Reviews by Felix Larsson

This very short piece sketches an excentric way of making narrative sense of Pac-Man: (Spoiler - click to show)Pac-Man is a junkie, haunted by ghostly apparitions; he needs a ”power pill” to save his day, drive his ghosts away, and go to junkie heaven. I’m sure the author could have made more of this particular idea; but, as it stands, it’s no more than a mere sketch, with no real choices for Pac-Man to make along the brief way to the ending: you go one way you win, you go another you die. The writing is as good as it comes, though.

A pretty faithful IF-remake of Space Invaders: The aliens drop their intergalactic missiles at you; you fire at them with your gun. As a game in it’s own right, I suppose it would be quite a disaster. But, of course, now, it’s not a game in it’s own right: it’s a rendition in text of an old graphics video game. That makes it kind of corny fun—to players who are familiar with the original game, that is.

I don’t think there’s a way actually to win this one (which is quite fair, since there never was a way to win Space Invaders in the first place, was there?), but I didn’t have the superhuman patience nor the subhuman pigheadedness to keep playing long enough to be sure of this.
Also, at a certain point, the author introduces an original element to the game …

It’s pinball. You’re the ball. The first time you fly off, the experience will likely be as disorienting to you as it must be to the poor ball, and the game is soon over; by the third time, however, you will probably have got the knack of it. The game is replayable, in a sense—the sense in which any game of pinball is replayable: you can always try to score higher than before.

(Wuerz’s writing, a times, hints at pinball as an allegory of life, again with you as the ball. Come to hink of it, there’s obviously a deep buddhist meaning to Tilt!: (Spoiler - click to show)there you are, a ball, trying to make sense of a world you’re thrown out into without a say in the matter and telling yourself you have some control, though in truth you’re at the utter mercy of outside forces—those outside forces, on closer inspection, being you(!), the player, who you actually are (the ball and its world being empty—mere virtual objects devoid of any real existence) and who, moreover, is no real party to the virtual pinball world, except for playing this very game of Tilt! over and over again in the pursuit of ever increasing high-scores in your (i.e. the virtual ball’s) next (virtual) life—until, at last, you suddenly realize the futility of it all, stop clinging to an illusory pinball world and are awakened to the truths of its emptiness and your own power and purity.)

You are a paddle. You can move up and down to block the ball.
Making interactive fiction of Pong is a wacky idea that Granade manages to transform into a weird experience, thanks to a writing that is reminiscent, in ways, of the language in For a Change, only more convoluted and presented as a kind of inner monologue of the paddle’s. Some feat, really, since (though there are appropriate responses to other standard commands) the paddle can (did I mention that?) do nothing but move up and down. The novelty of the writing is, however, gone some while before either you or the opponent Non-Player Paddle scores a fifteenth time and the game is at last over.

To anyone who never played or even watched a match of Pong, this game must be terribly confusing; and I suppose it would be quite the worst introduction to interactive fiction that could well be imagined.

This is a hypertext collection of poems demonstrating the basic functionality of the author’s Interactive Poetry Extension to Inform 7. The poems are all single stanza quatrains. The first line of all the poems reads “Arid and pale”. The reader chooses one of the words of this line and the poem is incremented by one line according to that choice.

As a collection of poetry I didn’t find the work very convincing (though it might well be more to somebody else’s taste); anyway, the collection was probably intended more as a demonstration of the extension than as an attempt to achieve literary immortality.

The work tries a curiously traditional IF take on poetry (rather than e.g. a hypertext one like Arid and Pale): There is a PC, who moves around in a two-room world, there are three objects and an NPC, and the basic standard commands are implemented (X, GET, ASK ABOUT, PUT IN). The poem is written from a 1st person perspective, though.

In spite of that mostly traditional IF setting, there is nearly no interactivity: You (i.e. the ”I” of the poem) can examine the few things in the world, but apart from that there is only a single course of action open at any point in the poem. Twice the PC asks himself a yes or no question, but even then the choice doesn’t change the course of events or the point of the poem.

Interactive Fiction can certainly be very poetic. Indeed, Mishima himself has written such works. But I don’t think this particular poem presents an experience or an idea, a truth or a mood, a pun or whim, an image or an approach to language &c. &c. in any poetically compelling way.

Short and creepy ”literary” horror. You are a young female artist waiting for the break-through and recently moved into your boyfriend’s small, shabby apartment—just big enough that you can’t see all of it from any one place. It’s a dark and stormy night; a serial killer stalks the streets; you’re all alone. The phone rings.

Certainly worth reading … and re-reading! once or twice. The details of the story and even the length of the piece varies a bit depending on what you decide to do (there may be more to do than you think) and in what order. Writing is good, and, playing this all alone on a dark and stormy night, you’d better hope your phone doesn’t ring.