Reviews by OtisTDog

I was a big fan of "The Tick" back when the animated series was on. One of my favorite jokes from the series was the hapless group of pseudo-superheroes known as the Civic-Minded Five, whose absurdly ineffective "powers" consisted of things like having four legs or being able to deliver static electricity shocks. Neil deMause may or may not have been familiar with the Civic-Minded Five, but it seems likely that he was, as the characters in this game are clearly cast from the same mold.

You are Improv, leader of the Frenetic Five, a group of part-time superheroes in between gigs. Your superpower is coming up with MacGyver-like plans, which is no doubt the result of long hours of radiation received while watching the show on TV. You are trying to do just that, as a matter of fact, when your team's junior member, Newsboy, arrives to announce that evil is afoot... and it's up to you to stop it!

I must congratulate Mr. deMause for his writing talents. The story unfolds and the personalities of your teammates emerge in a convincingly lifelike way through various timed scenes. The jokes come fast and often, and several had me laughing outright. Everywhere the author paid care and attention, the payoff for the player is delightful.

Unfortunately, the care and attention the author paid seems to be wildly uneven. High expectations set by the opening scenes rapidly dwindled once I left the apartment, and by the time I reached the ostensible goal of the evil villains' hideout, the game world had lost its fizz and gone flat. I ran out of patience and resorted to a walkthrough, which left me totally bewildered as to how anyone could realistically have completed the game without it.

It's possible that I just missed an awful lot, that I couldn't tune into the author's wavelength and just didn't interact the right way. However, it seems far more likely that this work is simply unfinished as a result of of trying to get it out the door in time for that year's IF Comp, where it placed 13th. It's really a shame, since the story's universe held a lot of promise and left me hungry for more, despite the relatively unenjoyable time I had trying to reach the end. The good news is that there are two additional Frenetic Five titles out there that I have not yet played, and which I hope earn higher scores.

The coding quality is competent. What works, works well, and I encountered no notable bugs. It's obvious that Mr. deMause has it in him to produce some truly top-notch interactive fiction -- even half-baked, The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm und Drang did take the "Best NPC" Xyzzy Award for 1997, which is no small achievement. I look forward to playing more from this author.

It was 1996, and Graham Nelson -- creator of the Inform language and the father of modern IF -- had just released Inform 6 in April. The Second Annual IF Competition was underway. What better chance to show off the new stuff? Professor Nelson completed the intriguingly-titled piece known as The Meteor, the Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet and submitted it to the IF Comp under the pseudonym (and anagram) "Angela M. Horns".

This is a game in the old-school style. That means the pastiche of elements that are assembled into the story is contrived, but the beauty of it lies in the assembly. It's like a patchwork quilt: You can clearly see the seams attaching various unrelated flights of fancy together, but if that's where you focus your attention, you'll miss the striking overall pattern.

At the outset, you play a diplomat, caught in an interminable "tour" of the land you are assigned to. Before long the setting changes to what long-time IF players would consider more familiar territory -- almost literally. Allusions are made to a secret mission, but it's up to the player to figure out what the mission is and how to accomplish it as you go along.

This work predates the modern style of detailed implementation, and its object and room descriptions are remarkably spare. This is clearly not carelessness, however; a rich world is presented as your imagination fills in the artfully-carved blanks. Perhaps it is the nature of a mathematician like Nelson to pay such close attention to negative information, as this same tendency shows through in the design of several puzzles. There is often as much of a clue provided by what is not said as there is by that which is.

Echoes of Zork abound, but they do not define the experience. The story comes into its own towards the end. If you, like me, find yourself completing the game without achieving the maximum score, then you'll also find yourself diving right back in to see how to dredge up those last few points. And if you, like me, find yourself looking at the built-in hints to speed that process, it's only proof that you've been well and truly hooked.

There are a few bugs (including one I found that crashed Frotz), a few quirks (potentially unplanned "solutions" to puzzles) and a couple of instances of find-the-syntax, but on the whole gameplay was smooth and of professional quality. If you enjoyed the original Infocom Zork and Enchanter series, or the more recent Enlightenment, this is a must-play. Three stars for this work from a five-star contributor to the art.

