Jolt Country

Irvine Quik & the Search for the Fish of Traglea by Duncan Bowsman
(I played the first release, having not noticed a second one)

IQSFOT continues the tradition of the doofus-in-space game, a genre most successfully explored by games like Space Quest and Planetfall. It is also an interesting mix of ideas- some more successful than others.

Duncan Bowsman is probably the most personable ADRIFT proponent I know (he has the benefit(?) of being basically the only one I've met), but this was actually the first time I sat down with one of his games. I liked the way that the game uses its screen real estate, especially how the additional bottom-aligned status bars (I don't know what the ADRIFT term for them are) were used for things like the current chapter name (as the game is broken up into chapters).

There's some unconventional design in the game. Bowsman often designs around interpreter/language quirks and features (at least, I know he has done it before), and he does it here, too. Early on, there's a task that has the feel of a “Quicktime event”. The inclusion made me both think, wow, that's inspired, and also feel bad for people for whom the “puzzle” would fail, like those on screenreaders (not that I'm sure how well the ADRIFT 4 Runner works with screenreaders). I imagine that once you fail enough of the numbers you are supposed to enter, you get a chance to land the ship using some of the other available options, but it'd still be nice to be able to skip out of the QTE once you realize it's not something you want to do.

The game is also written in the third-person. I think that one of the dangers of writing a game in the third-person is that the player can feel distanced from the protagonist; I found that to be the case here. Overall, I like the style enough that I wouldn't change it back, but maybe there should be more omniscient narrator prose to get us more involved in Irvine's predicament.

Between chapters, there are often little comedic cutscenes. I liked this.

A couple times, I got stuck, only to go to the walkthrough and discover that I had missed a room exit somewhere. Eventually, I remembered that the ADRIFT Runner has a built-in automapper. The efficiency-lover in me still thinks the game probably has more rooms than it needs, but I guess that is not quite as important as long as players remember to turn the map on.

I ran into some bugs that I'm pretty sure are common ADRIFT 4 problems, like characters still being mentioned in rooms where they are not. That was frustrating to see. I also got poisoned and wandered around a jungle until I had a cardiac arrest, where I was mysteriously saved and sent to the infirmary. Great, but then when I tried to leave the spaceship, Nika sent me to the infirmary again.

It also seems Bowsman had to go to great lengths to get certain verbs to work for different characters, but I have to admit that he handled it well and distracts from much of the ugliness.

I don't think I'm the intended audience, as far as cat humor goes, but I did especially like the part where one dude looked like a particular kind of cat.

All in all, not all parts of the story and humor hit home with me, but Bowsman is definitely an imaginative guy and I look forward to seeing how this tale progresses. Assuming that some of the problems I saw are due to ADRIFT 4, I look forward to Bowsman (or someone else) applying this kind of coding perseverance to ADRIFT 5 (I don't think I've opened an ADRIFT 5 game that didn't try to open up in some kind of debugger first. Save me, Duncan.).

Before I get on to my last review of IF Comp 2012, let me do a little interpreter testimonial. I tell you, picking a good z-machine/Glulx interpreter is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Somewhere along the way, the giant ugly cursor present in Frotz and Glulxe became unacceptable to me, but Gargoyle can be a lousy choice for games that do much with the status line or have multimedia.

Around the time I was opening up Andromeda Apocalypse, I remembered to give Jimmy Maher's Filfre interpreter a try and was quite pleased with the results (I've used it for games in the past but had forgotten its charms). I even tried Eurydice's somewhat weird quotebox-handling (I really think there's supposed to be a pause and a clearscreen somewhere in there), and it works nicely in Filfre. I'd recommend Filfre to all Windows users for games that just aren't suitable for Gargoyle. You can download it here:
http://maher.filfre.net/filfre/

Andromeda Apocalypse by Marco Innocenti

The IF Comp is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is the best way to get one's game played and reviewed by more people than any other method of distribution (at this point). On the other hand, that invites a lot of submissions that are against the spirit of the competition. As a judge, I am only required to play up to two hours of a game before rating it; I see games that would normally require much longer to play (if not for the fact that they were distributed with a walkthrough) as a violation of the spirit of the competition and normally have no qualms about deducting points for it.

