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This year there was one game whose writing was on an entirely different level from the rest, masterful and self-assured. It was also possibly the most poorly-coded game in the entire comp. I'm speaking, as you've probably guessed, of FINE-TUNED, which is both astonishingly hilarious and astonishingly buggy. Not only has the author created an absolutely wonderful world, full of "anti-autoists," roving herds of goats, and fist-shaking train engineers, but it dares -- and manages to pull off -- a number of pieces of participatory comedy, which is much harder to pull off than just writing a bunch of funny lines that always show up. For example, the trip down the driveway could easily have been dull, had the PC put on his entire costume and only then started up the car, but by adding a sidekick who's eager to get started, the author prompts the player to try to get moving after donning each article, making for a hilarious sequence... and then you have the gag with the parking brake, which is an instant classic. I'm talking about the way that, if you don't remember to release the parking brake (and who does?), the mechanic will shout at you to do so; and then if you don't remember to set it, the car will start to roll away until the mechanic sets it for you; and then comes a major event, and the game is truly underway, as you head out on your own for the first time -- and as you attempt to sally forth, the car lurches forward and the mechanic sticks his head out of the ditch he's in and screams, "The parking brake! RELEASE THE PARKING BRAKE!" I laughed so hard I thought I'd die. But what really impressed me was that I had to make the joke happen, or rather, the author had to set things up such that I would genuinely forget about the parking brake three times, without me noticing this piece of misdirection, and it worked beautifully. I so very much wanted to give this game a ten... but after the infinitely decreasing score bug, and the [** programming error **] bugs, and the stack overflow bug, and the hundred other problems, I just couldn't do so in good conscience. It looks like the author ran out of time; had the game been truncated, chopped down to chapter one alone and polished so that even that much was bug-free, this would have been a ten without a doubt. As it is, it was the second-place game on my ballot.
First place, then, went to MOMENTS OUT OF TIME, which may not turn quite as many glee-inspiring phrases as FINE-TUNED but which does a fair job of not falling apart every thirty seconds, unlike some games I could mention. And in a comp where nearly every game was either all flash and no substance or no flash and no substance either, it was wonderful to at long last happen upon a game with some infrastructure, even if it occasionally lacks a certain surface sheen. But I'm speaking in generalities here, so let me get specific. Here's what I liked about this game. Even if it had just been a story about an utterly colorless household at the onset of World War III -- a disturbingly more realistic scenario now than when the game was planned out -- it would've been interesting, but this is more than that: our primary view of the war is filtered through the diaries and email of the teenagers whose sibling rivalries and sticky fumblings are increasingly distorted by the imminence of the end of the world. And they're not even stock-character teenagers: the author could have picked something generic to serve as the source of the girl's angst, but being stuck with a robotic eye -- that's new, and great. And this is only one of the two worlds the author has created for this game: you also have the far-future world of the framing sequences. There's more invention here than in half the rest of the comp put together. And then throw in such innovations as the concluding interview, and the opportunity to pick a handful of superpowers suited to your strengths and weaknesses as a player... I played 50 games without finding one I felt I could say clearly deserved to win the comp. Luckily this was the 51st.
The only other game besides FINE-TUNED and MOMENTS OUT OF TIME that I thought might turn out to be a ten at any point was NO TIME TO SQUEAL. It too started off by exhibiting an awareness that one should rarely if ever use a generic story element when an unusual one will do: the authors could have had the football player get in trouble for using drugs, say, or getting into a murder case -- but using a corpse as a ventriloquist's dummy? That's new. That sticks in the memory. Similarly, where many aspiring writers would have thought that describing a football team as "not exactly the Osmonds" made for a sufficiently vivid image, SQUEAL takes it a notch higher and specifies that the team isn't "quarterback Donny Osmond handing off to halfback Marie." With that line, I was ready for a great game. Problem #1 cropped up when, after the first fake ending, I didn't type "restart" but rather "restore," to try to fix whatever I might have done wrong; luckily I hit the walkthrough before I typed "quit" and assumed that was all there was to it. But that paled in comparison to Problem #2, when what had been fun and inventive turned into the world's billionth Wonderland pastiche. So, okay, can we agree not to have any more Lewis Carroll references, like, ever? Forget about dragons -- if I have to look at the word "jabberwock" ever again I may have to gyre and gimble my way to Dr. Kevorkian's house.
