Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

This is not quite a game, but it's definitely something more than a simple example of the Inform 6 conversation system it's intended to demonstrate (which seems to have been updated since the release of this work).

The intended demonstration is of a flexible conversation system that controls standard ask/tell behavior through a keyboard-driven interactive menu. Selecting from the menu generates the equivalent command, which is entered for you at the main prompt. It's an interesting approach, that allows for a pretty direct comparison between two classic methods of NPC interaction, and it gave me more appreciation for the narrative flow that a well-done menu system offers when compared to ask/tell.

The fatal flaw of the system (to my eyes) is that it seems maintain a running list of "open" topics for you long past when they are conversationally appropriate, and this contextual distance is not reflected in the way the NPC responds if you suddenly change topics. Thus, as your list of options increase, the conversation can go from seeming very natural to seeming very odd as the NPC gamely responds to any thread you choose to continue.

I'm not saying simulating more realistic responses here would be easy -- far from it. I want to be clear that this apparent oddness is a symptom of success; it's a side-effect of breaking the illusion of natural flow that the menu system so ably provides at first. That the oddness wouldn't be noticed using the ask/tell model is likewise an indicator of just how unrealistic "conversations" using it are.

Putting model details aside and considering Medusa as a brief interactive fiction experience, I can't help but think that it's above-average, and that it would make a great opening sequence for a longer work. It would also be a good start on a decent "slice of life" entry for a one-room game competition, though, in its present state, it's a far cry from more widely-known works such as Emily Short's Galatea.

Take note: The split-screen display doesn't quite work right using Gargoyle, but it worked fine with plain old Frotz.

Oh, my. When browsing at random through the IFDB, you can go way, way, way, way back through the archaeological layers of IF. This work hails from the primordial era of 1993 (quite possibly predating the release of Inform version 1!), and, boy, does it show it.

Although built using the stalwart TADS 2 platform, Shadowland I: The Tower of Iron seems positively atavistic to modern eyes. Much of this is a result of the chosen style; it plays more like one of the RPG-simulating MUDs it was contemporary with than it does a typical text adventure.

The game actually starts off fairly well. If you ask for it, you are treated to a lengthy introduction to playing IF, such as you might have found in the manual for an Infocom game. The opening description is basic but competent, and then you find yourself killed because you failed to beat a guess-the-verb challenge within 5 turns.(Spoiler - click to show) (Hint: "remove straps") Okay, then.

The title hints that this piece was intended as the opening installment of an entire series. In this exciting first chapter, you will face many terrifying challenges, such as:

* randomized combat between low-level characters (in the context of a largely unexplained magic and combat system),
* the twin demons of guess-the-verb and guess-the-noun,
* hunt-the-topic with uncommunicative NPCs,
* and unexpected starvation puzzle(Spoiler - click to show) (in a world with just one thing to eat, that you probably will use immediately upon finding it since it also the only thing heals you, apparently), and
* subtle programming errors that inhibit basic functionality!(Spoiler - click to show) (a lingering requirement for a skill roll to pick something up, even when no longer in combat?)

Playing this game was a terrible experience for the modern player. But playing this game was a wonderful experience for the old-school IF aficionado, taking you back to the days when each point(Spoiler - click to show) (out of a well-rounded 1000) was a hard-won battle pitting your wits against the author.

Seriously, I actually did enjoy this game, in that grudge match kind of way. I was determined to make it to the end, even though it wasn't entirely clear that this piece was completed enough to do so. When I thought I'd tried absolutely everything possible but still found myself stuck, I took it up a notch and decompiled the code to look for hints.

To the author's credit, he may have anticipated this possibility, and his puzzle design skills continued to challenge me even in this "god mode". By cleverly omitting the names of objects involved in actions, he made it virtually impossible to determine how the last barrier between me and success was to be surmounted, though I scanned vigilantly through the uncommented spaghetti code churned out by the decompiler.

When I finally ferreted out what the correct item/object/unique-action combination was, my hat was off to this brave pioneer, for the daring masterstroke of inexplicably requiring one particular item to be used out of context to(Spoiler - click to show) open a grate... No hints in the relevant object descriptions. No hints when an incorrect object was used with the right verb. A cunningly-placed red herring, in the form of a different object that much more plausibly could have been abused in this way. I nearly cried at the genius of it.

My greatest regret is that I didn't get to experience the related follow-up puzzle without preparation, as I had already accidentally "solved" that while tracing code for the one above. Figuring out that one cold would have required a level of transcendent insight akin to the Dalai Lama's.

Taking my tongue out of my cheek for a moment, I actually did enjoy this enough to rate it in two-star territory. It is an honest first effort that took no small amount of work to realize. Minus the bugs and with slightly fairer puzzles, I might even have gone for three stars. Mr. Claburn, if you're still out there somewhere, consider dusting off this project. Give Inform 7 a whirl. You've already got your first player lined up for Shadowland II.