As the author is a fine contributor to the online IF community, I was willing to bend this personal rule for Andromeda Apocalypse once I realized that it was not a light game. Having never gotten through Andromeda Awakenings for much the same reason, I even gave that one another attempt before starting this one (which is part of the reason this game was played and reviewed last).

I played much further into the Apocalypse than I normally would have, stopping only when I ran into a conundrum near the end of the game. Of course, much of this was spent adhering to the built-in hints. While not exactly peppered with puzzles, this game does push my too-many-rooms buttons. It doesn't help that the endgame just seems to be fetch quests that take you to the other side of the map.

On the positive side of things, the prose is a bit more accessible this time around, and I liked a moment where you are joined by an NPC of sorts who stays with you and helps explain the alien environment.

The game has an achievement system which is kind of novel, but in this case, it's kind of used in place of a regular score (and not the traditional achievement sense). Personally, I think I'd rather see it changed into a FULLSCORE type scenario or make it more achievement-like and work off of a configuration file so they are only achieved once.

I can see why the series, so far, has its fans, and for the most part, Apocalypse, unlike Awakenings, has more puzzles I could have conceivably solved on my own. Still, two games in, I'm even more certain that this series is not “IF Comp” material, as I felt overwhelmed and unable to enjoy the various locations and imagery. I hope that in the future, the author considers other ways to release, like the Spring Thing.

That's it. I'm done, bitches!

Wow! All those games were terrible, sounds like!

Why do you say Gargoyle is bad for multimedia games on the PC?

I ask this because on the Mac side, it's the only up to date glulx interpreter with sound. And I assumed that being cross platform, the interpreter would look and sound the same on the PC. I haven't tried it there. If I have a multimedia glulx thing on the Mac, I go straight to Gargoyle.

Things I don't like about it on the Mac are - weird scrollback and no scroll bars - can't handle speech to text - changing config requires editing a text file(!). But it does the important stuff right and (b) it's also my only choice on the platform when I want sound.

- Wade

Wade wrote:Why do you say Gargoyle is bad for multimedia games on the PC?

Partly because Gargoyle doesn't do cover art (which, admittedly, is not that important), I think I often forget that Gargoyle handles multimedia as well as it does (for Inform games), so that is a bad generalization on my part. Still, given cover art, Frotz/WinGlulxe/Filfre give me more of the feeling that I am seeing the game as it is meant to be played.

I'll also switch out of Gargoyle if a game has a status bar with more information than can be held in Gargoyle's default width; I take that as a sign that Gargoyle was not one of the test interpreters. It's most likely that the author just doesn't know how to have a status bar with varying behavior dependent on screen size, but in such cases, it'd be nice if they distributed the game with a Gargoyle .ini file.

That's a problem with IF that I hope eventually gets fixed. It's hard enough to get people to write (and subsequently play) IF games. Knowing that they might run, look, or perform differently on different interpreters is yet another hurdle for players.

I never know what to do, when it comes to an interpreter, with Zcode games these days. It doesn't stop me, but I wish that all Zcode games were somehow forced to tell players which terp the author tested it on. I'll go ahead and use that one.

I also hope that Hugor somehow becomes the "only" Hugo interpreter, once it has movie support. The fact that there are 2 Hugo interpreters caused Pinback to lose his shit at me the other day, and that number again was TWO.

I think the default screen size for most interpreters is too small, but that's just me. It is the one great sticking spot with Gargoyle that you have to edit that file to change things, but once you've done it once, you may never do it again (EG Me - I just made the screen wide and that was two years ago.)

Since I like to show my cover art in the game when I'm ready, I don't like interpreters showing it before that.

- Wade

Wade wrote:Since I like to show my cover art in the game when I'm ready, I don't like interpreters showing it before that.

I think there's a distinction between cover art and a title graphic. On the other hand, I don't ever intend to use an IF catalog frontend that makes good use of cover art (at least, I haven't found one that I found really appealing) so I admit that maybe it isn't a feature really worth supporting.

I'm obviously confused on the issue, as I wrote a "cover art" extension for Hugo to emulate the cover art effect, even though such "art" would not show up in any kind of IF frontend. Also, as an author, I find that I hate writing cover blurbs for my games.

Still, just because they are there (in Glulx games and what not), I gravitate towards interpreters that show them. Maybe that is a bad habit (as cover art/text rarely increases my enthusiasm for a game).