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Review of Interactive Fiction Competition 2000
There are people out there still writing
On the table you see a monkey.
>get monkey
text adventures; brilliant, wonderful, stop-playing-Diablo-and-use-your-imagination-you-fool interactive fiction. Obviously these solitary nutcases need some kind of motivation to keep them going, lord knows nobody's going to pay for these games when they can buy Baldur's Gate V: This Time It Takes Up Twelve CDs. So there's a yearly competition held by rec.arts.int-fiction with wacky donated prizes which has been going for the last six years or so.
To play interactive fiction games you need an interpreter, of which the two main ones are the colourfully-named Frotz and Tads. I've been plugging along with just WinFrotz for a while, but to play a real diversity of games last year I decided to snarf HTML Tads as well. Not that it's a hassle - each one only takes up around a megabyte.
So, I picked five pieces of IF out of a possible 53 based on good reviews (the upside to waiting till the competition is long over), downloaded and started playing.
One last thing, because these are RPG.net reviews I've tried to mention each game's RPG-ness; how easily it could be used as inspiration (read scavenged) for scenario ideas.
Game 1 Nevermore, by Nate Cull
Nevermore is an example how to do gothic well. It's based loosely on Poe's poem The Raven, you know, "Quoth the raven; nevermore." Parts of the poem pop up at the top of the screen at timely moments, which is clever. Even cleverer are phrases hidden throughout the description text that only Poe fanboys like me would notice, and nothing more. Knowledge of the poem is not vital to enjoy the game though.
The major deviation from the poem is the protagonist; now he's a black magician with better things to do than just mope about his lost love.
(I imagined him as a cross between Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with a little bit of Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands thrown in. Damn, that Johnny Depp's versatile.)
The storyline is simple. You're in the tower where Lenore, the love of your life, died, alone except for your stacks of books, your stash, and a tap-tap-tapping at your chamber door. Immediate problems are finding out what that damn noise is, researching your books for clues on how to proceed with the experiment you're working on and keeping yourself medicated.
On self-medication: drug use in fiction is always going to bother somebody, but that somebody's not me. The wide variety of situations in which substance abuse can help you out in this game is amazing. It's possible to overdose, but even easier to die by not taking your happy pills. On a purely game level it's an interesting puzzle and clue-delivery system.
And while I'm talking about clue delivery, here's a method that sucks: random research. When you pick up a volume and read it you get a paragraph of the important stuff from a random selection. The problem with this is that they repeat - I picked up a book, read the same thing three times and assumed that was all there was, and was dead wrong.
(It's the opposite of Necronomicon Syndrome. You know how it is, libraries in roleplaying games that contain only one useful book which the PCs find instantly, presumably because all the other books have blank pages and are just for show.)
I'm not entirely sure what the author's intention was here, maybe he just wanted to break up the text ("Gotta be interactive, gotta be interactive.") or maybe he was trying to simulate fevered, drugs-and-depression hazy research. Either way, it bugs me.
But back to the good stuff. It's possible to get into a position from which you can't finish the game a couple of ways by destroying vital pieces of equipment, but the author has implemented a 'winnable' command. Just type the word 'winnable' and you get to find out if you've screwed the game up or not.
Conclusion: Apart from the random research, everything else was top-notch. I had to rely on the hint menus pretty heavily towards the end, but that's probably just because I suck. Still, far better than a lot of games I've paid ninety bucks for.
RPG-ness: Definitely. Strong Cthulhu potential here and long strings of occult quasi-nonsense in the books which would make great handouts for lazy GMs.
Game 2 Rameses, by Stephen Bond
Andrew Plotkin says it better than I could: "The author says (in the "about" text) that this is "not really a straight story". In this regard, the author is smoking crack." It's interactive and it's fiction, but those looking for games and puzzles will be disappointed.
It's a good first-person story about a teenager at a boy's school. The usual talking commands (ASK CENTAUR ABOUT BRIGANDS, TELL CENTAUR ABOUT BRIGANDS, ORDER CENTAUR TO KILL BRIGANDS) are replaced by a menu of conversation options. I like the idea, and it's put to good use in giving you an illusion of choice, but your decisions don't really seem to matter.
RPG-ness: When I run that game about an all-boy school this will be useful. But that probably won't happen until I run my courtroom drama and a psychoanalysis scenario, which is to say, never.