I'm having a hard time expressing what I liked about this piece.

You direct the actions of a good-natured, young, domestic everyman, nearly fresh out of college and getting established in the world alongside the "Honey" that has become the center of his universe. Well, maybe "center of the universe" is strong, but certainly she's the bed along which his stream of consciousness runs.

Since Honey's parents (his future in-laws?) are coming to dinner, he has a minor errand to run -- pick up some photos that she wants to show them. Easy enough, right? Only this is IF, so certainly something will stand in the way.

The author stuck to genre here, in that the challenges you face are the very believable everyday challenges of existence.(Spoiler - click to show) There are plugged toilets, lost keys, escape-oriented pets, and the like. Although this sounds like it would be tremendously boring to simulate, it's not, thanks to the continuous characterization of the narrator as he grins his way through these obstacles.

As some of the other reviews I found online mention, the "puzzle" structure is fairly straightforward, with much of the delay resulting from the choice to reveal context-relevant things only as you need them. This was an interesting twist, emulating the way that so much of everyday existence lies beneath your notice, but I agree that it was a bit irksome because of the way it forced you to revisit the all of the rooms again every time you change context. On the other hand, perhaps this device was necessary to accommodate the author's method of characterization, which is grafting context-relevant information on the descriptions of everything.

The hunt for new items was certainly not too burdensome to endure, especially when you recall that you can navigate to any room by name(Spoiler - click to show), and there are only about 10 locations total. It's a technique worth looking at, and there are ways to cut down the irk level when using it.(Spoiler - click to show) (For example, when the narrator realizes his keys are missing, he recalls where he last saw them, eliminating the full apartment search for this item.)

As a first work, it is very well-done -- especially the major NPC, your adorable/terrible cat, Azrael, who is light-weight in coding but has a definite personality. The most noticeable errors I spotted were some lingering action contexts in descriptions and a few glitches in the NPC's idle behavior (doing two different, incompatible things on the same turn).

In the end, I think it was the narrator himself that I liked best about this piece. You'll notice that my description above switches back and forth between the treating the narrator as a third person and the player. This is an artifact of the author's use of the first-person in describing game actions, which creates a strange sensation of both being and not-being the narrator as you direct him through his world. On reflection, what it seems to do most is force you to consider the narrator as a separate person instead of a role you are trying to fulfill, giving it the feel of "hanging out" instead of "let's pretend".

The game experience was just long enough to feel like I'd hung out with him for a while, amiably killing time on a lazy long-weekend morning. It feels like three stars, but I give it two for the coding errors and the lack of puzzle "meat." Still, it's better than average, especially for a first-timer, and anyone considering an in-your-apartment work should review this one to see how the author manages to hold the player's interest in a potentially banal setting.

Since I hadn't heard of this piece before, it wasn't immediately apparent to me that it was released as an April Fool's joke. Although the Quake setting is portrayed in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the use of "special effects" in the opening sequence does a fairly good job of setting the right mood for anyone who remembers playing the original.

A little map-connection legerdemain ensures that any of the multiplicity of apparent options will quickly funnel you towards either a generic dead-end or to the main path of progress. You'll soon find yourself happily blasting away with a virtual shotgun, much as you would when playing the real game.

The randomized combat means there is a decent chance you will die before reaching the end, but it only took me twice to run the gauntlet and reach the ending sequence, where a mysterious figure lets you in on the joke and ends the game.

It's not much of a game, but I congratulate the author for the effort it took to put together the opening sequence, and the work as a whole is actually not too shabby for a first attempt. It's worth the time if you've ever played the first-person shooter it's based on, just for the novelty of having the experience translated to IF.

In this micro-work, you are a dinosaur of unspecified type, standing in a featureless plain you can't leave. A few turns from the start, you will be killed as a result of a massive asteroid impact nearby.

As near as I can tell after several "playthroughs", this is all that happens -- all that can happen. It would probably take about as long to recreate this game in Inform 7 as it did to write this review.

Although it might be interesting to try to depict this scene in a realistic way, this piece make no attempt to do so. Skip it.

You have to use the bathroom. Eventually, you do.

That's pretty much the whole story of this piece, which, although it didn't center around potty humor as I had feared, offers little in the way of interesting gameplay.

This work is probably best considered as a companion piece for Michael J. Coyne's list of "First-Timer Foibles." It handily illustrates many of them, including synonym sickness, aberrant articles, oral offenses, shocking spelling and grisly grammar, laconic locations, and action abortion.

