Ratings and Reviews by mjhayes

One of my favorite concepts in novels, games, and movies is that of a world that is falling apart despite the main character's best efforts. Games like Riven tried to capture that feeling but fell far short. In this game, that is the central premise.

I should begin by saying I have only recently discovered this game and have only played the Final Cut. It begins with a terse room description and from there quickly builds up the mood and then the atmosphere. You immediately learn that your colleague has just been assassinated in an effort to keep secret what is in your scientific research notes, and you have a sense of urgency to share your findings with the University. Only you never make it there because (Spoiler - click to show)the first disaster strikes which threatens the solvency of the planet. Shortly after that, you realize there is an even greater danger than that.

The mood is adequately set by having the player - a humble, nerdy, non-athletic scientist - break down in tears more than once on the way to the next train. Adding a friendly, reassuring character was a nice touch, (Spoiler - click to show)although I wish it had been a little longer before he had been killed off. I do like the plot twist when you discover (Spoiler - click to show)the First Initiative, and it would be nice if there had been more like this. The one journal you do find isn't enough, and actually feels disconnected from the rest of the story.

Consulting many different topics in your e-pad gives you an opportunity to learn as much or as little about the game setting, which also sets the right mood. I like that it isn't necessary in most cases to look up much of anything, especially if you're playing through for the second or third time. There are also subtle references to other IF, such as the description of the e-pad as a "Guide to the Galaxy." The ending is the best part in my opinion, but I won't give anything away here.

A couple tweaks to Robots gives us Zombies. Instead of manipulating the bad guys to collide with one another, now you manipulate the bad guys to collide with pits. There are two styles of gameplay, one with deep (bottomless) pits, and one with shallow pits which disappear when a zombie falls into it.

Still fun, but I like Robots better.

The '90s was a turbulent decade for quite a few game franchises, Zork being no exception. Infocom was on its way out, but fortunately or unfortunately, along came Activision to the rescue. Return To Zork was the first multimedia Zork game, but sadly what would seem to be the last game that was truly Zork. Zork Nemesis was a beautiful game with an interface that wowed laypeople and seasoned gamers alike, but was Zork in name only.

So when Zork: Grand Inquisitor came along the following year, it seemed to be the best of both worlds. It had the same next-gen panoramic interface that Nemesis had, making it forgivable for falling into the "Myst-wannabe" genre, but had the same characteristic quirkiness of classic Infocom titles. To make things even better, a few guys now at Activision thought to throw a bone to the IF crowd by co-releasing this free IF piece.

I downloaded it with the expectation that it would be a true "Zork IV" (not Enchanter or Beyond Zork) but I was quickly disappointed. There was no sense of carefree spelunking with this one, if only because the player is commissioned by the Grand Inquisitor to explore a newly-discovered section of the Great Underground Empire. It's short too, more so than I was hoping for. What really ruined it for me though, was getting an actual verbal description of a grue, and also walking into a room that turns out to be a Grue Convention Hall. I know that other Infocom games like Journey had made the connection between orcs and grues and had illustrations of the orcs, but because those weren't Zork games, I looked the other way.

Another thing that irritated me was the description of the entrance to the hallway "the size of a large boulevard." I knew that a central character in Zork history was Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive, famous for his outrageous sense of proportion, but this over-the-top description shattered my "suspension-of-distaste." I will also refrain from talking about the rat-ants that make their return from Beyond Zork.

Now that it's not 1997 anymore, I can say that in hindsight, I'm glad this game was developed, since I believe it's better to have something mediocre than nothing at all. I just wish it had been better among the original Zork games.

This "abuse" title uses colored text, a mouse interface, and high score saving. The only thing missing is timer routines, since it's a turn-based solitaire game. If anything, it's a diagnostic tool to see what your interpreter can handle.

The game itself takes about two minutes to play, putting it into the "coffee break" genre with high pick-up-and-play value - and with high score retention, it has high arcade replay value. My par is 3,000 points. I had exceeded 4,000 points once.

It won't take you long to figure out how to play this game. The plus side is that it's fun. On the other hand, the control scheme I find to be a bit unintuitive. The key bindings for diagonal movement are in a different place than the key bindings for orthogonal movement. Still, you'll probably find yourself coming back to this game more than once.

