Random ramblings from a random rambler
Posts tagged ifcomp2010
IFComp 2010 Review: A Quiet Evening at Home
01 year ago
When presented with a game entitled A Quiet Evening At Home, I expect a story about anything but. Surely such an evening within Interactive Fiction will be interrupted by invading aliens, or the discovery of my neighbor’s body, or even the Rapture. Alas, no. This game authored by Anonymous offers what it promises: You, the daunting adventurer, spend a quiet evening at home performing a few mundane chores so that, ultimately, you can go to sleep.
This is clearly the anonymous author’s first attempt, or one of his first attempts, at writing IF, the dead giveaway being the “I implemented my apartment” world model. The other giveaways are that basic gameplay and writing flaws abound. Indeed, the very first room demonstrates several of these:
Sidewalk You are standing on a densely-settled residential street in front of a beige house with red trim. A short flight of stairs leads to the front door
Note the missing period at the end of the paragraph. And…
>x door You can't see any such thing.
And …
>x house it's the shortest house on the street, and it's got beige-painted siding. It's home. you've got to use the restroom! >enter house That's not something you can enter.
After seeing these numerous capitalization errors and the fact that I couldn’t examine a door or enter a house that was clearly in front of me, I nearly quit on my fourth move. Nevertheless, I continued onward, since, to the game’s credit, it was clear that I had a goal. I did find the bathroom, though as far as I can tell, I never actually *used* the bathroom. Apparently, the game simply flags the fact that you enter the bathroom and that’s that. No notification is given to the player that the mission has been accomplished.
Similar errors and quirks throughout the work deprived me of my enjoyment, so I eventually quit without finishing. Too bad, since according to other reviews, the ending awards the player with a dream about weird alien sex… or something.
If a lesson is to be learned, authors, it is this: Unless your first game is a polished work of IF, please do not submit it to the competition. By all means, submit it to the community. Folks will be more than happy to test the game and offer constructive feedback. Use the knowledge to build a new game with more polish, more pizazz, one worthy of the competition. In other words, keep writing, anonymous, and hopefully you will feel that your next game deserves your name on it.
Interactive Fiction Competition 2010
01 year ago
The annual Interactive Fiction Competition, edition the 16th, has been underway for nearly a month, but vacation and classes and, well, let’s face it, life in general, have delayed my chance to download and start evaluating the 25 (26?) new games to emerge upon the IF scene. Fortunately, the past week has given me a brief respite, and I’ve started checking out the entries.
Although I have played and judged the competition in previous years, I have never written down my thoughts about my experience. I’m hoping that by announcing in this very post that I will, indeed, review the games that I play1, that I will actually take some time and effort to contribute to the game reviews already available, most of them very insightful and informative, and some not-so-much. I will aspire mine to be the former, with one post per review when time permits.2
In the meantime, I’ll simply say that out of the half-dozen games that I have played, only one has stood out among the others: The Warbler’s Nest by Jason McIntosh3. It’s well-written and well-crafted, which–for those interested in how I “rate” a game– are my two main criteria for what constitutes a good, and therefore fun, piece of IF. In a nutshell, “well-written” refers to the literary aspects of the game, and “well-crafted” refers to the technical implementation. You might wonder if there can be a difference, but trust me, you can have a beautifully written piece of IF that is horribly bug-ridden; and you can have a technically elegant game that is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. I have seen and played both. And within each year’s competition, you can usually find games that span all corners of my particular reviewer’s matrix.
Quite honestly, I’m not certain what to attain publishing reviews. Certainly not fame or glory. But perhaps by studying the games of others, I will be better prepared when I gather up both the time and courage to submit a game of my own.