Reviews by Andrew Schultz

I guessed wrong on Hedda Deadline's identity (up there with Ruderbager Doppleganger, pseudonymous author of "Last Minute" in my Pantheon of Best IFComp Pen Names, placement be hanged) and IF Derby's main point at first. But I don't feel particularly dumb. I think it should've been anonymous, not because it was an Alan Smithee sort of production, but because it could be construed as "Hey, vote for me and my positive message about not worrying too much about comp placement," whether or not the author submitted another game.

IF Derby reminded me of very old Pascal programs on the Apple II(!) where you could watch horses racing and they'd go forward a few random pixels each turn. But the horses did not have cool names. Here they do. Gameplay revolves around constant betting on horse races. While I loathe gambling and how it's permeated itself into our culture (prop bets in sports events that cause people to send profane messages to college basketball players who score a "meaningless" basket or, worse, betting if Nicolas Maduro would be removed from power, which seems ripe for manipulation) betting does have a pull to it. I'm smart enough to know I can't beat the House. There's something horrid to me about the House getting a 5% advantage and slowly squeezing its "customers" out. I've seen ways to outsmart the betting syndicates by getting the best odds each way on a sports contest. If I could, I would.

There's nothing much to do except enjoy the names. Each horse pays out for even odds, but there are eight in each race, so I grasped quickly that relying on the RNG was not the way to go. What was, then? Was it a scoldy game about how gambling is bad? Somehow, I doubted this, with the amusing horse names. The horse name "Jugglenauts" particularly made me smile as it's a word I'd thought of but would never use, so I'm glad it has a place. Also included, a riff on a New York Times best-seller with grawlixes in its title, many takeoffs/pastiches of popular text adventures or TV shows or classic books (e.g. The Island of Dr. (redacted–play it yourself!)), what not to do with a sword (I won't spoil it!), some deliberately reductive titles, and a creative main character name in the title. Perhaps the only downside is that the horse names seemed to appear randomly, thus creating a reverse coupon problem for "did I see everything?" (I'd be glad to be wrong.) Perhaps a weighted randomizer, where names you hadn't seen for a while bubble to the top, would be a cool post-comp tweak. Because you only have finite money, so the RNG can sting you, if you bet $20 of your original $500 at a time and don't pick up on what to do. (Fortunately the names are in the source! I enjoyed looking. I forgot Arbelos was a word. It reminded me of long ago math contests. Mysterious word until I found out what it meant! The titles have enough variety, they might do that for you, too.)

I wouldn't have minded losing but I wanted to be able to say I had my thinking cap on and rose to the challenge, and rise I did. I followed a few false trails and enjoyed seeing others'. Some very smart people appeared to have trouble, and that made me feel better about the patterns I thought I saw but didn't.

My main takeaway at first was about how gambling etc. is exciting until you know what to do, then it feels unfair in your favor, which doesn't make up for it being unfair against you. And how much/what sort of success/failure balance do we need to feel accomplished? Once I knew what to do, I got tired quickly. The excitement was gone. I kind of nodded through the end, which felt like fluff. (It was late.) I felt constant worry the game might change the rules on me and leave me broke. Was this some sort of mean massive long con? Would I get arrested for knowing insider secrets, or would the racetrack not pay out because of "suspicious betting irregularities?" (Again, it was late. But I felt like I'd had good luck figuring what to do. And luck doesn't last.) As I piled up dolla bills, I stopped paying attention to the names. Part of this is due to seeing most of them, and part of it was a "just win baby" attitude that overtook me. Even in a game that didn't ultimately matter. A sobering psychological experiment, whether or not it was intended.

Then on replay I read through the dialogue more carefully, and I got what the author was really trying to say.

We don't want to get too far into the weeds at "Look! Metafiction!" here. There's always a chance that metafiction is a pure copout, or it's what you write when the story you really want to write falls through. (It sort of felt like that in my own 2026 entry.) In this case the author nods to having a deadline and wanting to write something good even if it wasn't what they wanted, and I think they put something fun out there, without being all "HEY LOOK I WROTE SOMETHING RANDOM BEFORE THE DEADLINE, IT WAS FUN, IT TOTALLY HAS MULTIPLE INTERPRETATIONS AND NOT GROSS INCONSISTENCIES OR OVERGENERALIZATION."

So my first time through I felt the game touched on themes of cheating to win, whether or not you'd be happy doing so, how tough a game should be, and whether or not a walkthrough would improve the experience. (Here, it would have taken away.) It's not new to say it's no fun to be told the right answers to an exam or to getting ahead unfairly in life (people still search for them anyway), but this is very cheerily done for a black and white game, and it's always good to have a new perspective on the questions the game brings up.

And the game is under no illusions it is being brilliant and profound. It's not being stupid, but it does address questions we have had before, of the "should I bother" sort. It makes us feel the struggle to do or write or be more is worth it, and if it came too easy, it wouldn't be worth sharing. It touches on the struggle to be creative without wallowing in frustration or begging others to like it, and it leaves us with this question among others: how do we help the player feel like they've won, without making it too hard or too easy? It even gives us a few answers and examples without being one.

I felt a bit silly having missed the author's main point, or what seemed to be the main point based on others' discussion. Its message, or at least what the crowd agreed its message was, boiled down to something cliched if someone said it: (Spoiler - click to show)Do your best, and that is good enough. But, of course, there's no best way to say that, even if there are plenty of good enough ways to, and they add up.