I like this MiSTing even more than the one for Detective, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the original game needed spoofing because of its extremely primitive design, not for being so laughingly awful like Detective was, and so the emphasis on the MST dialog is on that aspect of the game. Another thing is that this MiSTing has an intermission, which I found to be hilarious.

Playing through the game was actually pretty enjoyable with the heckling that stripped it of any seriousness. The original "game" itself was just an interactive stream-of-consciousness set to an unordered "maze of twisty little passages." I did enjoy the room descriptions with the MST comments added. Just be aware that you'll probably squeeze only about a half-hours' worth of enjoyment from this piece.

Programming tutorials tend to be boring, but not this time. First, play a few rounds of classic IF to wake a genie, and then he will decide to play the role of a teacher.

Internally, there isn't much to this piece, which is why the file size is relatively small. But trying your hand at introductory LisP programming and then having an NPC check the results each step of the way makes it surprisingly fun.

RobotFindsKitten has been ported to a lot of different platforms, and now it's available in IF. It uses a lot of different functions which not all interpreters support, so there's a chance you'll need a different interpreter to try this out. You will need arrow keys as well.

The "gameplay" (although this isn't much of a game) is simple: move the robot around, touching various objects until you find the one that's Kitten. You can change the "difficulty," which is merely the number of objects in the playfield.

What's fun about this piece that's self-described as a "Zen Simulation" is the humorous descriptions of the various objects. Every person who has ported RFK to some other platform has probably had more fun coming up with a list of object descriptions than the players have had finding Kitten.

If you have a few minutes to kill, give this one a try. It doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is.

If you read about the game before you try it, you know that you play as an attractive female college freshman who has not yet turned 18, and is stranded in the desert due to car trouble. That alone implies that playing the game will be a bit of a guilty pleasure.

Sure enough, it is. It's not very well-written, but it's not all that bad either. Although the game progresses linearly along one of two major paths, it leaves the player free to experiment in a lot of different ways. There is a time limit, but it's a very generous one, once you've handled the immediate emergency of finding shade before high noon.

What I like about the game is that most of the "inventory objects" are not necessary to complete the game, so you do not have to be a pac-rat and collect everything you can get your hands on. In many cases, more than one solution will solve a problem, and in some cases, the objects have no use whatsoever. Another thing is that body parts as objects were implemented very well here, and the game had received honorable mentions for that aspect.

There is some IF "inside humor" as well, which you will either enjoy or groan at. For one thing, try (Spoiler - click to show)opening the trunk of your car and counting the dirty laundry - you might recognize that number. The usual easter egg commands are recognized as well.

What I don't like about the game is that some scenarios don't seem to fit with the character. Crossing the road without looking both ways first will sometimes cause you to get hit by a car. For one thing, a young woman who has made in into college should instinctively know to look both ways first. Plus, you're out in the middle of the desert, where you can hear an oncoming vehicle from half a mile away. At some point, you might try (Spoiler - click to show)touching yourself, which results in a canned message with a slang phrase. Do it multiple times and it will cycle through a list of slang phrases with the same canned message wrapped around it.

The game is not difficult to complete at all, although a few solutions were obtuse, like getting the tow truck to re-appear at the service station. Because you often will wait to let time pass by, you can enter a number with the usual "wait" command to wait for a given number of turns, knowing that two turns equals one minute. I did uncover an interesting bug, which I'm sure will never get fixed. (Spoiler - click to show)Try attacking the driver of the gray pickup after you enter the pickup bed, before it pulls off.

In summary, this game goes down in IF history, in neither a good nor a bad way. The author went on to write some of the most memorable IF to date, so this can be seen as a sort of humble beginning, all the more so if you view the source code.

Naturally, somebody would think to port Eliza to IF, since users originally interacted with it through a "command prompt." I had played around with Eliza in my college years, about the same time that I was introduced to modern IF, and so I immediately recognized the name.

It's a disappointment. For one thing, it's just Eliza here, without any of the virtual patients that had been created to interact with Eliza, such as Zippy, my favorite. Another is that most of the text I was able to enter before isn't recognized here. About all I could get it to recognize was so little, it would make the original experiment seem to be a grand failure.