Game 3 Planet of Infinite Minds, by Alfredo Garcia
Planet is the one game I didn't play to the finish. Way too often I found myself confronted by a puzzle I couldn't solve, and when I resorted to the hint system I realised I could never have solved it with the information given. Partially it's a problem of the game - the puzzles are of a nature that you will either get or not get, and no amount of scribbling ideas into Notepad will help - and the hints are poorly written. Either they don't give enough information, or they tell you the answer outright. Nevermore gave hints that lead you towards a solution, but Planet doesn't.
And while I'm kvetching, scores in IF are just silly. I want the story to reward me for doing something clever, not an arbitrary number of points. You can turn off the score notification, but then I'd feel like I was missing out on part of the game. Damn I'm hard to please.
The actual storyline is about the protagonist discovering that he is a chosen one, a mysterious gypsy, time travel and Einstein's brain. It's written with a degree of humour, but not enough to keep me interested.
RPG-ness: Well, it does feature immortals hidden amongst the herd that is humanity.
Game 4 Kaged, by Ian Finley
Kaged is the game that actually won the competition, and I can see why. Most of the comparisons have been to the film Brazil, and they're right. You start out as a clerk for a bizarrely bureaucratic Justice Department, but soon go rogue and are pursued by the organisation you used to be loyal to.
First-up, Kaged experiments with multimedia. Images pop out at relevant junctures in the story, sometimes showing the scene as it happens, sometimes just a mood-setting illustration. The artwork is nice, but immersion-destroying if you're the type who already has a clear picture from the text. I found myself muttering, "That's not what the rubber ball looks like," even though the game's designer should know better than me.
There's music as well, fuzzy-sounding, but it added to the atmosphere. While I applaud the experimentation, looking at the pictures and listening to the music I found myself heretically wishing that this had been a graphical game.
I relied heavily on the hints as usual, but these ones came as a text file, rather than the interactive menus of Nevermore and Planet of Infinite Minds. For some reason I can't stop myself from reading ahead in a text file, but if I have to press a button to read the next hint I can just about restrain myself. Maybe I'm the only person like this, but I ruined a lot of the suspense, and a hint menu could have fixed that. That's probably just me being weak-willed, and not a real fault of the author.
The description text was sometimes lacking, I frequently needed to use the examine command on parts of a room before I got a decent picture of it in my head. Normally this wouldn't bother me, except that there are several chase scenes which limit the amount of 'moves' you have before you get caught, and looking around counts as a 'move.' Part of what made this a flaw for me is that the excellent game Spider and Web (a.k.a. Tangle) from a few years back did similar scenes a lot better. Kaged either needed better initial descriptions or free looking.
Conclusion: An enjoyable game, but even the multimedia gear didn't give it an atmosphere on the same level as Nevermore. That's a lesson all the best IF teaches; good writing more than makes up for a lack of snazzy graphics and sound.
RPG-ness: Lots of the tropes of fantasy gaming creep into Kaged. There are helpful loonies, nasty inquisitors, escapes from cells, a chase through sewers and even an arena scene. All very instructive.
Game 5 Shade, by Ampe R. Sand (a.k.a. Andrew Plotkin)
Andrew Plotkin is something of a celebrity among IF fans, having written Spider and Web, Hunter in Darkness and several other works of very high calibre. This year, he entered a single-room piece of a surreal nature.
I had trouble with Shade almost immediately, mostly because I forgot to use the search verb on an object, and became irrevocably stuck after only a minute's play. After a few days of banging my head against the game I finally twigged, and from there on it was a cinch. I can't say much about the actual plot without giving it all away, but the decreasing sense of sanity is nicely handled, and trying to figure out what the game was really about should keep me amused for a few nights.
RPG-ness: Only if you have very twisted players I'm afraid.
Overall Conclusions: 2000 was a good year for the IF competition, with a record number of entries and quality games (including several I'm yet to get around to, 'Yes, Another Game With a Dragon!' sounds like my kettle of fish). The quality is especially noticeable when compared to the current graphical gaming market, filled as it is with tired and unoriginal games, content to rip-off last year's big hit with slightly improved graphics and higher system requirements.
Bitch, bitch, moan. You think I'd be happy with 48 games still to play and Thief 3 allegedly in the works, but nooo.
These games, and more, can be found at:
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/
as well as the interpreters you'll need to play them.
(I can't really give a style rating for a whole competition, but substance is obvious. I mean, it's all free!)
