In the order played ================== "Zero One," Alan, by Shed Having to type >X GREEN DOOR rather than >X GREEN when the latter is unambiguous ticks me off. One of the ways that the "big three" authoring sysems shine is by not making the player structure their commands quite so much as less refined systems. Yes, I hold it against authors for choosing systems that make things harder on me, the player. It was particularly irksome because of this game's paper-thin detail. There are quite a few significant-seeming objects and features mentioned in descriptions that turn out to be unimplemented. Bullet holes in your cell door, for one; I'd think at least being able to look through them would be reasonable.... The game begins by telling me that I can hear a conversation outside my cell. >LISTEN tells me "You hear nothing unusual." Whoops. There's not much in the way of actual plot here; it's a small set-piece that feels like the introduction to a game rather than part of it. It feels rather like the bit in Adventure between the start, descending into through the trap door, and killing the troll who bars your way; it's only after that linear exposition that the game's full scope becomes available. But here it's the whole game, and insufficient: I finished it in a scant twenty minutes. And the writing... could use work. Evoking "Stiffy Makane" upon loading a firearm is not a *good* thing. Rating: 3 ================== "Getting Back to Sleep," Windows .NET, by IceDragon I don't have the requisite .NET framework installed on my XP machine, so the game refuses to run. I don't appreciate this, but I'm skipping the game rather than give it a bottom rating because the game's readme does document this potential issue. Rating: NR ================== "Sting of the Wasp," Inform/Z-code, Jason Devlin A tightly implemented game, not badly written, but one which forces the player to wallow for a couple of hours in the slimiest of petty crimes, blackmail. Bleah. For all the unpleasantness, the puzzles are competent (if straightforward), and the prose is vigorous if occasionally stilted. Rating: 7 ================== "Blink," Inform/Z-code, Ian Waddell A bit heavy-handed, even simplistic.... This is a hard kind of piece to write successfully. Some of it is successful, some isn't. The conversation with Duncan actually hit me harder than the one with Harry, despite the latter's being more detailed and variable. I couldn't generate more than one ending, despite the >ABOUT text's assertion that there are several possible. Rating: 6 ================== "Luminous Horizon: Earth and Sky 3," Inform/Glulx, Paul O'Brian Paul can -write-. 'Nuff said. The combat scenes didn't quite make sense at times, alas. I'm not very good with puzzles in general, but I had to be led by the nose through the parental scene, then beat the bad guys not through cleverness, but by brute force and ignorance. The effect was to make the pacing exaggeratedly uneven, with a curiously anticlimactic victory. The endgame was a shock, too; it seemed to come out of nowhere, a capricious final danger for Our Heroes to overcome. Fortunately, it -worked- for me; my heart was going a mile a minute, and I got stuck just long enough to start to think about asking other folks for hints, when inspiration struck and I could drive through to the finale. Whew! The hallucinatory gizmos made for a wonderful >CHANGE experience, but as far as I could tell were just red herrings, and having them around made it -harder- for me to figure out the parent situation: i figured that there was probably a way to use them to address the situation. This is a darned good game, though. I'm rating it as high as this, despite the flaws I've discussed here, because the tone is impeccable and the >CHANGE mechanism is a joy to behold. I started out wanting to do the whole game as a single character. You can't; Paul's done a great job of building a story about *two* superheros. No sidekicks here! Rating: 9 ================== "Typo," Inform/Z-code, Peter Seebach and Kevin Lynn >OPEN ACCESS DOOR Which do you mean, the access door to compartment number 2 or the access door to compartment number 1? >1 (the access door to compartment number 2) That's odd. You can't seem to get the access door open. 'Nuff said. It's a puzzlebox. With the typo-correction-run-amok conceit, it could have been a lot more interesting, but instead it's just a puzzlebox. Sigh. Rating: 3 ================== "The Great Xavio: A Mystery," Inform/Z-code, Reese Warner Oh, what fun! Dr. Todd is a deliciously irritating yet helpful companion, the mystery is revealed only partway through, and there are multiple ways of solving various puzzles. What's not to like? Disambiguation is occasionally a problem, juggling room keys and doors and key slots and so on. I also ran across an object missing its description (the master bedroom bed). There also isn't quite so much depth to the implementation as I'd like, especially given the multiple solutions to certain puzzles. George, in particular, wound up being irritating but not helpful. The red herrings, while possibly obligatory, also seemed a bit "thin" -- I'd hoped to find some interaction involving the prosecco and room 315, for example. (And only two bits of evidence to have enough to confront the culprit? I wandered around quite a bit after finding them, thinking that there -must- be more evidence needed than that....) Despite the occasional stumble, I had a great time playing this one. More, please! Rating: 8 ================== "The Orion Agenda," Inform/Z-code, Ryan Weisenberger A classic-style adventure game, complete with sudden death when you've failed to anticipate a necessary game state before entering the location that requires it. The writing isn't bad, though better proofreading would have been a good idea; there are missing words more than once. It's pretty heavy-handed, too. I don't think it handles the moral tension of its premise well enough. The puzzles are uneven, too. In particular, the old man and his ooh-aah stones, fraught with Meaning, was a ridiculous Plot Device. I'd be more charitably disposed to this one if it didn't suddenly digress into enormous text dumps and massive cut scenes, on more than one occasion, too. Eurgh. Rating: 6 ================== "The Realm," TADS-2, Michael Sheldon "...your sword and leathery armor gone." Not -actual- leather, but a mysterious leather-like substance. This is not an auspicious first sentence. But it turns out to be typical. Rating: 3 ================== "Blue Chairs," Inform/Z-code, Chris Klimas I liked this game a whole lot, but I'm damned if I can pin down why. It strikes me as a sort of game that will simply not be some folks' cup of tea. It also strikes me as only proper that Robb Sherwin helped test it. A few sections felt 'off' to me, notably the desert. The writing felt strongest when it was 'busier': with so little in the environment in the desert and similar austere locations, the complexity of place, the -uncertainty-, didn't come through as much. Surreal still, yes, but to me not as ... poignant? Hard to describe. The puzzles got the better of me on a number of occasions, too; i wound up reading every hint in the game. This was probably in part a result of playing the game late at night, in part because I just stink at figuring out puzzles. It's hard for me to gauge the difficulty -- I needed a lot of help, but in retrospect I suspect many people won't need so much as I did. Rating: 8 ================== "Ruined Robots: World Domination, With Robots or Without Them," TADS-2, nanag_d Eeeagh, lines of yen symbols trying to be ASCII graphics. Hardly a promising start. And then there's this: >X CLOTHES These old clothes are not worth bothering about, they're just supposed to be artful background scenery. "Artful?" Oy. Nothing is boring like a game with implementation errors, too. I kept running into weird layout issues, description text intermixed with "Done" and similar acknowledgements that an action had been performed, and flat-out bizarre disambiguation problems (">TAKE NOTE. Do you mean the platinum key, or the Post-It note?" WTF?) Eventually I took to playing through the walkthrough, and stopped 30-odd moves in when i hit the rock labelled about elves and proud declamations about a SIMM! With exclamation points! Huzzah! Rating: 2 ================== ...no other games rated.