Eragon

IF-Review
Eragon vs. Bygone Era
I think the lesson that emerges from this game is that although it would be great for popular writers to offer interactive fiction based on their works, they should probably do so in collaboration with experienced IF authors if they're unfamiliar with modern IF themselves. After all, even Douglas Adams didn't try to write the Hitchhiker's game himself — the participation of Steve Meretzky helped ensure that the game would not be a hash of bugs and mainframe-era game design cliches. Similarly, modern authors would do well to avail themselves of the knowledge contained within the modern text adventure community. Combining a popular writer's skill and imagination with the technical expertise and experience of an established IF creator would be most likely to result in a game that puts both the author's works and interactive fiction itself in the best light. Without that creator's insight, you run the risk of games like Eragon, which makes IF fans want to avoid more Paolini and Paolini fans want to avoid more IF.
-- Paul O'Brian
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SPAG
A recent example of mainstream IF exposure is Eragon, a zcode dungeon crawl apparently based on a book of the same name by Christopher Paolini (and because it's hosted on his official site with no other attribution, he'll have to take the blame for the game as well). Eragon takes its game design cues from the homebrewed BASIC Zork knock-offs that padded out coverdisks in the 80s, and so, true to form, we have a maze, we have parser problems, we have guess-the-verb for every puzzle, we have laughably static NPCs, and we have bad, bad writing.
-- Stephen Bond
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