Ratings and Reviews by OtisTDog

The conceptual foundation of Vendetta is a frustrating mix of originality and cliche, embedded in a compelling and often richly-envisioned universe that begs for further development and exploration.

Five minutes into this piece, I was in complete agreement with Dan Shiovitz's assessment: "Stories about supercompetent badasses who have No Time For Love always make me feel a little dirty, like I'm seeing parts of somebody's psyche it is embarrassing to be looking at..." The prose style and dramatic content reminded me of that B-movie kind of adventure fiction where men are men and women are ornaments with incomprehensible emotions. It almost seemed like the style found in pre-pubescent fiction, and my estimate of the author's sophistication -- as well as my interest level -- kept dropping.

Anyone who feels the same way at that point is encouraged to continue(Spoiler - click to show), because shortly thereafter, comes a surprising plot twist. It's revealed that the narrator is an artificial being built for military purposes whose personality has been "modified" (or maybe just mangled) by the removal of key human elements like empathy and love. It's also revealed that the narrator's memory is mostly composed of the memories of another, much older person, which were artificially "written" to his brain. This revelation knocked my judgment for a loop; so many things that had seemed odd and out-of place, from the child-like interaction with Sally to the incongruous use of "young man" to describe others to the casual disregard for recent accomplishments, suddenly seemed appropriate. This sort of resonance between the large and small details is brilliant, but I'm not 100% certain it was intentional. Accepting this premise immediately raises the question of why an artificial being is walking around the world unsupervised in a world where such beings appear to be nearly unique.

The writing style is strange and uneven. Fluid and competent prose alternates with stilted, forced writing sprinkled with spelling and grammar errors. In several places, there is repetition of a word (or variations of a word) that can be jarring. In others, the exposition takes abrupt detours to work in a bit of background that probably should have appeared earlier.

As a work of interactive fiction, it has several weak spots. For the first half of the game, much of the player's time is spent waiting for multi-turn "conversations" to complete. One glance at the walkthrough should have raised red flags; there are far too many z's in it.

While on one level I thought it was interesting to be doing other things while the conversation takes place (like multi-tasking on the phone in real life), the object implementation is so shallow in some scenes that there's not really anything else to do but wait. Eventually, it crossed a line. The sensation was similar to how I once saw someone describe an RPG GM who gets too active with the party NPCs he controls: At some point, the players begin to wonder if they're just there to watch the GM entertain himself.

However, all of this changes (another significant discontinuity) when you get to the second act. Immediately, the player finds himself in the middle of a sprawling map full of interesting scenery objects. It's such a change in the nature of the play, and the depth of object implementation is so spotty, that adjusting to the transition is somewhat annoying. You find yourself trying all of the mentioned nouns, never sure which commands will result in a "no such thing" message, and which will result in two or three layers of irrelevant detail. Most of the object descriptions are done well -- more consistent implementation depth might have made for a very interesting effect(Spoiler - click to show) as you ransack the area while racing the clock. After all, when you're in the unknown, you don't know what's significant at first, and a real office would be filled with plenty of useless objects.

This part feels like a more traditional piece of IF, and it takes a while to explore. Just when my previous irritation at being inexpertly railroaded in Act I had started to fade, the sudden introduction of a CYOA format during the endgame left me shaking my head in disbelief.

The level of realism, like so much about this work, is lopsided in its application. While I was impressed with many details like the "bit player" NPCs in the hotel environs and the changing weather as you venture outside, they stand in stark contrast to the cartoon-like interaction with later hostile NPCs, who seem to be implemented as little more than combination punching bags and bowling pins.(Spoiler - click to show) As an example, I spent several turns goofing around with a locked gate, while the occupant of a nearby guardhouse patiently sat there staring into space, waiting for me to walk in and break his neck.

Vendetta was developed using ADRIFT, which my limited investigation leads me to believe is a sort of point-and-click code generator intended for non-programmers. Perhaps the author, James Hall, had no background in programming when this was written, in which case some of the problematic parser interactions that I encountered are easier to understand. Some choices in verb-to-action mappings, as well as the author's tendency to translate your apparent intent into a series of actions you did not specify, lead to a strange kind of abstraction to what you do. From time to time, it's almost like you're just offering suggestions instead of controlling the PC.

