Ratings and Reviews by cgasquid

a very short treasure hunt in which you, the angel Gabriel, must return to heaven but cannot until you have collected the seven colors of the rainbow. you are assisted by Demeter, your (presumably?) mortal lover. (it is clearly not the Greek goddess Demeter.)

the writing is snappy and the relationship depicted is sweet. Gabriel is an adorable nebbishy type and Demeter -- you know, i mean i could describe the character, but looking at the author's name and the apparent resulting self-insert, i'm not comfortable describing a real person i don't know.

if this were a longer piece, perhaps spreading the colors out further or adding more tasks, i'd feel better about it ... but it's only two rooms, and while the colors are kind of hidden, they're not hard to find and the game is over in less than ten minutes. i don't have enough time to really understand the characters.

aside from its length, which is auctorial choice even if i don't agree with it, i had three problems with this game, all spoilers:

1. blue. (Spoiler - click to show)while i have seen pants that are the kind of bright, pure blue called for by the scepter, i've never seen a pair of jeans that were that kind of Platonic blue -- manufacturers tend to go for a light blue or a very dark one. i'd very much assumed my jeans were an "off" color like the burgundy furniture, and found they worked while looking for an Easter egg.

2. indigo. (Spoiler - click to show)the sky can appear indigo at sunset at high altitudes under very specific conditions. there's nothing in the game to indicate that those conditions are present. the clue is "what would you color with a blue-violet crayon," which i'd think would vary by child. also, you're supposed to have to touch the object, and the indigo light is scattering in the upper atmosphere.

3. (Spoiler - click to show)the game cannot be completed without getting at least two suggestions from Demeter -- both yellow and violet involve items that are only gained by asking him. under normal circumstances this would be good ... BUT talking to Demeter is presented as the game's hint system. it does not make me happy when a game is only solvable with hints.

but overall it's sweet and sappy and adorable, and being this length and this easy makes it a kind of like a Christmas card to send to someone you love.

Zork Zero, I hate you.

I hate your massively overblown size, mostly full of empty rooms with no purpose. I hate the excessive copy protection, with many promising puzzles (including the game's central puzzle) turning out to be "do you have the documentation" checks.

But the reason why Zork Zero feels like such a cop-out, such a zero-effort mess?

Towers of Hanoi!
Fox, chicken, and grain!
Hi-Q!
Nim!
Measuring liquid using two vessels!
True and false statements written on doors!
The executioner's paradox!
A freaking rebus!

What in the heck are all of these ancient bewhiskered cliches -- many of them extremely belabored and move-intensive -- doing in a game produced in the twentieth century? Let alone in a Zork game, a series known for the cleverness and wry sense of humor in its puzzles?

The worst part is that these old chestnuts make up the game's better puzzles. The original ones, like catching the flies, breaking the couple's curse, and the fungus puzzle, are utterly half-hearted. There's no depth to them; frequently you just haul the right objects across the bloated map.

About the only puzzle in this game that felt truly satisfying and Zorkian was breaking the hunger curse. I had to use a variety of objects in weird ways to achieve a completely loopy goal.

But everything else ... just a miserable slog of busywork and cliche. I understand making a game this huge is difficult, so there's a temptation to just fill it up with junk so you can boast about the number of puzzles ... but you know, you could just have made the game smaller and actually good.

generally, there are two types of hard games. in a game with fake difficulty, the problem is conveying to the story exactly what you're trying to do because you can't seem to figure out how to phrase it so the game will understand you. in a game with real difficulty, you have a wide variety of tools to tackle the situations you encounter, but each puzzle will require a different sort of lateral thinking and creativity.

a game with fake difficulty breeds frustration. a game with real difficulty induces obsession until you finally crack it.

Spellbreaker is absolutely a game with real difficulty. despite the surreal, disjointed landscape you're exploring, it's totally immersive. i never ran into the kind of blank incomprehension you see in a bad game; it was always just a matter of thinking harder about the puzzle and persevering.

this would be a five-star game, but i'm deducting a full star for the bank puzzle. it's derivative, uncreative, has iffy implementation, and even following the best-written walkthroughs i've never gotten better than a 50% chance of getting it right. (unfortunately, the use of stock puzzles would only get worse over time, hitting its nadir in Zork Zero.)

Wordplay games have always been a tough genre to get right. On the one hand, you want to have consistent rules for word manipulation, so the player isn't just sitting there guessing words. You want to have the puzzles actually fit together into a larger picture, whether that's a treasure hunt (Letters from Home) or a detailed plot (Counterfeit Monkey). You need to make sure the game is tuned to the language, not to pop culture references, to ensure the game doesn't become incomprehensible five years from now.

Out of the short stories that make up Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It ... one, perhaps two, fit any of these criteria.

The general pattern of these stories is to recognize the kind of "wordplay" at work in the story, then just examine items and type every example of that wordplay you can think of. In "Playing Jacks," you have to know a lot of words that have "jack" in them. In "Shopping Bizarre," if you see an item, you type its homophone. The biggest offender here is probably "Eat Your Words," which is just see object, type cliche naming object, continue.

There is a single highlight here: "Manor of Speaking." It's a haunted house game where each ghost has a different obsession, and you play them off against each other and solve actual puzzles riffing off wordplay. It's brief but delightful.

By contrast, the worst of the lot is "Act the Part," which requires the player to be familiar not only with unfunny gags from downmarket 1950s sitcoms, but also to recognize a phrase that is as opaque to me now as it was back then ((Spoiler - click to show)"better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"). This stuff was dated when it came out. (Ironically, the opening-move puzzle in "Act," despite being incredibly difficult, is one of the few that's stood the test of time.)

Similarly culture-specific and extremely difficult are "Buy the Farm" and "Shake a Tower." "Farm" is at least well-written (most of Nord and Bert has nothing but short, terse responses) but some of the expressions in it are already passing out of English parlance. "Tower" uses spoonerisms, and it's very cruel, utterly nonsensical, and nearly impossible to get a perfect score on.

People talk about the Oddly Angled Rooms from Zork II being too culture-specific. At least there are at least three countries whose inhabitants would get the joke.

If all of this were beautifully written, or tied together in a coherent fashion, it might be another story, but it's just checking off disparate scenarios until you're allowed to go on to the last one. "Meet the Mayor" is basically the same as "Buy the Farm" but with much more obscure language.

Most of the games that Nord and Bert inspired did the job better. I was a huge Infocom fan, to the point of a fault, but there are still a couple of their games that I just can't defend. This is one of them.