Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

Toeing the Line is a product of Speed IF Autocratic Fist, which tasked authors with producing a discourse on the theme of hubris using an improbable combination of "vestigial tail, environmental policy on ferret populations, phlogiston, a pink parasol, sudden undeath, or crappy madlibs."

The author, Gregory Weir, seems to have mostly ignored the overarching theme in favor of crafting an experience that combined as many of the random seed elements as possible. To my surprise, he does a creditable job of doing so in this strange and silly piece.

Though much of the gameplay is mechanical and not particularly rewarding, Weir does an excellent job of pacing the short play experience. The brief introduction provides all the characterization and backstory that is needed to make the restraints placed on the player's action reasonable, while leaving most of the specifics of the situation undefined. The new player has just enough turns to familiarize himself with his equipment and the surroundings before the main action begins. Weir shows a deft touch in his descriptions, painting broad strokes of mood and style with compact and clever writing.

While it was disappointing to find how little could be done in the main sequence, it captures the frenzied mindset that would no doubt prevail in that situation. The result is much the same regardless of how many points the player scores, and the entire experience seems far too short -- a mere glimpse of what I quickly found myself wishing was a larger experience.

The coding quality and attention to detail seem significantly above-average. This, coupled with the writing expertise and intuitive feel for pacing, makes me very interested in seeing what Mr. Weir can produce in a longer development timeline.

One of four entries for Speed IF 12, The Hose was produced by formerly prolific author Peter Berman in 2000, his most productive year (at least in terms of works released). Challenged by a premise in which the narrator must prepare a special surprise in honor of the undefined Chuck Schmendiman, Mr. Berman crafted a short tale featuring frustration, revenge, and beautiful flanges.

Although the opening text seems somewhat drab, Mr. Berman's prose quickly starts sketching a believable universe. Some of the techniques he uses are instructive. For example, he immediately presents the reader with the challenge of understanding "extemporous hose technology" -- the secret to Schmendiman's success and the focus of the narrator's career. Also, by repeatedly mangling the name of Schmendiman in a vaguely derogatory manner (Schmendrick, Schmindleman, etc.), he subtly establishes the players distaste for his employer (and the task at hand) without being required to justify the emotion. In the description of the main item, he establishes the narrator's dissonant admiration for the products of Schmendiman's genius. It's a remarkable job of mood-building in a few dozen paragraphs.

However, this piece slips into two-star territory due to the lack of coherence in the central puzzle. The unusual dream imagery brought to mind the technique used in Planetfall, in which the dream sequence is a metaphor providing hints for the major puzzles encountered by the player, but this was apparently not the purpose of it.(Spoiler - click to show) Instead, it is a timed guess-the-verb challenge, during which you must perform an optional action to gain an "insight" that will advance the plot. The player need not do anything after waking up to see the plot advance, which happens in a way not credibly related to the dream action. The dream imagery seems to have been chosen solely to meet one of the "bonus" items in the speed IF premise.

The end sequence is abrupt, and the narrator's success seems out of proportion with the level of dislike established beforehand.(Spoiler - click to show) I would expect more dramatic tension than non-specific job dissatisfaction to motivate blowing up the whole lab! Better puzzle design and a little more editing would have gone a long way here.

This very short piece is labeled by the author as his first speed IF (Speed IF 17), and it may have been his first published work. Several self-deprecating remarks in-game demonstrate a lack of confidence that was probably justified at the time.

The premise (racing the clock in a building wired with bombs by terrorists, on New Year's Eve) is very ambitious for speed IF, and it sets up anticipation that would be difficult to satisfy with a full-fledged game, let alone something rattled out in a couple of hours. However, the more pressing problem is the author's flat writing, which does nothing to generate interest or involvement.

While the piece is functional as a program, the short plot is basically nonsense. The game can be "won" in a very short series of moves, and the very limited two-room, three-object, 1-NPC implementation makes it relatively easy to discover the winning path, even if nothing about it is comprehensible. One of the objects is stolen from Emily Short's Metamorphoses, something which really does not belong in a piece with this premise unless the author were taking it in a very surreal (or possibly sci-fi) direction.