As a program, this piece is mostly functional, but is close to broken at several points. I encountered a number of apparent bugs, one of which mercifully allowed advancement of the "plot" without what I would assume was intended to be a critical item(Spoiler - click to show), unless, of course, boiling water in a rusty pot is supposed to magically make glue.

Upon reflection, it is clear that the author was actually trying here; you can sense his struggle to learn Inform 6 in the design of the puzzles, such as they are. Presumably, the end result was the best he could do at the time. According to IFDB, it's been ten years since this piece was released, so there's a very good chance that the author's skill as a writer and programmer have substantially increased.

New voices are always welcome in IF, so, if you're still out there, Mr. Gaertner, why not give it another try?

This cooperative creation by two apparently new IF authors carries many of the hallmarks of the newcomer, but it also shows some surprising hints of both depth and capability.

As someone who never appreciated The Lurking Horror, I approached this piece with some skepticism. Horror is a difficult genre to write; it takes a very subtle skill to craft prose that will possess the reader enough to generate real discomfort. With interactive fiction, the challenge is sharply increased, as the pacing -- so important to managing the reader experience -- is subject to the flailing and detours of the player.

The authors seem to have an intuitive grasp of how to manage the pace through a series of gently-railroaded sequences. The illusion of player freedom is fairly good. It wasn't until I was finished that I realized how expertly I had been swept along. Within each sequence, the story world evolves through changes in the protagonist's mental state even if your actions fail to make the desired changes to the world's physical state. There was only one place where I stalled out for a bit.(Spoiler - click to show) It was at the ranch entrance, where, after discovering I couldn't walk to the house, I was at a loss about what to do next. It would probably be in keeping with the overall pacing to have the protagonist spontaneously notice the broken lock piece after 10 turns or so, instead of forcing multiple examinations of the gate.

The first time this game impressed me was in the opening sequence.(Spoiler - click to show) Though the introduction is somewhat confusing, and the transition to the first move felt somewhat forced, I was quite fascinated by the touch of "cinematography" (for lack of a better word) as the color scheme changed on the words "Your child is waiting." It was a very effective way, in conjunction with the change in punctuation, of emulating a cinematic match cut, and very clever use of the medium.

The writing quality is patchy. It needs some proofreading to weed out misused homonyms, run-on sentences, and the like. In addition, there are certain discrepancies in tone that disrupt the experience -- some out-of-place jokes that work against the mood-building, some points where the anger and violence of the protagonist are so over-the-top that it strains suspension of disbelief. However, the writing at its best shows flashes of real talent, as evidenced by the feeling of creepiness stealing over me in those places that seemed to have the most polish.

The overall implementation quality is quite good. The authors make excellent use of changing descriptions to keep you focused on the important part of the story. The biggest gaps I noticed are certain unimplemented details(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g. you can look at the house but not the stables from the entrance to the ranch) and the lack of hinting on the correct conversation model ("talk to", not "ask/tell").

Written for the 2009 IntroComp (where it placed first of three), it is by definition an unfinished work. As a result, I gave it an extra star for the potential that I sensed this work could have as a cleaned-up, full-length story.

The true test of an intro is whether you would be interested in continuing, and, in my case, the answer is a definite yes.

As I started playing the third (and final?) entry in the Frenetic Five series, I found myself immersed and smiling almost immediately.

Once again, you take the role of Improv, MacGyver-disciple and leader of the City's most available group of superhero temp workers. This game opens with you at the tail end of a party, playing "Battle Cry" with some other local crime fighters after indulging yourself a bit too much. I knew I was already hooked when I immediately replayed the prelude to get another crack at this game-within-a-game. I was extremely disappointed to discover that the catchphrase "Able to carry wood furniture up a flight of stairs in a single bound!" was not for a superhero called The Prime Mover.

Author Neil deMause really seems to have been getting the hang of writing IF by the time this piece was created. As before, the story universe seems alive, with the action for many scripted scenes and exchanges taking place over several turns. There is little temptation to keep entering "wait" to see them play out, however, for two reasons: First, there is a lot to keep you occupied in the game environment. Second, the way they are written doesn't necessarily tip you off that they will continue from turn to turn.

This method is an extremely effective way of creating a convincing social atmosphere; the interaction amongst the NPCs gives them a sense of independent life (in stark contrast with the stage puppets that many IF NPCs resemble), while at the same time feeding you a steady drip of characterization, backstory, and hints. The technique's potency won the work an XYZZY award for "Best NPC" -- the second for the series.

The work required by the author to create this mirage is significant, and there are limits to how long it can be sustained. Spend too long in an area without moving the plot forward, and your companions will become oddly silent, an after-effect of the compelling illusion provided when they are "on".

Long-time players will recognize the site of your team's mission as the setting for Zork. Perhaps that is why this episode feels like it has some meat to it, and that it will take some real effort to reach the end. This is just another trick, however -- the total length is typical for a modern, non-commercial piece.

