Reviews by jcompton

Truly fantastic things can be done, in earnest or in parody, with the voice of Holden Caulfield. This not-remotely-finished game doesn't do them.

You wander into cutscenes from the book with no particular object. No documentation or in-game explanation is provided for parenthetical numbers which look like they might be footnotes, but the FOOTNOTE command is not implemented. Nor is much of anything else, including at least one room which lacks any description whatsoever.

Maybe it escaped.

Autocomplete in 1984? Not too shabby.

Swiss Family Robinson is an odd entry in the bookware wave, a parser game clearly aimed at a younger playing audience. (That doesn't mean you don't get 1984-style instadeaths, but they do feel a bit more like learning opportunities.) But the parser works with you, saving you from wasting time on impossible or unparseable commands by basically forcing everything to conform to an autocomplete algorithm.

And out of the shortlist of commercial titles that expressly targeted a younger audience (Seastalker and... a few others, give me a minute) SFR seems to have dialed in on its target much more effectively. You may be at a loss for things to do (or animals to butcher into steaks) but it never feels like the game is abandoning you.

It's possible to be rescued without doing all of the interesting things in the game, making the game replayable. And today it feels ahead of its time by gently putting the player on rails without being too patronizing.

This is not a great game but it is one of the best of its genre, the split-screen graphics/text adventure of the 1980s. The story unfolds with actual beats and although it's possible to miss the choice you're asked to make, the story does branch in a meaningful way that's unusual for the period.

The graphics, while imperfect, are evocative and have a sense of style to them, and have at least surpassed the extraordinarily low bar set by some of Sierra's worst abuses. Similarly, although the game can be laughably small in scope if you're uncharitable (you hop from planet to planet, but each "planet" is really just a modest-sized map near a spaceport), there isn't a ton of padding masquerading as game content.

Mindshadow is routinely hailed by everyone up to and including Interplay itself as the better game. Interplay always passed this game up in favor of Mindshadow in its retrospectives. I am here to stridently disagree. On a five-star scale I only put one star between them, but it's the difference between "I never need to play Mindshadow again" and "a pleasant afternoon revisiting The Tracer Sanction sounds nice."

Unfortunately, from here Interplay (and others) started making bad and misguided choices, including the totally mistaken idea that what 8-bit text/graphic adventures needed most was a GUI. That was the last thing they needed, and subsequent games like Borrowed Time and Tass Times In Tonetown would have benefited if they had simply stuck with the formula and focused on using more of that precious real estate for art.

Jimmy Maher argues that this adaptation of the first two novels of what is now known as the Chronicles of Amber wants to be a choice-based game. It's a compelling argument.

But there's more going on here than that, because they really committed to a high concept for a sprawling wide-open parser experience. There's an elaborate fencing system in the parser which ends up being entirely unnecessary. There's a clunky-but-engaging life-or-death map-building minigame (used for "walking the Pattern", a rite of passage for Amberites such as your character) which can be entirely avoided with a single clever verb. There are all sorts of twists and turns that make a rote recreation of the novels not-quite-right, or actually just plain boring compared to the game's unique alternate path through Prince Corwin's top priorities ((Spoiler - click to show)recovering his identity, revenge on chief rival Eric, and ruling over Amber.)

Even for the mid-1980s, there's a lot of parser fighting here as you struggle to reconcile your ideas for how to advance the plot, the opaque cues and clues being given by the other characters in the game, and the seeds planted by the original Zelazny text. Even more than I'd enjoy seeing a supercut of the satisfactory paths through the game (and there are at least two "good" endings, plus others which are "complete but less than perfect") I'd like to see a documentary about the process this game's large team went through to put it together.

All of the entries in the pretty-code contest have their strong suits, but it's not just that Caduceus' source has a lovely poetic flow to it. The game it creates has a very different, mostly-prosaic vibe to it, while telling the same story with the same terse descriptions.

As a game Caduceus just looks like a short proof-of-concept with a less-than-obvious final move. As source, even the wasted space (such as the adjectives borrowed for this review title) serves a purpose. Top honors were warranted.

Not for its plot (which isn't bad, but ultimately boils down to "obtain a special item") and certainly not for its parser or descriptions (which are not terribly far above Scott Adams/Brian Howarth standard) but for its implementation.

In Double Agent, you control two characters, the last surviving members of the expeditionary force sent to save this remote world. One is a "finesse" character who speaks the local language, while the other provides muscle. You interact with the agents using a split-screen interface, toggling between them on demand or when one agent becomes temporarily unavailable due to movement from one area to the next. The control of the agents is handled very naturally, with clear color cues.