Emily Short has pioneered a number of advances in IF, most notably the radically innovative conversation model of Galatea. Galatea was not universally loved; my sense is that many people thought of as too experimental or too "new school" (i.e. all story, no puzzles) to be generally accepted. Not one to turn down the implicit challenge, Emily set to work on Savoir Faire to demonstrate that she really did "know how to do it" in the old school style.

She succeeded dramatically, removing any doubt that she is one of the modern masters of interactive fiction, and joining the pantheon of the New Implementors. Savoir Faire is arguably her most acclaimed work: Too big for submission in the IF Comp, it swept up most major awards in the 2002 XYZZYs and was a finalist for the remainder.

Ms. Short's signature style seems to be daringly huge conception followed by lengthy and intense efforts to bring her new brainchild into being. In this case, the kernel of genius is her conception of the "Lavori d'Aracne", a type of sympathetic magic that allows users to link objects together, entangling them physically and conceptually in interesting ways. Where most authors might go on to write a perfectly delightful game full of special-purpose code to produce the "fun parts", Ms. Short seems to have labored to create an entire simulation system for it -- implementing not just the magic but its very laws.

This has two effects: First, the modeled world seems incredibly rich and deep as a result of your freedom to deploy this new power in just about any way that respects the built-in laws. It is entirely possible to forge links that are useless to the main character, but which nonetheless function in a consistent manner. Second, it sets the bar for coding very high, as the complexity of the game's system soars.

Unfortunately, Savoir Faire seems to have been a bite that was slightly too big to chew from a coding perspective -- though I played version 8, there are still (minor) bugs to be found. These are completely forgivable and do not detract from the entrancingly intricate story, but they did throw some jarring notes into an otherwise grand symphony.

Though this would normally qualify as a five star entry in my book, I'm only giving four stars because of the unfairness of one particular puzzle. Why "unfair"? Because:(Spoiler - click to show)The puzzle with the dancers and the letter was a sharp departure from the consistency of other linking puzzles. You are required to build a link between the two objects, but there is little to indicate that this should be possible according to the laws of linking as I gleaned them in a week of playing the game.

All other links seem to require at least two points of similarity from several categories: form, material composition, color, decoration, or physical relation/relative positions. This is true for both puzzle-related links and general case legal links, but no such correspondence exists for these two items. In my perception, the picture of the dancers would count as decoration on the old letter but must correspond to the physical form of the dancers themselves.

The dancing/encryption idea was very clever but this particular link seems not like the others; I am certain it is enabled by special-purpose code and would not be allowed as a general case. So, even though I knew the letter and dancers were related, even though the picture of one is on the other, so consistent was the negative reinforcement from my many failed experiments in linking that I spent a whole day without it ever occurring to me that a link of these two things might be possible. After all, some puzzle solutions do not directly involve links.

Maybe this incongruence was intentional -- many famous old school puzzles are at least as arbitrary, and there is a mocking undertone running through the game directed at old school fanatics (like me). I suspect this was just an error in continuity, though, and it had a disproportionate impact on my perception of the overall quality of the playing experience.

Then again, maybe I'm just annoyed that I didn't think of the solution on my own, since I was doing so well without hints to that point, and I may have eventually found the right command through brute force (a definite echo of the oldest of old school play). As she mentions in her own hints page, I always had the option of decrypting the letter out-of-game.

These minor flaws aside, there's no question that Savoir Faire is one of the great accomplishments of the new era, and I highly recommend this work to all players. It delivers the best of both the new school (dense story) and old school (great puzzles), and left me with a hunger for more that will no doubt be satisfied by the sequel, Damnatio Memoriae. Allow yourself one hint to avoid getting irritated like I did, and you'll probably end up giving it a five-star rating yourself.

[edit: With the passage of time, my irritation about that one puzzle has faded, and I have come to realize what a tremendous accomplishment this work embodies in its exemplary integration of a simulationist implementation with both the puzzles and the story. As such, I feel compelled to increase my rating to five stars, since it is undoubtedly the pinnacle of that class. Hats off to Ms. Short!]

