that asked for me to
press "enter". Pressed enter. Nothing happened.
Threnody:
I'm not the ideal audience for this one, because while I am not opposed
to fantasy genre games, I rarely enjoy those which style themselves
after RPG scenarios.
Threnody exudes authorial good will and seems technically adequate --
in a few respects, more than adequate. I appreciated touches like the
enhanced status bar and the magic self-updating map.
On the other hand, the setting, and the writing that described it,
disappointed me. It struck me as fairly stock fantasy material, the
author not having given a lot of time to developing his world as a
place with its own history and character. And once or twice -- as when
the passageway collapsed behind me -- I had the impression that he was
trying to apologize for having just relied on a tremendous cliché.
This almost never works; if you realize that one of your plot mechanics
is overused, better to take it out and replace it with something more
interesting and more specifically suited to the story.
I played about a hundred moves before losing energy and interest.
Points for accepting >FIAT LUX as a command. But the bottom line is
that it takes tremendous writing skill to get me to accept a talking
cat without rolling my eyes.
Flat Feet:
....speaking of which.
This has much to commend it. There are good lines, especially in the
relationship with the PC's sidekick. I like the flexible treatment of
geography that makes the map feel open and unconstrained; the car was
so tidily handled that I never got annoyed with it -- it provided an
excuse for traveling long distances but never made my job as a player
harder. The tone was light, but in an enjoyable way. (How many games
let you throw NPCs?) There were nice extras, like the extensive hint
menus; I didn't run into any obvious bugs, either.
"Flat Feet" lacks something in the cohesive design department, though.
I spent the first fifty or sixty moves wandering around in search of
motivation, with key information turning up only after I'd solved a
puzzle because it was there. Some of the puzzles worked fine; others
(like the Transamerica Pyramid bit) relied on my going places I had no
reason to go, and doing things I had no reason to do.
Early on, it gives the impression that the player should take guidance
from plot constraints rather than map constraints. To explain: there
are obviously quite a few locations open at once, as soon as you get
the car working. Not all of these locations are equally relevant to
what you're doing. Some of them are actively a bad idea to visit before
you're ready, even though it's technically possible to get there.
So at the outset, I felt that my job as a player was not to explore
every single thing I could find, but rather to follow the course of
action that made the most sense at the moment. (Seek out person X, ask
for information about Y, investigate crime scene Z, and so on.) The
minimalist implementation of scenery encourages that play style as
well. When there are a lot of nouns mentioned in any given room
description which are not examinable, I start to get the idea that
examining things is not the player's primary task. That's fine,
especially if it's handled consistently.
What I found jarring was following along a plot thread for a while,
coming to a dead standstill, and discovering the reason I was stuck was
that my PC hadn't taken time off from the plot to explore a location he
had no reason to think interesting. Worse, the location I needed to
visit was only peripherally hinted at in a room description, though a
bunch of other scenery nouns were not implemented at all, and I had
come to expect useful exits always to be clearly and explicitly listed.
This isn't so much a question of obeying any one set of design rules
about how open or closed to make the map, or how fully to implement
scenery. It's possible to make work any of a range of things, as long
as you set up the player expectations properly and then follow through
on them.
Unfortunately, the feeling of arbitrariness grew stronger and stronger
as the game went on. I found myself turning to the Invisihints
increasingly often, and being increasingly annoyed by the things they
told me to do. (And at least one of the puzzles was simply so finicky
that, even when I had the right idea, I had to try about fifteen
variations to get it to come out right.)
So I would have enjoyed this more if the puzzles had been more sensibly
integrated with the plot, or (paradoxically) if the game had been
*more* purely puzzle-oriented and more methodical about its world
model. One or the other. The mixture was problematic.
But the author did do a lot of things right. With a clearer approach to
the overall structure of the game, his next piece could be quite good.
The Authority
Oh my.
Subjective criticism: I've worked in a few places that vaguely
resembled this. I hated them. I am not having fun reliving the
experience. Sorry about that.
Substantive criticism: the game frequently offers me a bunch of
conversation responses that don't yet make logical sense. And it's a
little strange the way what to do next is always spelled out.
I did not finish this one. It's entirely possible that it gets much
more compelling after the intro.
Bolivia By Night
This is nutty but works far, far better than it has any right to do.
With a few minor exceptions, I almost always knew where to go and what
to do, and had a general idea of how to solve the puzzles that were in
front of me -- thanks to careful game design. The map and plot are laid
out in such a way that it's hard to reach a puzzle without already
having seen all the components necessary to solve it. I was rarely
stuck or bored. A few solutions of the late game puzzles veered from
merely unlikely into mind-bogglingly implausible, but they were hinted
fairly extensively; there were only one or two things that I got hung
up on.
The setting was also strong; the credits indicate (if we couldn't have
guessed from the photos) that the author visited in person, and there's
evidence of that first-person experience throughout.