The two agents start out in different locations, so mapping is initially a challenge as first-time players will not know where the two paths will meet. The different abilities of the agents requires that they be used correctly to solve certain puzzles that need a special skillset. Descriptions are functional and concise without seeming too bare. The parser is not terribly flexible, but most necessary commands are clear.

Although multi-character control in text adventures had been pioneered by titles like Infocom's Suspended, Double Agent puts an interesting spin on a concept that can easily distract a player, and does a nice job staying novel and playable at the same time. Even if you load it up strictly to punch in the walkthrough step-by-step, it's worth the time to see how this elegant little gem was put together.

A version of this review originally appeared in The Spectrum Games Bible Vol. 3.

The Witness has a reputation for disappointing customers. Having waited for a new Infocom release and plunked down dozens of early-1980s dollars, they expected a bigger and more challenging game. One that would keep them up late at night for days on end, playing and replaying key sequences trying to build up a godlike understanding of a clockwork world, much as Deadline had offered them.

Instead, what they got was something players would stridently demand just a decade or so later: a game that was compact enough, and fair enough, to be solved without feeling like one should have earned college credit while doing so.

Although derivative, the feelies lean in deep and hard to the 1930s detective potboiler and pulp mystery markets. The character roster is indeed shallow but at least it's easy to keep track of who-means-what-to-whom. Galley's tweaks to standard parser responses mostly work to build the illusion. The variations in results for accusing and arresting suspects give enough teases and nudges to encourage playing again if you didn't reach the optimum solution.

So, at commercial release? This game definitely rates one star lower. The criticism from contemporary players and press was totally deserved. Without the big-ticket investment and pressure for this game and this game alone to offer several dozen hours of digital engagement? It's quite good. (The gaming market was tiny compared to the virtually limitless choice of the 21st century.)

The good news: This game is better than Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative.
The bad news: That's not saying much.

Unlike its predecessor, Promethean Prophecy doesn't try to redefine the genre, sticking with a basic windowed text interface. The game starts before the back-of-box blurb events happen so your Chapter 1 is essentially just working through the linear events necessary to put the main game in motion. This plotline plays off a better episode of the original series but doesn't break much new ground.

Once complete, the main game does its best to justify the relatively small map and constrained environments of the game. There's an interesting story in here, but it's masked behind some unintuitive puzzles and an assortment of items defined so much by color and shape that it feels like Starcross and Suspended had a baby.

The player (and crew of the Enterprise) are meant to be in a situation that looks bleak, but somehow the game also ends up being drab, and there's an important distinction.

So many things have to go wrong for a game like this to make it to market. It took Paramount over a decade to start participating in the video game market that had in very significant part sprung up directly around Star Trek. It took several more years for them to sanction a non-arcade game of any quality. That sad track record begins in the deep end with this failure.

In trying to innovate around the traditional (but at least well-understood) limitations of parser games, the Kobayashi Alternative team instead presented something which made the basics of map navigation and inventory management opaque and confusing, while breaking no new ground with the conversation interface. What could have been an engaging story with the tremendous advantage of an established world is instead an unrelenting exercise in frustration.

I first gave In the End a silent two-star review. I dislike it and consider it Not Good, but it's not hideously broken or otherwise defective. But then I gave a two-star review to a game that, given a choice between "like" or "dislike", I "like." So I'm coming back and saying loud and clear: I must put In the End in the one-star bin along with those Actually Terrible games.

Unfair, perhaps, but I'm not the one who came up with this railroad mood piece.

24 years ago, I rolled my eyes so hard I could hear the straining in my head when I realized what the author was trying to get me to guess.

Revisiting it today, I smile a sad wry smile at the ABOUT screen's wish: "In The End" will be, I hope, the first successful "puzzle-less IF", but its success will not completely close the question.

Looking at what has followed, the author gets a rousing "Mission accomplished."

Today I'm softer on the piece (24 years does that) and perhaps it's the countless choice games in similar veins which make it easier to spell out where I think In the End fails.

In a nominally open-ended parser experience, the author can do a lot to set the tone and give guidance and establish goals. And the author can make me desperately bored enough to want to quit. But if you want me to (Spoiler - click to show)conclude that suicide is the only option, I'm gonna need a lot more, and In the End doesn't come close to delivering it.