The implementation quality is much improved when compared to previous entries in the series. I did encounter a few small bugs, but nothing significant to gameplay.

As with previous episodes, the highlight of this piece is the author's sense of humor. It starts funny, it stays funny, and then... (Spoiler - click to show)well, then there's the ending.

To call the ending unsatisfying is an understatement. I was powerfully reminded of the movie The French Connection, for the strange and sudden severing of the viewer from the plot thread, leaving the story to end not with a bang but a whimper. (Well, figuratively, at least.)

Frankly, I couldn't believe that the ending I saw was the only one available. I scoured the internet for hints and walkthroughs, finding only a single walkthrough that delivered the same ending. A few more iterations of the climax scene offered no other options, so I took the unusual step of decompiling the game file to look for other possible variations. There were none.

Why you would go through the effort of creating a work of this scale to deliver such a disjointed, downer ending is beyond me, but doing so is the author's privilege. Mr. deMause seems to have a penchant for challenging player expectations of the medium, and this certainly qualifies.

Assuming you don't want to read the spoiler above, all I can say is that the ending is different from what you might expect of this genre or this series.(Spoiler - click to show) The only takeaway seems to be: Friends Don't Let Friends Fight Crime Drunk.

In addition to being mostly enjoyable as entertainment, this is an excellent piece for study of technique -- both writing and coding. Even with the spare object and verb implementation, the world is vibrant and animated in a way that few works of IF manage to be. I gladly recommend it to anyone looking for some laughs, which are delivered at their usual "frenetic" pace.

This extremely short work is an entry to "The Great IF Toaster Contest". See http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if/toaster-comp/ for details.

As the site explains:

"The rules are very simple: Make a toaster. The toaster should have a lever on it (to push down the bread) and a slide or dial to set the toastedness to. See how much of a game you can make out of it -- let your imagination run wild, as they say."

This piece seems to interpret the instructions as one might an assignment for a programming course. There is a toaster, and the author's imagination does seem to have run a little wild.

While it would get at least a passing grade in the imagined course, it is completely lacking in any of the things that would qualify it as interactive fiction. It is an interactive coding exercise, and nothing more.

It seems safe to assume that the author, Duncan Cross, was new to writing IF at the time this piece was created. I see that there are several other works by the same author available on IFDB, and I would certainly not shy away from trying out another one in the hopes that his talents have matured.

I found myself with a few free minutes this evening and thought I'd try the latest on IFDB. I ended up spending at least an hour with this game, which was surprisingly engaging.

The genre claimed for this work is "fantasy", but it's more comedy than anything else. It has a chattery, bantering tone that did a lot to endear this game to me, and did so quickly -- which is important because I very nearly quit after the first move. (Let's just say the command "read sign" did not produce a very promising result.) The text is frequently silly, but it only crosses the line into *too* silly once or twice. It made me chuckle on a few occasions.

The game proclaims itself as geared for a novice, and it mostly lives up to the promise. Puzzles are not difficult in terms of a thinking challenge; they are immediately recognizable as the "insert tab A into slot B" type of artificial roadblocks that litter both IF and other role-playing games. This is frequently reinforced by the fact that, in many cases, uses for objects are strongly suggested in their descriptions, often with comic effect.

Some puzzles were difficult, however, in terms of implementation choices. Object implementation is fairly rich -- perhaps too rich in some places.(Spoiler - click to show)At least one critical object is only discoverable after examining a seemingly-already-adequately-described scenery object in the first room... and then examining something mentioned in that object's description. This seemed like an artifact of the programmer having some fun, and it was not in keeping with the description style of the rest of the game. On the other hand, conversations were implemented so sparsely that they barely existed. If you don't hit on certain keywords, the NPCs issue only unmodified default responses.(Spoiler - click to show)This was particularly frustrating in dealing with the first NPCs I encountered, outside the mines. They did not react to keywords based on the nouns in the area, and for several minutes talking to the foreman gnome got nothing but "no response" results. I eventually went back and read what he first says and found that keywords there get real replies. After that, conversations went more smoothly.

Fortunately, the author includes a walkthrough, but, unfortunately, it is in the form of a series of commands to win the game a certain way. A better hint system would have been nice, since I did find myself consulting the walkthrough at one point (see first spoiler above), and in doing so, I inadvertently saw the solution for another.

All in all, I liked this game, but I think it needs significantly more polish before it can be considered complete as an introductory piece of IF. A real novice would probably have been confused and frustrated by the numerous small bugs and issues I encountered, and anyone turning to the walkthrough for help would have a lot of potential fun ruined.

Keep an eye out for future work from this author. There's definitely potential here.