IF Comp ’09 Super Sexy Black Tie Awards Wrap Up!

Instead of writing this up, I’ve been watching Riff play Uncharted 2, which is a lot like watching an action movie, if the main character in an action movie were psychologically incapable of doing anything until he’d completely searched the surrounding area for treasure.  “Drake!  Get out of there!  It’s gonna blow!”  “I’ll get out of here in a minute, goddammit, I’m looking for shinies.”  And then, because there’s a small part of Uncharted 2 that wants to be an exploration game instead of a narrative-driven on-rails climby-shooter (which it is, and is very good at being), he will in fact find a statue of Ganesh or something in a corner of the imminently-exploding train car and his neurosis will be rewarded, even as the climby-shooter part of the game yells at him and asks if he wants a hint.  Here’s a hint, designers:  it’s weird to both yell at people and reward them for the same behavior.  If you did that to a kid, you’d have a fucked-up kid.  If you did that to a hamburger, you’d have a fucked up hamburger.  In terms of potatoes, that’s bad parenting.

This post isn’t about Uncharted 2, though, it’s about the 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition.  I haven’t forgotten.

[spoilers for every game in the comp and also last year’s Riverside and incidentally 2006’s Another Goddamn Escape the Locked Room Game given free rein after the jump]

IF Comp ’09 – Sarah Morayati’s Broken Legs!

Mr. Magnifico: Math problem, courtesy of Little Mag: “I have 2 branches. One has one more than the other. How many different ways can there be?”
Mr Magnifico: (Answer: “It’s obvious that there are 30.”)

I saved Broken Legs for last, because the au jus seemed to like it.  So, with no further fucking around, let’s play it.

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: This game is steeped in personality and funny writing, and in that sense, I loved it.  Its puzzles, though… okay, maybe I’m denser than an Eric Eve protagonist, but I tried to solve its puzzles by myself, failed miserably, exhausted the hint system, continued to fail, consulted the pre-walkthrough, somehow managed to read it wrong, kept right on failing, resorted to the actual walkthrough, typed something in wrong, failed once again, then finally finally finally got it.  I feel like maybe a very small percentage of this is not entirely my fault.

So, yeah.  You should play it, though.  You’ll enjoy the writing, and can’t possibly do any worse at the puzzles than I did.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’09 – Matt Wigdahl’s Grounded In Space!

On a completely unrelated note for the RSS buffer, Machinarium, the new game by Amanita Design is out, and I’ve been playing it a tiny bit.  All Amanita games are along the same lines:  you solve environment-manipulation puzzles by clicking on shit in this sort of magic-trees-robots-and-airships fantasy world that is oddly hard to describe; the closest I can get is “like Wallace and Gromit and the Little Prince had a baby.”  They’re all pretty damn cool, and Machinarium brings some new stuff to the table.  The earlier games could sort of be brute-forced by moving the mouse around until the cursor turned into a hand, but Machinarium won’t let you click on something unless your little robot dude – oh, you’re a little robot dude – is near enough and the right height (your little robot dude has three heights) to reach it.  Also – oh, man, there are little boys screaming at each other in hero and villain voices outside my window, and one of them just declared the other one would never defeat him, and cackled.  That is so damn cute.  Where were we?

Oh!  Right!  Machinarium has a super kickass feature that is my new favorite thing ever:  each screen has one hint, and a walkthrough.  To access the walkthrough, you have to play a little platform mini-game, navigating a key through a field of spiders, and it is hard as fuck. To the point where I went “fuck these spiders, I will figure it out.”  Then did.  (I hadn’t realized yet my little robot dude had three heights.)  Figuring that one out for myself was approximately as satisfying as a warm English muffin with strawberry jam and oozing butter, which I really want now, dammit, and the game playing keep-away with the walkthrough kept me from robbing myself of that.

Anyway!  Grounded In Space!

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: This game is mega science-fictiony.  Probably Heinlein-inspired, although I’ve never read any, and I suspect I wouldn’t enjoy it.  From what I can tell, the puzzles are clever, but I have no idea how I would have figured them out in a million kajillion years.  There ar e six beta testers credited and all of them must be way smarter than I am, or read so much science-fiction that laser beams, reflector fields, and fusion chambers are what mice and cheese are to the rest of us.  If you are one of those people, you will probably enjoy this as a fun little puzzler, in the same way that Mothra enjoys Tokyo as a light snack.  Personally, I couldn’t hack it.