I very much enjoyed the photographs. They set the atmosphere and
grounded the game in reality. In general I think this is a great
example of the sane way to incorporate graphics in IF. Illustrating
every location is hugely difficult, and if you try to depict all the
environment changes that the player can accomplish, you start to lose
one advantage of having a parser and text game in the first place --
namely, relatively inexpensive interactivity. Instead, in "Bolivia" we
have illustrations that show up at important plot junctures and scene
changes (as a reward for accomplishment, sometimes) and show the
setting, but don't even pretend to be pictures of what is going on at
the moment. [One mildly spoilery example of how the author used the
photos well: if the picture of the Zebra had appeared before the Zebra
character showed up in-game, I wouldn't have understood what it was,
other than Something Really Wacky. Having the photo show up after the
Zebra puzzle made me laugh, though -- it was like a visual punchline to
this joke. "Here, you've been imagining something silly? It's even
funnier than you thought."]
Finally, in my experience being able to choose the protagonist's gender
in IF rarely does anything interesting, so I was intrigued to see that
playing a female character made for some funny (or mildly disturbing)
twists on the NPC interactions. The game manages to walk a fine line --
the narrative voice is never snarky or harassing about my gender, but
some of the characters are, a little, and the result is a reasonably
successful depiction of being a foreign woman in a culture of machismo.
If there's a drawback, it's the tonal inconsistency. It's a little
strange to have these light, goofy forms of enchantment operating
alongside serious social issues. But somehow I think it mostly worked,
even so -- this would have been a much more depressing and less
enjoyable game without its leavening of humor, magic, and cartoon
violence. Meanwhile, the Bolivian history lessons were interwoven in
the game in a way that didn't make them too overwhelming.
"Bolivia By Night" wasn't quite cohesive enough to become a favorite of
mine, but it has a lot going for it, is fun to play, and introduces a
setting I've never seen before in IF. My initially dubious reaction to
the talking Che t-shirt wore off surprisingly fast.
Note: If you haven't already played the games, you may want to hold off
on reading these. They are not very spoilery, but I may ruin the
surprise of a few things.
Whom the Telling Changed:
Technically a polished and well-made piece of work, and one which
allows for some real variety of outcome. Unfortunately, playing it felt
a lot like negotiating hypertext, which I find tremendously
off-putting. I realize, now, that I could've turned off the boldfaced
text; maybe later if I have time I will replay in that style and see
what difference it makes for me. I can see that it might well be
frustratingly difficult to play the game *without* that aid, though.
I also found the generic frame story dull and a little distant,
especially set against the specific cultural background of the
Gilgamesh tale. The characters in the internal story were far more
compelling than those in the "real world". I realize that some of this
is because the frame has to be flexible as to the PC's gender and
attitude, so it tends to make all his/her relationships a little vague
and hypothetical as well.
But I can see that there's good stuff here. All in all, a strong
effort, and I found myself wishing that I'd been more engaged by it.
Second Chance:
Couldn't load up with my version of MacSCARE. Went to the SCARE website
and established that I did have the latest version. Downloaded jasea
instead; installed jasea; got a startup screen that asked for me to
press "enter". Pressed enter. Nothing happened.
Threnody:
I'm not the ideal audience for this one, because while I am not opposed
to fantasy genre games, I rarely enjoy those which style themselves
after RPG scenarios.
Threnody exudes authorial good will and seems technically adequate --
in a few respects, more than adequate. I appreciated touches like the
enhanced status bar and the magic self-updating map.
On the other hand, the setting, and the writing that described it,
disappointed me. It struck me as fairly stock fantasy material, the
author not having given a lot of time to developing his world as a
place with its own history and character. And once or twice -- as when
the passageway collapsed behind me -- I had the impression that he was
trying to apologize for having just relied on a tremendous cliché.
This almost never works; if you realize that one of your plot mechanics
is overused, better to take it out and replace it with something more
interesting and more specifically suited to the story.
I played about a hundred moves before losing energy and interest.
Points for accepting >FIAT LUX as a command. But the bottom line is
that it takes tremendous writing skill to get me to accept a talking
cat without rolling my eyes.
Flat Feet:
....speaking of which.
This has much to commend it. There are good lines, especially in the
relationship with the PC's sidekick. I like the flexible treatment of
geography that makes the map feel open and unconstrained; the car was
so tidily handled that I never got annoyed with it -- it provided an
excuse for traveling long distances but never made my job as a player
harder. The tone was light, but in an enjoyable way. (How many games
let you throw NPCs?) There were nice extras, like the extensive hint
menus; I didn't run into any obvious bugs, either.
"Flat Feet" lacks something in the cohesive design department, though.
I spent the first fifty or sixty moves wandering around in search of
motivation, with key information turning up only after I'd solved a
puzzle because it was there. Some of the puzzles worked fine; others
(like the Transamerica Pyramid bit) relied on my going places I had no
reason to go, and doing things I had no reason to do.