Some people might think from my breathless review of Spider and Web that I am an Andrew Plotkin groupie. This is not the case. While I have tremendous respect for his fearsome combination of seamless coding and tight story-telling*, he is, in the end, only human. Shade is the reminder.

The start of this work exhibits all of Mr. Plotkin's hallmark qualities: his trick of making the mundane seem interesting with inventive prose, his expert sense of how long to keep the player in suspense before providing the next clue about what's going on, his knack for making the story follow you before you can follow it. The excellence of this work set up some high expectations about what would come next.

To me, everything about the first half of the game seemed to be pointing towards a particular moment of revelation, in which the player would literally "wake up" and begin a new section of gameplay. This never happened. Instead, things take a sharp turn towards the weird and abstract, and the story leaves the player in the lurch, confused and unsatisfied about which, if any, of the tensions introduced in the first half were resolved.

When abstraction is introduced, art is always in danger of sliding down the slippery slope from transcendent to incomprehensible. Shade, unfortunately, goes right over the edge. While it is tempting to think that I just "missed it", it seems more likely that Mr. Plotkin's profound intuition misled him here in deciding how to communicate whatever he was trying for. [edit: Turns out there was quite a bit I just missed. (Spoiler - click to show)The studied opinion of IF master Emily Short shows that a careful reading of the text provides plenty of evidence (subtle though some of it may be) to support a consistent and interesting interpretation of the end. I've upped my rating by a point to reflect this.]

This game is still worth playing at least once just to marvel at the genius of its functioning as the story's central mystery unwinds. I can't even conceive of what the underlying code for this game looks like, but it feels like something deeply elegant and beautifully simple. If the story had the same coherence, this might have been another landmark work in the field.

* Or is it tight coding and seamless story-telling?

Wishbringer was part of Infocom's "introductory" line -- an attempt to bring a wider audience to interactive fiction by creating works that would appeal to those who had never played a text adventure before. Only a few introductory titles were produced, and this one is my favorite by far.

It is also the most effective. Unlike the other introductory titles (Moonmist and Seastalker), Wishbringer provides an easy-to-follow orientation to the IF interface in its opening sequence; the first tasks are going someplace, taking something, looking at it -- all of the basic commands experienced players take for granted. As with all introductory titles, the first few moves use an explicit prompt ("OK, what do you want to do now?") to hold the hand of those who are not sure how IF works.

This courtesy extends throughout the rest of the game. Puzzles are solvable in at least two ways: easy (using a wish) and hard (using your brain). Maximum points are awarded for solving puzzles the hard way, but those who just want to see the story advance will not regret wishing their way to the end -- though they may be prompted to go back and improve their score.

Part of the game's allure is its "once upon a time" tone, which is well-suited to freeing the imagination. This is enhanced by -- or perhaps the product of -- the enchanting writing style of Brian Moriarty (author of Trinity, which many people consider to be the best Infocom title ever). Most of the rest of its allure is probably due to the unforgettable platypi.

Those new to the game will likely have to do without its wonderful "feelies". The glow-in-the-dark Wishbringer replica was a little cheesy, but it was one of my favorites (second only to Planetfall's postcards, stationery, and Stellar Patrol ID). Even without these, Wishbringer is probably the ideal IF primer for young people and those young-at-heart.

I knew I liked Enlightenment right from the start. Sure, Taro Ogawa (the author) has appropriated just about every last detail from the Zork universe, but he does it so well that you can't help but forgive him. This game is not just fan-boy homage or unimaginative plagiarism, this game is something new that was lovingly crafted using familiar elements. This game is Zork turned up to 11.

As in Zork, the game's terse replies are just encouraging enough to get you to continue for another few moves even when you feel stuck. Perhaps it's because this game emulates that iconic look-and-feel so well that I had the patience to keep trying after nearly an hour of play without a single point scored. Yes, there is that much non-essential material to keep you busy, with many jokes to discover, footnotes to unlock, and interesting-but-not-useful things you can do with the assortment of equipment you start with.

