Reviews by OtisTDog

As other reviews mention, this is not really interactive fiction -- it's a recreation of an old game from the days when "computer graphics" was completely synonymous with "ASCII art."

The game does seem to be implemented well and was probably something of a pain to write. I didn't particularly enjoy the gameplay, so I'd normally rate it 2 stars, but I was struck by the way this piece is framed -- it made me think about the possibilities of throwing a mini-game like this into the midst of a standard IF work. (As if writing something of substance isn't hard enough!)

The only attempt at that sort of thing that I'm aware of is Infocom's Border Zone, which was somewhat controversial due to the real-time nature of the mini-game's action. In this case, the game is turn-based, which might work with the "stop-and-think" nature of IF instead of against it.

Barry Volain, the author of Myth makes no secret that the puzzles in this work are grounded in well-known Greek and Roman mythology. In the "readme" file accompanying the game file, he even goes so far as to recommend reading Bulfinch's Mythology (which is out of copyright and available via Project Gutenberg and at this web site) as a primer. In the era of Google and Wikipedia, such preparation is probably not necessary.

Myth is austerely minimalist. Descriptions are short for both rooms and objects. Many words mentioned in the text aren't recognized by the parser. It falls victim to a few First-Timer Foibles, including laconic locations, oral offenses (though only mildly), and close-mouthed characters. Yet somehow, this work did intrigue me, and I felt compelled to play through to the end.

I wish I could say that my patience paid off. Instead, it wore thin. After making about 100 points worth of progress, I hit something of a wall. As I could find no hints other than the walkthrough, my only choice was to read it and hope I didn't get too much given away.

Of course, I saw several things I didn't want to, including some things that I had tried to do but hadn't used the right word for. Once I realized synonym sickness was one of the first-timer foibles I was up against, I was a lot less willing to sit and puzzle things out when I was stuck. Doubly-so when I realized there were areas you could only visit once in a game with an inventory limit.

It's really too bad, because there were quite a few puzzles in the "hard but fair" category that I ended up missing out on this way. In the interest of letting others avoid that, here are my own hints -- restricted to extreme guess-the-verb problems and things that are basically impossible to figure out without mind-reading:

#1 (Spoiler - click to show)The sapling (yes, it's important)(Spoiler - click to show) - you need to get it(Spoiler - click to show) - with something sharp(Spoiler - click to show) - it's for making a weapon(Spoiler - click to show) - a spear(Spoiler - click to show) - like the ancients made them without metal(Spoiler - click to show) - "sharpen sapling" is part of it(Spoiler - click to show) - they were also treated some way(Spoiler - click to show) - for hardening(Spoiler - click to show) - "put sapling in <fire source>"

#2 (Spoiler - click to show)The grapes (yes, they're important)(Spoiler - click to show) - you need them to make wine(Spoiler - click to show) - you'll know how to make wine when you find the right equipment(Spoiler - click to show) - it's not the oak bucket, it's something with purple stains(Spoiler - click to show) - put the grapes in it(Spoiler - click to show) - how can you squish them? can't get in with them or stand on them or crush them or press them(Spoiler - click to show) - "step on grapes" is the magic phrase here

#3 (Spoiler - click to show)fighting things(Spoiler - click to show) - at least one critical battle appears to be semi-randomized, save before fighting and try again if you die, if you don't die the same way every time, keep trying

Don't worry, there are multiple layers of spoiler tags in the above, so you will have to click multiple times to be completely spoiled.

The size of this game surprised me. There must be around 75 locations. You will want to create a map for this one, complete with notes of the objects found in each location. It's probably too big to fit it all in your head.

Some of the puzzle designs in this work are clever. While in some cases the cliff notes of mythological texts provide virtual step-by-step instructions, in others the author takes license with the mythology to make you think a little sideways. This work would have benefited tremendously from a more literary touch and more thorough programming.

It's unfortunate that the scoring is implemented in such a way that necessary and irreversible steps don't always award points. It's a bit unnerving, leaving you wondering whether you're on the right track or heading for a dead end. Although I believe you can get this game into an unwinnable state, it's generally safe to assume that anything that appears to make things happen is a step in the right direction -- there is little interactivity that isn't directly aimed at the conclusion.

Another note about scoring: The walkthrough seems to indicate that its author got less than the maximum points. I got more than him, but less than the max. Out of curiosity, I decompiled the source code to look for those last lousy points, but it seems that they should all be awarded if you win the game. It looks like some actions may award points if you use one verb but not its synonym, so I wouldn't worry about it if you finish with less than 300.

Take One is a likable but mildly frustrating jaunt through your memories of playing "Indiana Jones" when you were younger. Ostensibly, you play the director of a movie, guiding an actress playing Indianette Jones through a scene about raiding some temple for an artifact. Submitted by Robert Street as an entry for the Finish the Game Comp held in 2005, it placed a close second.

As with Mr. Street's Turning Point, this work introduces certain interesting elements that don't end up having a recognizable impact on the story.(Spoiler - click to show) It's written in the third person, presumably in support of your observational status as director, but the gameplay works as though you yourself are Indianette -- there is no functional separation of "you" from her. The actress playing Indianette is decried as a useless airhead in the introduction, but this is not used for any story-telling effect (e.g. bawling her out when "she" makes a mistake, or ditzy commentary as "she" struggles on the set). In fact, she expresses no personality at all during gameplay, leaving me wondering why she is characterized that way.

Orientation to the game goal is well done. As the player, you immediately are told how to start the scene, and, while there are numerous hints about the outline of the puzzle you have to solve, there is enough left unspecified to make for a small challenge.