Short entries like IF Derby need a huge a-ha moment to place in the top half, and missing out is not due to lack of competence or effort on the author's part. It has no applause line. The positive message reaches no dramatic heights. The messages I found had that "I've seen/heard this" before. They don't blow you away. You figure you should have known them, and you feel bad half forgetting them, or not focusing on them enough. The long dialogue with an NPC at the end does not move mountains, but it reminds us why we're here. It made me want to go look at other entries that I might not match up well with on paper. The author admits they'd rather have written something longer, but I'm very glad they did what they could. And it reminded me of other entries that did what they could and did well. And just having the random horse names and calculating the likelihood I missed one made me think: what IFComp gems did I miss that would have made me happy? Which entries/horse names would other people find dumb that I loved, and vice versa? I sort of wanted to read more horse names, and yet, there might not be time or money to appreciate them all. (Well, in-game.)

I didn't really act on or live out these thoughts during the judging period, alas. I didn't review nearly as many IFComp entries as I meant. But I appreciate this motivation to see and do and connect more without full-on FOMO. So I think IF Derby gives us something we need, in a different guise than we are used to, and maybe you will find more if you follow sporting events or whatever. The conflict between trying to win and enjoying the horses' names stayed with me. Eventually, trying to win won out, and even when I was piling up money, a part of me didn't want to win too soon because what if there was one more horse, but I felt silly not using the strategy I figured. This is not a great moral dilemma of our time, but I enjoyed reflecting on it. I found it very good value for the time, with the interface and graphics and names, and I can see people recalling it fondly or taking motivation from it after games above it have sunk out of memory.

Once I was aware of 2600s and text adventures, I wondered if someone could write a 2600 text adventure. I learned reasons why it would not be practical or profitable or, for newer programmers, wise. But I did not learn any reasons why one couldn't. I saw various implementations of text adventures, and I enjoyed seeing homebrew Atari projects getting more and more complex. I wondered if anyone would take up the text adventure mantle for the Atari, as others did for the Apple II, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

And someone did, and finally, there is evidence a person could, and, in fact, SHOULD maybe even do so again beyond "because it is there." And it's by someone I'd thought would be a prime candidate for something odd and interesting, given their previous work. I'm glad they came back to give us more. Because while Logic Land runs into the limitations of the 2600, it's more than competent, a weird experience in mostly a good way. I stayed up later than I thought to solve it, which is mostly good.

Logic Land doesn't have many of the niceties we expect, but it's an impressive feat of engineering, and it does have that retro charm, or what qualifies as retro charm. Given the 2600's lack of power, it's no surprise you are given no real background or story as to what to do. You are simply a classic everyperson, with items to pick up and experiments to run. They are related to many classic puzzles and thought experiments. For instance, you meet Einstein, and there is a Chinese room, and ancient Greek philosopher for appears somewhere else. The items you receive may seem nonsensical, and in a bigger game, it might be annoying, but Logic Land only has 23 rooms with only one thing to do in each. Eventually you wind up at three different gates. They all require items, one of which needs to be prepped in a way that didn't make sense until I got through. (This was my own fault. It was a classic thought experiment.)

However, the simplicity comes at a price: the text and puzzles are simple and direct, but the controls are not. They make sense once you fiddle with them, but they're still, well, fiddly. It's hard to imagine how they could be better, and while the parallel move/verb menus are toggled with the fire button, and moving is not hard, I had problems scrolling left and right to get the action I wanted. Sometimes things got sticky and I wouldn't move between any of the options, and sometimes I'd skip one. Said actions include use, take, talk, and act, and you can't act for a while. Which is nice to narrow things down, and it IS at the end of the list.

If not for this, Logic Land would be a very quick play. It's quick enough, but by the time you're comfortable with the controls, it's close to over. And along the way brute forcing runs into general problems with futzing with the controls as you try to TAKE everything in each room or USE it. Also, sometimes rooms don't update after you solve a puzzle, which makes it tricky if you want to restart.

So I think the time on the website for completion is a low estimate. It may be frustrating if other people get stuck and try to brute force. I missed two room locations. The map is classically done and not super sparse, e.g. each room is one unit away from the next, and if you can go east/north, you can't go north/east. I saw 23 rooms in a 7x6 map. I missed two of them for a bit, again partially because of the lack of descriptions. I recommend making a map--the game keeps it simple, and there are no loops, which cuts down on the directions you need to search. I was worried I soft locked myself out, and if you do so, you probably just missed a room. I missed that (Spoiler - click to show)you could go north from the sea and, beyond that, (Spoiler - click to show)south from the first lab. Once I saw the rooms, things clicked into place.

These are the main obstacles to enjoyment. I hope knowing them lessens potential frustration. People who aren't big on the technical side of things, or who never had an Atari 2600, may find them too much. But despite my criticisms, I spent a while thinking "Wow! It's cool a game like Logic Land could be made on the 2600!" My experience with the 2600 is replete with flimsy games my family overpaid for, as well as games I bought on clearance and then found out WHY they were on clearance. Logic Land stacks up very well against these paid efforts, indeed.

Philosophy isn't my background so I can't vouch for how seminal the game's examples are, or how rigorously appropriate, but I recognized a few (Chinese room, Occam's razor) and did not recognize others. So it turned out to be educational. I spent some time googling the stuff I didn't know. It's something I would never dare to try, because I don't have the knowledge for that sort of thing. And it seems it would be very hard to do better with the 2600's severe memory limitations, too. My technical side walked away with a grasp on a pretty neat world and enjoyed guessing why the author made the stylistic/technical decisions they did to include certain features and not others, and my imaginative side (such as it is) had a list of things to wonder about and look at.

I hope more people take up the challenge to work through this. It might not be for everyone, but it clearly has other places it will find a home for beyond IFComp. It may have suffered from a lack of a hint-through. If there were a better way to show available exits, that might save people time and frustration. But I'm amazed and glad it exists at all.