The game's title is well-chosen; once that first point is scored, they become easier and easier. For the last few turns of my game, everything fell into place, and I felt I truly had achieved enlightenment.

The game's end notes state that this piece is actually 19K larger than the original Zork I. I am surprised, but not too surprised. No course of action seems inherently off-limits or "wrong" for this game -- a difficult-to-achieve perceptual illusion that is no doubt the product of vast amounts of coding work and exceptionally careful playtesting on the author's part. Mr. Ogawa is to be congratulated for having pulled it off.

Enlightenment is a one-room game that you wish would go on to "feature length." Though Mr. Ogawa seems to have never produced another piece for public release, I sincerely hope to see more by him in the future.

Leonard Richardson's writing in this work is the most consistently funny piece of interactive fiction I've encountered. He has a flair for doling out expert satire using a tongue-in-cheek style that somehow never lets you know the joke is coming before you've already started laughing.

The game's concept was inspired by the eponymous "guess the verb" problem found in many poor-quality games, but you won't encounter that problem yourself, since the unusual verbs required are deliberately spelled out for you. Your not-too-difficult job is to find when to use them.

I simply can't understand how this game scored just 11th place in the 2000 IF Comp. Only two possibilities come to mind:

First, players might not have caught onto the central puzzle of how the verb-guessing booth's attendant can be fooled. Without this, the game would have never gone anywhere or ended very quickly. The real comedy starts after you've figured this out.

Second, players might have panned the game because it is not a traditional piece of IF; there is not a central well-defined story. Rather, this piece is more of a playground for both author and player, stuffed to the gills with hilarious riffs on both famous works and IF in general. Every "examine", "show", or "ask" is an opportunity for Mr. Richardson to make you chuckle yet again.

Either way, this ranking was a grave mistake -- Guess the Verb! is a gem and a must-play in my book. I am tempted to give it 5 stars, but I am holding onto that "perfect" score for the future piece from this author that will surely earn them.

Starcross is the only Infocom game with an 'Expert' rating that I ever completed without any outside help. This was no doubt due to my near-limitless enthusiasm for hard science fiction at the time the game was released. Although no particular story was instrumental in helping me figure out the game's many puzzles, the background in basic physics and familiarity with hard SF space travel conventions were essential to feeling at home in the game universe.

The most notable feature of this work is its extremely consistent internal logic. There are no quirky or humorous solutions here -- though you may need to have a flash of insight to comprehend a particular puzzle's symbols or structure, the solution is always clear enough (if not necessarily immediately reachable) once this occurs. The author does a perfect job of providing you the information you need to solve a puzzle without making it instantly apparent which information is significant to which puzzle.

This game is definitely 'old school', and, as such, may seem unfair to someone more attuned to the modern IF style. It is extremely easy to make the game unwinnable without realizing it. Somehow, this fits the style of Starcross well -- you are exploring an unknown vessel full of alien technology, and it seems right that you must rely on your own intuition instead of an author-supplied 'revelation' that you just made a mistake. Sure, you should make use of the save command frequently, but, when you find yourself stuck, you should always be able to deduce where you went wrong after some reflection.

If you're an SF junkie, you'll probably love Starcross. If not, expect to feel frustrated and lost a good chunk of the time.

In 1995, Inform 6 was under development and the first IF Comp was organized. The modern era of interactive fiction had not yet begun. Author Gareth Rees has been instrumental in bringing about the modern era; he helped kickstart the adoption of Inform by contributing to the Designer's Manual and producing the well-regarded Christminster. It is not necessary to be enthusiastic about The Magic Toyshop to acknowledge the debt of gratitude we all owe him.

This game is much more akin to "Hunt the Wumpus" or some other ASCII mainframe relic than it is to a work of IF. It has a framing story, but that story in no way affects the gameplay. Gameplay consists of a series of increasingly devious logic puzzles, most of which are based on the kinds of pen-and-paper games that kept kids busy on rainy days before the invention of the game console. To advance, you often have to figure out a way to creatively cheat. While this is somewhat amusing, it is also slightly perverse -- you have no motivation for doing so other than to "win" by any means necessary.