Unfortunately, what could have been a smooth gameplay experience was frustrated by programming and/or parser problems.(Spoiler - click to show) Though you are given instructions to read the journal then rub the ring, you are unable to rub the ring while wearing it. If you try, you are told "Indianette Jones can't rub the ring," which is unhelpful, to say the least. I spent several turns in an unproductive hunt for a synonym of "rub" that would apply before I figured out the glitch.

In a similar vein, it took me far too long to discover how to get the jewel from the statue.(Spoiler - click to show) Unlike Inform, the ADRIFT parser doesn't seem to provide any help if the player hits on a correct verb but incorrect syntax. Thus, the command "use whip" gives the same result as "<any nonsense> whip", which makes it seem like the verb is unrecognized. In fact, "use whip on jewel" would work. Since I am conditioned to the Inform type of parser response in this case ("What would you like to use the whip on?"), and since most authors avoid implementation of the verb "use" in favor of more specific wording, I spent several playthroughs trying things like "crack whip", "attack jewel with whip", "whip jewel", "throw whip at jewel", etc. before hitting on "get whip with jewel".

The situation isn't helped by the fact that the game lies and tells you the jewel is lying on the ground -- a serious error for a final release.

Those issues aside, it was smooth sailing and a fun scenario. The overloading of the "restart" action to begin a new "take" of the scene was a clever touch.

Mr. Street definitely has the ability to come up with good premises and puzzles. With better use of the conceptual pieces he puts into play and a less journalistic writing style, his work would probably attract more attention.

Two hours isn't much time for coming up with a good story, let alone coding it. Gilles Duchesne demonstrates with this piece created for Speed IF 16 that you can produce something likable in that timeframe... and have a great time while you're at it.

This episode has every indication that it was written hastily and with a devil-may-care attitude about literary or artistic quality. A decided lack of pretense saves the day, though, making it easy to overlook any minor faults and experience the author's glee at lashing together the seed ideas he used from the contest: Marie Antionette, antiques, cheese, monkey heads, and Brandon van Every.

It's a 15-minute experience that I didn't regret, and I look forward to trying other works in the absurdist Captain Speedo series. If the others are like this one, they are a brilliantly-conceived framework well-suited to the handful-of-random-ideas category of SpeedIF.

This game is small, but there's good reason: It was submitted as an entry to the Commodore 32 Contest, which challenged entrants to create a Z-code game weighing in at 32K or less (the memory size limit of the fictional Commodore 32 computer).

The competition was created to showcase mInform, a minimalist library designed to replace the Inform 6 standard library. I'm not sure what the point of mInform was (other than the standard engineer's motivation of "because I can"), but mInform can be used to create quite functional games, as author Robert Street demonstrates with Turning Point.

The introduction of this piece sets up a backdrop of interstellar war that comes across with all the excitement of a USA Today news blurb. As the action starts, you are standing on the oddly-placed bridge of a starship as the Captain (whom you are a clone of) issues assignments to handle various problems on the ship. You are shortly assigned to investigate a "disturbance" which turns out to be a firefight with an alien infiltrator.

It's actually not a bad setup, but the execution as a story leaves much to be desired. Though the 32K limit leaves precious little room for exposition, much of it is wasted on an unnecessary and frivolous detours(Spoiler - click to show) -- the fact that the PC is a clone of the Captain, and some backstory about an accident the Captain had which has caused him to take a more juvenile mindset. Neither of these has any relevance to the plot that I could detect, and good editing would have trimmed them out.

There is also a tendency to use humor when justifying restricting the player's actions. While the jokes are amusing, they do not fit with the serious and straightforward quality of the puzzle design.

Regardless, the writing is good enough to create an engaging atmosphere without unduly taxing the player's willing suspension of disbelief, and it is complemented by solid (if basic) programming technique and better-than-average puzzle for such a short game.

It's about a 15-minute diversion to win, and any new authors who are better writers than coders can use this as a benchmark for basic functionality.

IF author Sean Barrett's brief homage to Douglas Adams on the occasion of his death (one of several produced as part of the DNA Tribute Speed IF) is an excellent example of what short-form interactive fiction can accomplish.

Using just three locations, a handful of objects, and two non-interactive NPCs, Mr. Barrett creates a brief but engrossing experience combining elements of Adams' Hitchhiker and Dirk Gently universes. Fans of Adams' work (such as myself) will appreciate the attempt to render Dirk Gently's unique worldview faithfully, while those unfamiliar with the underlying novels will probably still find themselves drawn into the puzzle that Barrett presents.

While the piece has a cliffhanger ending (and is unlikely to be continued due to intellectual property laws), it provides a satisfying and well-balanced dose of exploration, problem-solving, and humor. The puzzle is just the right level of complexity for an introductory sequence, requiring the player to begin coming to grips with the uniqueness of the game universe but not requiring mind-reading.(Spoiler - click to show) The manner in which the obvious solution doesn't quite cut it, and the humorous game feedback it generates, is perfect for easing the player into greater effort of puzzle-solving without presenting the frustration of a dead-end brick wall.

Though I doubt The Sofa at the End of the Universe would live up to Mr. Adams' preferred level of diabolical complexity in interactive fiction, it is a fitting tribute to the most highly-regarded "crossover" IF author in the field's history. Adams fan or not, I recommend this piece.

Submitted as the first chapter of a six-part work proposed by the Segment Mini-Comp, this incredibly brief piece is under-implemented, uninspired, and did not encourage me to continue on to the next chapter. It seems like what might result from 30 minutes of sketching out an idea in code, then calling it quits.

Skip it, and see Mr. Carbol's Spring Cleaning as a better example of what he's capable of.

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.