Update:  Oh, and according to Elizabeth, Matt Wigdahl and his wife just spawned a baby human, so grats on that!  If it’s a girl, I think you should name it Penumbra.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’09 – Ben Vegiard’s Interface!

This one is billed as a “deliberately ‘Old School’ romp.”  I don’t think you can get much more old school than Spelunker’s Quest without actually being stored on eight five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, but I’ll give Interface the ol’ ben. of the d.  (Just wait until I start blogging as Bertie Wooster full-time.  You guys are going to love it.  On a completely unrelated note, Ben Vegiard’s new nickname for purposes of this review is Inky Two-Veg.  Good chap, old Inky.  Writes games and doesn’t afraid of anything.  I wonder what P.G. Wodehouse would have thought of the internet?)

“Well, I’ll be dashed, Jeeves, it says here this fellow put a car in his car so he can drive while he drives.  Rather Oedipal, that.  Is it Oedipus I’m thinking of, or another of those earnest Greek chappies?”
“That particular meme, if I may say so, sir, is at the tail end of its life cycle, as evidenced by divers subversions of it, my personal favorite being this captioned photograph of Matryoshka dolls.”
“You don’t say.  What are Matryoshka dolls?”
“Russian nesting dolls, sir.  The idea being, naturally, that one put a doll in sir’s doll because one heard sir liked dolls.”
“How extraordinary.  I don’t recall telling anyone I liked dolls.  Come to think of it, I don’t believe I do like dolls.  That is the trouble with people, Jeeves, they neglect to check their facts.  Now, if anyone calls, I shall be in the drawing room charging my laser.”
“Very good, sir.”

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: I think this game had the best-clued puzzles overall, if not necessarily the most innovative.  Goals were clearly presented, mostly, and the solutions were logical, plus the premise was pretty cute, and other than a few typos, there was nothing really wrong with it.  Oh, and excellent hint system.  For an unambitious little house puzzler, it was not bad, Inky, old bean.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’09 – Tom Murrin’s Spelunker’s Quest!

Only seven games left?  Really?  The zeitgeist does not think much of Spelunker’s Quest.  I have yet to discover what the schadenfreude and the zaftig think.  Casually dropping German words into your sentences is sort of hip still, because absolutely everyone doesn’t think you’re a pretentious asshole for doing it, like they do when you casually drop French.  Speaking of which, we really need to get our own word for “denouement,” because there’s no good way to Anglicize the pronunciation without sounding just ridiculous (duhnooeyment?) and if you go for the accent you might as well announce to the world that you actually order things out of the Signals catalog.  (I make that joke fully expecting at least forty percent of my readership to own an outdoor thermometer with a Robert Frost poem engraved upon it in Gaelic.  It’s okay.  We’re still friends.)

Anyway.  Spelunker’s Quest.  Caves and shit.  Let’s do it.

Mostly Spoiler-Free Update: If you’ve played older IF games, you’ve pretty much played this one.  Wasn’t badly done, though.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’09 – Lea’s Byzantine Perspective!

I try not to soak up the zeitgeist, but it’s like frickin’ au jus and I am, presumably, a small defenseless dinner roll.  (Or, y’know, anything along those lines.  I could be a crouton, or even a potato.  It does not matter one bit.  I could slip into evil sponge form and defeat what’s-his-name the Wonder Twin, although he might question my reason for being full of au jus, as would I, frankly.)  Therefore, I have picked up a couple preconceived notions about this game, but nothing too spoileriffic, so I think it should be okay.

No use fucking around any more in this introduction, since I’ve already used “zeitgeist” and “au jus” in the same sentence, and I’m not going to top that without wondering out loud if my people know they are godless now.

…do you?

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: Oh, man, forgot this bit.  There’s not much to this game besides a single twist, but it’s kind of neat twist.  This is pretty much exactly what the au jus was saying.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’09 – Oliver Ullmann Utkonos’ The Duel in the Snow That Spanned the Ages!

Episode 1:  The Tale of the Age of Old Russian Machines!

I’ve got a lot of these games to play still.  Might as well double-fist.

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: Well, I sort of liked both of them, actually.  Duel That Spanned the Ages is full of space-marine-saga-survivally-horrorish business that is frankly not my thing at all, but the puzzles were actually pretty fun, if not groundshattering, and the writing was serviceable in most places and delightfully over-the-top in others.