ALL ROADS boasts solid gameplay (nice adaptive hints along the way and so forth) and a healthy scattering of nifty scenes and gimmicks, like the gallows segment and even the first turn... yet perhaps it's appropriate that the first word of the game proper, "Conciousness" [sic], is misspelled. I don't normally obsess over spelling errors -- MOMENTS certainly had its share of typos, and I barely noticed them -- but here they bothered me. Maybe it's because they were more weight- bearing words: "assassain," "cygnet ring," and most cringeworthy of all, "Guiseppe" (imagine a major character named "Micheal" or "Brain"). Or maybe it's because ALL ROADS seems to flaunt its style more than most games that the glitches are disconcerting. But I'm getting off track: the misspellings were only a small factor in my lukewarm response to this game. Much more important was that the central gimmicks didn't strike me as particularly compelling and that the style wasn't to my taste. Still, a respectable effort.
Another respectable effort was BEST OF THREE, another conversation game by the author of GALATEA. Only this time you're not talking to a living piece of marble who can tell you about what it felt like to have her eyes drilled in, but some drama-club jerk. I don't generally care for theatrical people, so my inclination was to try to get away from this guy, but the game wouldn't let me. Doh. I also found myself feeling hampered by my conversational options: frequently the menu would only bring up one choice, often something that I disagreed with (I'm especially thinking of the "moral arbiter" line here, imperfectly as I recall it.) It's almost as if the game is suggesting that no one out there in the audience could possibly hold the opposite opinion, so why bother having it implemented as a response? And the thing is, I think this problem could have been remedied by making the PC either more user-definable or more extreme; as it is, she inhabited an unfortunate border zone, enough of an Everyperson that I didn't feel like I was playing a role, but with enough specifics nailed down that they clashed with what I the player brought to the character. What's more, while the conversation wasn't exactly the same from playthrough to playthrough, the same elements kept cropping up over and over again, so while there may have been just as many variants as GALATEA had for all I know, I didn't feel compelled to explore them. This is making it sound like I loathed the game, which is far from the truth -- it's one of the few that captured my attention. I was just less impressed by it, on every axis, than I was by the author's initial release in this genre. And I wonder: is this a genre, or just a stopping point? When do we see conversations like this integrated into larger, not-all-talk games?
We actually do see a not entirely dissimilar conversational model integrated into a larger context in STICK IT TO THE MAN. I actually liked STICK IT a fair amount: it has a massive cast for its size yet manages to establish personalities for most of them, paints a world more interesting than most, and matches gameplay to subject (you don't have to solve a fifteen puzzle to open the protective shutter over the Starbucks window you want to smash or anything.) But it is pretty sketchy, and it hard-crashed my interpreter ten times before I could complete it: eventually I was saving after every turn, just in case. This was on top of other coding blunders like neglecting to set the women female, a flaw this game shared with a number of others. I suppose we could imagine that all these games are actually Elizabethan theater, but that seems like a fairly inadequate remedy.
I also liked EARTH AND SKY, especially the scene where the siblings try out their powers: that was well done, both as an obligatory scene in comics like this and as a way to introduce the necessary IF verbs. But I got bogged down fighting the monster... never did manage to finish the thing. (Also, I really dislike the name Emily, but that's neither here nor there.)
A NIGHT GUEST had a neat approach: I liked shouting suggestions at a guy who gets himself into one conundrum after another and having him respond rather than a parser. The poetry I could take or leave, though, and the structure made for a bottleneck every single turn... an interesting experiment, but not one I'm eager to see repeated.
Seeing the same elements repeated in multiple games was a theme of this comp -- I'm not the only person heard to make remarks along the lines of, "Okay, the 27th, 30th and 32nd game I played were all slight variations on a theme." A number of games, for instance, seemed intent on proving Zachary Houle right, with opening scenes informing you that, whoops, your memory's gone! The 4th, 7th and 10th games I played all did that. The best of these was VICIOUS CYCLES, whose scenario was interesting enough on the first few replays but which I lost patience with after things got too fiddly: collecting objects to unlock doors to collect more objects to unlock more doors... one autokey to go, please. CYCLES mentions in the first line that "your memory shatters"; a familiar phrase, since I'd already played SHATTERED MEMORY, if only long enough to ascertain that the English would remain too poor for me to be able to stand it. ("Do you casually know who am I?" Sure: you're someone who should partner with a native English speaker if you want to write in English.) THE EVIL SORCERER also begins with a bout of amnesia, which is appropriate because I forgot everything about it a few minutes after closing the game window.