I will say that, some minor errors aside, the author does appear to have a basic grasp of some of the mechanics of programming and puzzle design -- what's missing is the creative narrative to tie them together. I would not shy away from other works by this author to track his progress as his skills mature.

Another speed IF entry -- this one for PAX East 2010 -- that gains tremendously by throwing away most of the random seed ideas and developing a small set of them into a more coherent narrative.

You play a conference attendee who is struggling to get the last open seat at a one of the overcrowded panel discussions. Competing with you is an antithetical antagonist, whose interest in the panel is unclear. You start out empty-handed, armed only with your wits, determination, and a handy portfolio of famous spells from classic IF.

An engaging and witty comedy puzzler that won't take too long to solve, this piece does a good job of blending old and new in an interesting way. There are some minor-to-significant flaws, as might be expected for a first release of speed IF, but none that should inhibit your progress for very long.(Spoiler - click to show) (Except maybe one... be sure to "rezrov crowd" at some point.)

By all accounts, the IF-related portions of PAX East 2010 drew significant interest from attendees who did not know much about the field. This, in turn, sparked dreams of a resurgence of mainstream appreciation for IF. Such a hopeful mood permeates Ms. Morayati's piece, which ends on a "gooey" note of optimism on this theme. As the number of member reviews on IFDB passes the 1,000 mark, I find myself hoping right along with her.

How about: 'What was the chicken thinking as it crossed the road?'

This short piece can't seem to decide if it's an 'interpreter abuse' type of game implementing Freeway(Spoiler - click to show) -- at which it fails since you can only go one direction -- or an actual attempt at humor. It does a better job of the latter than the former, but not enough to make it actually funny, though I might qualify it as mildly amusing.

It is competently put together as a program; I encountered no bugs. Based on the 'bad' version of the ending, it seems that the author was aware of the work's artistic shortcomings, but decided to release it anyway.

Given the number of other titles by this author with better ratings, I think it's safe to skip this one. As a warning to anyone else who wants to try it out: Gargoyle is not the best client, since the game expects a fixed-width font. You'll either have to download a different interpreter, get Gargoyle to use a different font, or (as I did), copy-and-paste the descriptions to a text editor to see the intended representation.

[edit: I've upped the rating to two stars because the major problem I had (text rendering in Gargoyle) was a function of my interpreter, not the work.]

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.

By all appearances, this is a below-average but sincere and functional fantasy adventure, oriented around your quest to save the princess at great peril to life and limb. However, it's difficult to say so definitively, as the version of the game here on IFDB is shareware, and it only allows you to play for 30 turns.

In the context of an abundance of free games of comparable or better quality, nothing I saw in the first 30 moves suggests that it's worth the $10 Canadian requested by the author. Also, given the age of the included contact information, it seems doubtful that it's still possible to register legally. Perhaps the author will see fit to release the full game as freeware, so that the public can appreciate his work. Until then, we can only wonder.

Here we have an unusual animal: an Inform 6 port of a BASIC port of an original in an unknown language. I can only assume that the terrible gameplay is a high-fidelity recreation of the original, minus the pain of dealing with a two-word parser.

As this piece comes with both BASIC and Inform 6 source code, it's an extremely instructive example of the advantages of using a well-established IF-oriented language instead of trying to create your own parser from scratch. This game's real value, however, is in showing new authors what NOT to do when writing interactive fiction for the first time.

For starters, I'm not sure the output of this game qualifies as prose, let alone fiction. Single-sentence room descriptions abound, many for rooms that contain nothing and serve no function. NPCs are zero-dimensional obstacles. Object descriptions omit key details about their features and function. Critical information about a locale may not even be visible from within that locale.

There's a low inventory limit, which is especially obnoxious given the need for certain items at certain points that can only be reached once. And there are some highly-questionable implementation choices, such as(Spoiler - click to show) the need to type "enter rope" to use it to traverse an obstacle. (Even for a two-word parser, why not "climb rope"?) and(Spoiler - click to show) a magic teleporter device (cleverly disguised as a non-descript box-with-a-button-on-it) that only functions in two locations, with no hinting as to which two they might be.

Since the source code was available, I used it as a "strategy guide" after reaching my frustration limit, marveling at how convoluted and arbitrary the puzzle structure was. Hoping to have the satisfaction of at least seeing the end, I instead discovered that an apparent timing bug makes it impossible to actually complete the "adventure."