There are also some out-and-out problems with the code or writing, such as:

* an important (if optional) item is placed in scope(Spoiler - click to show) (the cell phone when you kill the first guard), but you are not notified and could easily miss it if you don't "look" again,

* the response to one critical command makes it appear as though the verb is not recognized, when in fact it simply requires an indirect object(Spoiler - click to show) ("reflect laser" vs. "reflect laser at x"),

* some descriptions are misleading, in a way that is out of character with the rest of the work.(Spoiler - click to show) (e.g. "In the corner of the room is the reception desk, which has nothing of interest on it other than a few pieces of office stationery." -- which gave me the impression they were blank pages, though I admit that's subjective.)

If the entire work was written as well as its current best parts, Vendetta would definitely rate three stars. With better consistency and some additional conceptual and thematic development, it could have hit four. I'm left with mixed feelings about this piece, as well as curiosity about what Mr. Hall has been up to for the last 5 years -- it seems like he has not released anything since Vendetta placed 14th out of 26 in the 2005 IF Comp. If Mr. Hall has continued to practice and develop his writing skills, I would expect his next work to realize much more of its potential than Vendetta does.

As you can tell from the length of my review, this piece managed to get under my skin. I want to give it a higher rating than I can objectively justify. For a pure player, there are enough negatives to warrant avoiding it. For new authors, there are valuable lessons to be seen in studying what's done right and what's done wrong. My suggestion: Decide which camp you're in, and choose accordingly.

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.

Written as the original implementation of Inform neared maturity (this work uses version 5.5), Spiritwrak is an old-school epic of a size and complexity comparable to the larger Infocom titles.

It seems that Daniel S. Yu, the author, firmly believed in the adage that "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." This work treads a fine line between those paths, starting with a premise rooted in the climax of Infocom's Spellbreaker and playing like something that came right out of its development team. As Duncan Stevens notes in his SPAG review: "[T]he magic system is suspiciously reminiscent of the Enchanter series, and the humor captures the Zork style." However, Spiritwrak adds a heavy layer of originality to the geographical and mythological framework created by Infocom, allowing it to stand as an achievement in its own right.

Spiritwrak is extremely difficult. Even for an old-school piece, the puzzles can be brutal. Some puzzles are arguably fair but lack what would be considered the minimum reasonable hinting by modern standards. Other puzzles require feats of mind-reading of the type that would have sold a lot of Invisiclues­™ back in the day.(Spoiler - click to show) (For example, can you guess how to hide behind some curtains when the "hide" verb is not implemented and opening them results in you immediately shutting them again? Can you guess the significance of a small boat's name, or which of the many topic-poor NPCs might be able to tell you about it? Can you guess that using your triplication spell on a certain item won't actually triplicate it, but instead produce variations of it that contain plot-necessary items?) A few puzzles appear to be virtual -- they halt progress like a designed puzzle but are probably due to flaws or limitations in the coding. This last group is especially frustrating because, in a game with so little hinting, it's easy to think you are missing key items or actions when in reality you have the right idea and everything you need(Spoiler - click to show), but are not holding the right objects "directly", i.e. in the top level of your inventory.

This is the kind of game that requires you to take notes, to draw maps, to learn by dying, to spend significant time pondering dead ends and red herrings, and to continually second-guess what you thought were solutions to the puzzles you've solved. For old-school aficionados, it's heaven! For everyone else, be prepared to seek hints -- though I highly recommend you do so via rec.games.int-fiction or IFMUD, as the "hint" files you can download here contain copious spoilers that are impossible to avoid.

Interestingly, this game claims to be released under the GNU Public License v2, which means that anyone should be able to expand and improve it. Unfortunately, however, it is not distributed with the source code (as required by GPL), and I was unable to locate the source online. If anyone else happens to come across it, please leave a comment here -- it would be interesting to explore cleaning up some bugs, making certain key descriptions of objects and action slightly clearer(Spoiler - click to show) (especially the brick puzzle in the endgame), and implementing an in-game hint system.

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.