Another trend was abstract games, like ELEMENTS (wander through the Fire Room and the Water Room to gather red cubes, orange disks, yellow spheres, green clovers and blue diamonds... it's a magically delicious treasure hunt!) and COLOURS, which presented us with about eight hundred thousand rooms full of caricatures and then expected us to do an acrostic or something. Couldn't I just do some trig problems instead? SCHROEDINGER'S CAT doesn't even go so far as to give us a task to accomplish: we're just supposed to be fascinated by the behavior of the abstract room it presents, with the satisfaction of figuring it out reward enough for our labor. Except that I didn't actually care about the damn cats. Just because you worked on something doesn't make it interesting to anyone outside your own head. You have to give the player the motivation to type something other than >QUIT. Other entries that weren't really IF included SILICON CASTLES and THE GOSTAK (where the challenge came not from the situations presented in the story but from the difficulty in determining what those situations were -- and why should I care? THE ISOLATO INCIDENT was similar and my interest was just as slight. BEGEGNUNG AM FLUSS wasn't like this -- the author was clearly aiming for a German-speaking audience, not trying to baffle an English-speaking one for kicks -- but since I'm judging based not on how universally Good the games are but on how much I enjoyed them, I felt fine giving this a low grade because, not reading German, I didn't enjoy it at all.)
A number of games threw a barrage of short scenes at the player: NO TIME TO SQUEAL I've already addressed, and AN APPLE FROM NOWHERE was so incoherent that it's not really worth addressing, but FUSILLADE is worth a few words. The different scenes with their different MIDI soundtracks were initially intriguing, and I was eager to see how they'd all tie together -- and when it turned out that they didn't, that the unifying factor was "hey, everyone, here's a bunch of weird shit I dreamed," I was actually quite stunned. Really disappointing.
There were a few island games: VOLCANO ISLAND, STRANDED, JOURNEY FROM AN ISLET. JOURNEY was probably the best of these, but none captured my interest really at all. I find myself lumping THE COAST HOUSE in with these games, as it painted a pretty vivid image of a real place, even more so than STRANDED's and JOURNEY's pictures did for their imaginary ones. It was still pretty blah as a game, though. Ah well.
Do homebrew games count as a trend? There are always a few, but there seemed to be an uncommonly large number of them this year, and as usual they mostly served as advertisements for using a major IF language. SURREAL, YOU WERE DOOMED FROM THE START, THE LAST JUST CAUSE, ANGORA FETISH... all of them were unacceptable by today's standards even before taking into account their actual content, let alone after. 2112 was an exception -- it seemed a fairly solid piece of programming, with few or no gaps in its ability to handle modern IF-ese -- but that alone doesn't make a good game. GOOFY may or may not have been written from scratch... but then, it was hardly written at all. Never thought I'd see a game MORE minimalist than FIFTEEN. Then we have the Adrift/ Alan/Quest games, which aren't homebrews as such but don't really deliver the goods, possibly less because of the parsers and such as because those attracted to such systems are more likely to be planning trifles rather than magna opera. THE TEST, THE CHASING, MYSTERY MANOR... and speaking of MANOR, can we please have a moratorium on games that revolve around the discovery of a journal? I know I gave my top score to just such a game, but that says more about the weakness of the competition than about the device. TO OTHERWHERE AND BACK was doomed by the fact that it's a Walkthrough-Comp game, and is therefore tied to a transcript that if followed is pretty much going to by necessity lead to a game that's silly and dismissible. THE CAVE OF MORPHEUS was the best of these but that's not saying all that much.
Not to say that trifles are restricted to the minor languages. THE NEWCOMER wasn't even finished, while BANE OF THE BUILDERS has the player wandering through empty cylinders putting black squares into numbered slots and such... yawn. TIMEOUT... as soon as I saw "TEND-IR-FUT," I knew this game's sense of what's funny would not be meshing with mine. Some larger efforts struck me as trifles, forgotten the moment I closed the window: GRAYSCALE, THE BEETMONGER'S JOURNAL, THE CRUISE. PRIZED POSSESSION also didn't interest me and needed some serious spellchecking to boot: "guarenteed," "loosing," resting one's "check" upon someone's head, people "laying" still upon the ground. You can probably throw THE CRUSADE into this category as well.
JUMP began by warning of "mature content" and then announced that "the throbbing is unmistakable" -- but this proved not to be what it seemed. Instead we have flat, abstract juvenile angst, telling us that "inwardly you struggle with your identity," something that totally does not work when told rather than shown. What we are shown is some sort of suicide club, prompted by, subtly enough, molestation by Bible-thumping, alcoholic parents. Oy vey. Child abuse also plays a role in TRIUNE, which uses the timeworn device of having the abused child escape into a fantasy world... can we have a moratorium on this, too? At least I don't recall a jabberwock showing up.