Early on, it gives the impression that the player should take guidance
from plot constraints rather than map constraints. To explain: there
are obviously quite a few locations open at once, as soon as you get
the car working. Not all of these locations are equally relevant to
what you're doing. Some of them are actively a bad idea to visit before
you're ready, even though it's technically possible to get there.
So at the outset, I felt that my job as a player was not to explore
every single thing I could find, but rather to follow the course of
action that made the most sense at the moment. (Seek out person X, ask
for information about Y, investigate crime scene Z, and so on.) The
minimalist implementation of scenery encourages that play style as
well. When there are a lot of nouns mentioned in any given room
description which are not examinable, I start to get the idea that
examining things is not the player's primary task. That's fine,
especially if it's handled consistently.
What I found jarring was following along a plot thread for a while,
coming to a dead standstill, and discovering the reason I was stuck was
that my PC hadn't taken time off from the plot to explore a location he
had no reason to think interesting. Worse, the location I needed to
visit was only peripherally hinted at in a room description, though a
bunch of other scenery nouns were not implemented at all, and I had
come to expect useful exits always to be clearly and explicitly listed.
This isn't so much a question of obeying any one set of design rules
about how open or closed to make the map, or how fully to implement
scenery. It's possible to make work any of a range of things, as long
as you set up the player expectations properly and then follow through
on them.
Unfortunately, the feeling of arbitrariness grew stronger and stronger
as the game went on. I found myself turning to the Invisihints
increasingly often, and being increasingly annoyed by the things they
told me to do. (And at least one of the puzzles was simply so finicky
that, even when I had the right idea, I had to try about fifteen
variations to get it to come out right.)
So I would have enjoyed this more if the puzzles had been more sensibly
integrated with the plot, or (paradoxically) if the game had been
*more* purely puzzle-oriented and more methodical about its world
model. One or the other. The mixture was problematic.
But the author did do a lot of things right. With a clearer approach to
the overall structure of the game, his next piece could be quite good.
The Authority
Oh my.
Subjective criticism: I've worked in a few places that vaguely
resembled this. I hated them. I am not having fun reliving the
experience. Sorry about that.
Substantive criticism: the game frequently offers me a bunch of
conversation responses that don't yet make logical sense. And it's a
little strange the way what to do next is always spelled out.
I did not finish this one. It's entirely possible that it gets much
more compelling after the intro.
Bolivia By Night
This is nutty but works far, far better than it has any right to do.
With a few minor exceptions, I almost always knew where to go and what
to do, and had a general idea of how to solve the puzzles that were in
front of me -- thanks to careful game design. The map and plot are laid
out in such a way that it's hard to reach a puzzle without already
having seen all the components necessary to solve it. I was rarely
stuck or bored. A few solutions of the late game puzzles veered from
merely unlikely into mind-bogglingly implausible, but they were hinted
fairly extensively; there were only one or two things that I got hung
up on.
The setting was also strong; the credits indicate (if we couldn't have
guessed from the photos) that the author visited in person, and there's
evidence of that first-person experience throughout.
I very much enjoyed the photographs. They set the atmosphere and
grounded the game in reality. In general I think this is a great
example of the sane way to incorporate graphics in IF. Illustrating
every location is hugely difficult, and if you try to depict all the
environment changes that the player can accomplish, you start to lose
one advantage of having a parser and text game in the first place --
namely, relatively inexpensive interactivity. Instead, in "Bolivia" we
have illustrations that show up at important plot junctures and scene
changes (as a reward for accomplishment, sometimes) and show the
setting, but don't even pretend to be pictures of what is going on at
the moment. [One mildly spoilery example of how the author used the
photos well: if the picture of the Zebra had appeared before the Zebra
character showed up in-game, I wouldn't have understood what it was,
other than Something Really Wacky. Having the photo show up after the
Zebra puzzle made me laugh, though -- it was like a visual punchline to
this joke. "Here, you've been imagining something silly? It's even
funnier than you thought."]
Finally, in my experience being able to choose the protagonist's gender
in IF rarely does anything interesting, so I was intrigued to see that
playing a female character made for some funny (or mildly disturbing)
twists on the NPC interactions. The game manages to walk a fine line --
the narrative voice is never snarky or harassing about my gender, but
some of the characters are, a little, and the result is a reasonably
successful depiction of being a foreign woman in a culture of machismo.
If there's a drawback, it's the tonal inconsistency. It's a little
strange to have these light, goofy forms of enchantment operating
alongside serious social issues. But somehow I think it mostly worked,
even so -- this would have been a much more depressing and less
enjoyable game without its leavening of humor, magic, and cartoon
violence. Meanwhile, the Bolivian history lessons were interwoven in
the game in a way that didn't make them too overwhelming.
"Bolivia By Night" wasn't quite cohesive enough to become a favorite of
mine, but it has a lot going for it, is fun to play, and introduces a
setting I've never seen before in IF. My initially dubious reaction to
the talking Che t-shirt wore off surprisingly fast.
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