AVOID. AVOID. AVOID.

Before today, I didn't really understand the point of speed IF. Making good interactive fiction is hard, making it quickly is damn near impossible. I thought the best that could be said is that it allows for experimentation, and by labeling a work as "speed IF", the player is more inclined to treat its shortcomings favorably on the assumption that they may stem from a lack of time and not a lack of care and/or capability. I didn't realize until writing this review that speed IF competitions aren't completely free-form endeavors, and that authors are supposed to craft the story around a collection of random ideas.

Approaching this piece in ignorance of its origin, I found it to have an intriguing premise with a lot of potential for exploration. You play the part of a fallen angel, freshly released from Hell to complete some (undisclosed) nefarious assignment. As the action opens, you find yourself at a sort of crossroads, dreaming of a return to Heaven.

The writing quality is somewhat less than average, comprised mostly of straightforward descriptions not in keeping with the thematic tone. Though you play a supernatural being, little is done to offer you insight into that condition. Many, many questions beg for answers: What was it like to be an angel? What inner conflict led you to side with Lucifer? What is it like to work for evil? Why do you seek redemption now? What do you make of the human world today? Thematically, there is a rich, rich vein of possibility that this work barely scratches.

From a technical standpoint, The room implementation makes little sense -- several are nothing more than superfluous clones of each other. Object implementation is weak, but this is entirely expected in a work completed in a couple of hours. Also, you earn 10 points before you do anything in this game, for reasons that are unclear.

One interesting aspect of this work is the hint system.(Spoiler - click to show) The command "help" brings responses from God, and sometimes the Devil. In a work about temptation and salvation, this device offers numerous possibilities. When people face moral dilemmas, they are often depicted as having a little angel and a little devil on their shoulders. Who does an angel get?

Given all of my interest in the premise, the actual gameplay was something of a disappointment. Both good and evil paths are available, but it's not immediately apparent how to proceed on either. It would have made sense to outline the evil path in the opening description and be much vaguer in the hints about the good path(Spoiler - click to show), provided that the player is clued into his supernatural creation power some other way. The path to salvation is ridiculously short and easy, and does not require any difficult choices.

On the whole, this piece verges dangerously close to 1-star territory, but I liked the premise so much, and it inspired so much thought about what this story could be, that I give it an extra star for potential. If someone else were to give the same premise a more extended and polished treatment, it could easily become a classic.

For reference, the seed concept of this particular competition was: "Write a game that includes decency, a Toys-R-Us Bag of Rusty Lead-Painted Metal Bits, a cursed angel, and the phrase 'thy gills are as unclean as a lobster's arse'. Bonus points for including the darkness intrinsic to the human soul, alligators and the women who love them, or professional girls gymnastics." Although many of these items are ignored, I think it's to the piece's benefit -- no need to take such a serious premise in such a silly direction.

This short piece has a rather unusual premise, in that it take place within IFMUD. IFMUD -- aside from being the place to be for authors and fans of the modern IF community -- is a MUD , a virtual environment that behaves very much like the type of virtual environment emulated by interactive fiction parsers. It's an interesting and strange experience to find yourself in a simulation of a simulation, when the "underlying" simulation uses such a similar interface to the "top" one.

The goal of the author was to recreate the experience of "attending" the 2003 XYZZY Awards, a full transcript of which is available online. In preparation, I read the entire transcript myself, for comparison purposes.

It took me much longer to read the transcript than it did to play this piece, partly because the author (David Welbourn, aka DavidW) only implemented the first couple of awards, and partly because he edited out much of the audience activity. The official presentations of the announcers are faithfully recreated, along with the notable acceptance speech by Triage.

This work is speed IF, so there are limits to what you can expect. The most richly-implemented feature of the environment appears to be the artwork surrounding the stage (murals and paintings). I don't know whether these descriptions are original creations of the author or what you would have seen had you been on IFMUD for the ceremony, but they are amusing, either way.

NPCs are barely sketches, but to implement them in more detail would require taking considerable license with the personalities of real people. The main focus is the presentation of the awards, and I congratulate Mr. Welbourn for creating a minor puzzle to advance the action -- a clever twist.