The Duel in the Snow has not much in the way of puzzles, or stuff going on in general (“Ah, yes.  The duel.”), but it’s got a lot of personality and I refuse to not sort of like it.  The Duel That Spanned the Ages is probably a better game (in terms of gameplay), but I think I enjoyed The Duel in the Snow more.

Also, Duel That Spanned the Ages has exactly the kind of hint system that I like games to have.  Watch and learn, The Grand Quest!

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’09 – bloodbath’s zork, buried chaos!

Not gonna lie to you; my expectations for zork, buried chaos are not high.  It’s not an original IP, which is usually not a good sign.  The dude who wrote it goes by the name “bloodbath,” which he doesn’t bother to capitalize.  (Yes, I am assuming bloodbath is a dude.  Sorry, fellow feminists!  Or, rather, you’re welcome!)  Also, I have had bad luck with neoZork games.  I just don’t think it’s going to be very good.

Hopefully, I can get most of the not-very-good games out of the way now, then spend the last bit of the comp playing brilliant life-affirming gems of pure crystallized humanity, about which I will have nothing to say except “This was good game I like good game game was good,” so, y’know, you can stop reading at that point.  I will have.

All right.  Let’s go drop these kids off at the pool.

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: This might just be a sad case of self-fulfilling prophecy, but I was right:  this game just isn’t very good.

[spoilers begin here]

IF Comp ’09 – Owen Parish’s The Grand Quest!

Let’s see, what have we got left?  Wow, kind of a lot.  An invisible man, two “The Duel”(s), two more games with caves in ’em… oh, what has Riff played that I haven’t?  Wow, what a slacker.  Guess it’s The Grand Quest time!

RSS buffer time too.  I remember when I was satisfied to repeat the word “gorilla” a few dozen times and leave it at that.  Man, those were the days.  Also, WordPress informs me that someone found this blog through a search for “pissy fanny pants,” which I realize is their particular filthy nasty kinky very very serious fetish probably but I can’t not giggle, I mean, come on, “pissy fanny pants?”  It sounds like a Benny Hill character, or a small English child spewing vaguely dirty words more or less at random.  (Speaking of which, have you seen the Buffy swearing keyboard [NSFW]?  I have no idea what Buffy has to do with anything, but I recommend hitting a few keys to get the feel, then typing Z.  You may not find this as funny as I do, since I am Not A Real Grownup and other things I find hilarious include the sale of fish tacos and the existence of the word “slot.”  J.M. Barrie must have edited out the part in Peter Pan where the Lost Boys are trading swears and giggling and snickering and talking about poop and Wendy, drunk on all the excitement, blurts out “Tits!” and makes such a surprised face that no one is able to stop laughing and many of them are eaten by the crocodile.  Because there is absolutely no way that shit did not go down.)

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: I almost wrote “walkthrough” instead of “upshot” here, probably because of how many times I cheated while playing this game.  It’s a puzzler, it could really use some sort of integrated hint system, and it sort of pissed me off.  Spoilery details of how it pissed me off are after the jump.

[pissy fanny spoilers begin pants]

IF Comp ’09 – Dave Horlick’s GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!!

I’ve been listless the past few days.  Blargrughiphinated.  Devoid of pep.  Clearly, the only cure is GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!

I’m going to say it again, only bigger.  Hmm, where is my thing to change font size?  Does <h1> still work?  Are we even still using those pointy bracket things?  It’s all CSS these days, isn’t it.  Why do they insist on changing shit once I’ve bothered learning how it all works?  Forty years from now young people are going to have to help me into the supermarket while I mumble about how in my day you just pushed doors and they opened, well, unless you weren’t on the pushing side, but even then all you had to do was pull them, and the young people will smile politely and murmur sympathetically as they lead me past the rotating laser blades into the transmogrifier, secretly pitying me a childhood spent pushing on boring single-function doors.  What the fuck was I talking about?  My scalp itches.  Oh, right:

…yeah, WordPress has ish with <h1>.  I think I’ll just say “GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!” quietly to myself in a normal font size and be done with it.  Too bad, too, I was looking forward to telling progress to go fuck itself.

Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: This game could have been pretty awesome, and in fact gets sort of awesome near the end.  It’s just that there are way more pointless rooms full of nothing than the game requires, like someone went “Oh, the Everglades are very big, how many rooms would that be?  Fifty?  Then that is how many rooms shall comprise the Everglades.”  Also this game takes place in the Everglades.  I hope you didn’t not want to know that.

[spoilers begin here]