YOU ARE HERE and HEROES also fit squarely into the genre of cliched fantasy, but with a twist: one's a sim of a cliche-fantasy MUD (and an advertisement for a play of some sort) and the other finally implements the pick-your-character idea that's been batted around on r*if forever. Maybe someday it'll be implemented in a scenario that's remotely interesting. CARMA is unusual (though its initial defensiveness about this is extremely offputting) but I couldn't relate to the topic, having never felt any particular enmity toward punctuation. (I may be alone in this, given all the missing punctuation in so many of these games.) Using Glulx to implement a variety show of sorts is an interesting idea in theory, except I don't like variety shows, so I bailed pretty quickly.
And that leaves us with the porn. Well, okay, FILM AT ELEVEN isn't porn, exactly, except in the I-0 sense that if you explicitly order the PC to do something porny, the game won't stop you. It's nice to see one's own game cited as a primary inspiration for someone else's, but since it's much nicer to see a game that's original, I couldn't give ELEVEN too many points. STIFFY MAKANE... well, I never found the original especially worthy of comment -- it's a stupid juvenile porn game like any number of other stupid juvenile porn games -- so having it dredged up yet again struck me as more tedious than funny. And that brings us to the worst game of this deeply disappointing comp: KALLISTI.
KALLISTI contains a disclaimer warning away the easily offended. This disclaimer, I suspect, is meant to function as a safety net: when the flood of scathing reviews comes in, the author can console himself in the delusion that they're all by a bunch of prudes who were offended by his revolutionary masterpiece. So let me make this clear: I'm not calling this the worst game in the comp because it's offensive. I'm calling it the worst game in the comp because it's staggeringly inept. Every response brings up another howlingly bad piece of writing: the prose veers back and forth between the semiliterate and the wildly pretentious, and occasionally even manages to combine the two. But it's not just that KALLISTI is poorly written -- its gameplay is also ridiculously poor. The game is divided into three sections, the first of which requires the PC to seduce a character who introduces herself thusly: "I am called Katie, I work here, as you know." (Leaving aside the glaringly incorrect grammar, who the hell talks like this? Okay, yes, characters in Ed Wood films do, but who else?) Now, writing about seduction is notoriously difficult, since so much of it occurs in the realm of the chemical rather than the verbal; even some of the finest authors consider it a topic beyond their skills. And that's not even considering the inherent difficulties of conversation in IF! But where some fear to tread, this author rushes in. So, picture this. A young virginal woman leaves her office on "some chore" (apparently coming up with something more specific was beneath the author) and returns to find the PC waiting for her. Her reaction? None to speak of, even if the PC is naked. Now she just stands around ("Katie stood opposite Gustav, a contrast to the poverty of the scene," the author tells us, as we try to suppress our laughter) and the PC fires questions at her. "Do you believe in love?" he asks, perhaps. And her reply? Maybe something like, "Do I believe in...? What kind of question is that? What the hell are you doing here, anyway?" followed by a swift retreat to her car? No, she rattles off a ludicrous canned reply: "In what sense? What does the word actually mean? Is it a seduction? A golden wedding anniversary? Is it everything? I believe in my own feelings and a category as wide as 'love' doesn't tell me anything." Gustav proceeds to ply her with suave, debonair lines like "I like your scarf" and "You have beautiful hair" while looking her up and down, occasionally thinking that she's "some beautiful paradox eating fruit from the trees in the gardens of contradiction" and then that "her legs filled the gap between her ass and the floor in the most pleasing way." After a few rounds of this travesty of a conversation, Katie is deemed sufficiently seduced and it's time for the sex. Part 2 of KALLISTI, like the original STIFFY MAKANE, requires the player to order a number of sex acts, which are ticked off the checklist before we can proceed to Part 3. Only instead of replies like "HONK HONK" we get the PC "pondering socio-sexuality as he grazed his teeth over her pert mounds," which is, if anything, even worse. And then, lest we think that this is not actually a superlatively profound work for the ages, the author adds a hilariously pretentious faux-Biblical coda. In sum, KALLISTI fails on every level, including a number of levels that hadn't previously been invented. It is almost miraculously bad.
Comp '01 thus makes a strong case for being the Worst Comp Ever. But then, the last Worst Comp Ever, back in '99, was followed by the Best Comp Ever, in '00. So maybe '02 will be better still. Please?
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