As if that weren't enough, the game loses its consistency about two thirds of the way through and introduces a "puzzle" requiring knowledge of the Infocom classic Trinity (and others?) to even have a clue how to proceed. Resorting to the walkthrough did not leave me with a sense of failure -- only puzzlement that the author could expect anyone but himself to figure out the right sequence of moves.

Should you make it to the end of this player/author grudge match, you are sent packing with little more than a cursory "*** You have won. ***" and no sense of accomplishment.

It is hard to imagine, but this all-work-and-no-play entry scored 3rd in the Comp. While this piece may be worth examining by a programmer for its noteworthy adaptation of classic timewaster games, it holds little value to a player -- except maybe the kind of militant puzzle fiend one can only find in Britain. I would not bother with this one unless you really get the urge to solve bent logic puzzles using a text parser.

LASH was written by Paul O'Brian, the maker of the popular Earth and Sky trilogy. This work demonstrates that he is capable of creating an original premise just as easily as he can put together a story around conventional superhero tropes.

This piece has been difficult to review. The code is solid. The writing is good. The gameplay is smooth. The hook hooks. The dramatic arc is clear. LASH has every reason to succeed. And yet, I'm giving it only two stars. [edit: I revised this to three stars, since it is good, just not great.]

Like Duncan Stevens, I felt the premise of LASH had something significant to deliver. Like Duncan Stevens, I felt it didn't quite reach me in the way that the author probably intended. While I find the piece interesting, most of my interest involves trying to understand what went wrong in the execution of what is clearly a compelling vision.

Functionally, I think it boils down to two issues. The first is time, and the second is the essential mechanics of player/PC interaction.

Regarding time, LASH is simply too short to build up the tension that is required to deliver the message well. Though the work was not entered into the IF Comp, it would have been well-suited to that venue owing to its short playtime and multiple endings. While this has been a winning formula many times for Comp winners, this structure shows its essential weakness when taken outside of that artificial environment.

Regarding player/PC interaction, it is hopefully not too much of a spoiler to state that the story's conclusion depends on a successful division of the player from the PC in the player's mind. It seemed to me that this division occurs somewhat abruptly and artificially, a perception that is very probably related to the short playing time.

There may also be a problem at the broader thematic level. Though I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, I can't see how to get around that this time while still being clear, so please don't read the following until after you've played: (Spoiler - click to show)The main problem may be that LASH's story depends on achieving an identity between the historical slaves of America and the fictional slave machines in the game universe. This is both conceptually and ethically challenging in light of the fact that the machines are, by definition, purpose-built tools, and the conceptual gap between "tool" and "slave" is naturally much wider than that between "person" and "slave" -- especially in an era where nothing like the artifically-intelligent PC exists in the real world. Building a bridge across that gap is a hefty undertaking, and further complicated as described below.

While I am sympathetic to the idea that no sentient should be held captive, the crux of this story revolves around making the player realize that he or she has, in some small way, adopted the mental habits of a slave master while dealing with the PC. There is significant interference here as a result of the default player/PC relationship in interactive fiction, which is to some degree dependent on forgetting that you, as the player, are not the PC. The key difference between player and PC is the "realness" of their existence in their respective worlds (actual vs. fictional).

This dynamic is very different from what I would expect between slave master and slave, where the owner and slave by definition inhabit the same world, and the key difference is the "realness" of the slave's status as a free and equal human being. Mr. O'Brian may have done better by trying to achieve the player/slave master identity directly instead of indirectly through the analogy of "Player is to PC as 'owner' is to slave."

Overall, this work clearly had the potential for greatness but ended up falling short. Its finalist (but not winner) status for every major XYZZY award in 2000 shows that this is a pretty common perception. I do recommend that authors examine this work as a study in how to implement well on a functional level, and also as a thought challenge -- to explore how one might successfully achieve what Mr. O'Brian set out to do.