Although this collection was originally conceived to cover just non-comp games, some competitions and compilations this year just didn't get much attention. So I'm covering them here.

SEGMENT MINI-COMP
1. Snowman Sextet Part I: But For A Single Flake, by Roger Corbol.
2. Snowman Sextet Part II, by Jess Knoch
4. Kaboot's Story, by Josh Giesbrecht
5. Fran and Bert Want a Snowman! by Tommy Herbert

24 HOURS OF INFORM
Dastardly, by Andy Chase
Within a Wreath of Dewdrops, by Sam Kabo Ashwell and Jacqueline A. Lott as "Alphonse de l'Entaille"

1 TO 2K COMP
23:15, by Jon Ripley
Smile, by Chris Molloy Wischer

LO-TECH COMP
Dog Show, by Mrs. Drallos' Fourth Grade PACE class

OTHER GAMES
For other games, please see the main table of contents for the NCRP 2005.

Segment Mini-Comp Games For more information about these games, see ifwiki.org or Baf's Guide. Additional links: SPAG's original unabridged version of this review
1. Snowman Sextet Part I: But for a Single Flake	2. Snowman Sextet Part II	4. Kaboot's Story	5. Fran and Bert Want a Snowman!
by Roger Carbol	by Jess Knoch (author's web site)	by Josh Giesbrecht (author's web site)	by Tommy Herbert
TADS 2	Z-code	Z-code	Z-code
Download: Baf's Guide	Download: Baf's Guide	Download: Baf's Guide	Download: Baf's Guide
Reviewed by Dan Shiovitz

[This is an abridgment of a review previously published in SPAG #43. Read the full-length review in SPAG #43. Reprinted with permission.]

The most complicated multi-author setup I've seen is the Snowman Sextet that David Cornelson organized earlier this year. Although the name suggests it was to be a six-part story, parts 3 and 6 never got completed. Nevertheless, there's a pretty decent story that can be pieced together from the existing four parts, so I thought I'd take a look at what's there, and see how the different games compare.

The overall setup seems to be some sort of story about a family travelling up a mountain to make a snowman and coming back again. The individual games are pretty small -- usually only four or five rooms each -- with one or two puzzles. Each game advances the plot a bit and the next one picks up more or less where the previous game left off. None of the games are particularly hard; you should be able to play all four in an evening.

The first part of the story, But For A Single Flake by Roger Carbol, is set in your family cabin in the mountains. It seems like Carbol may have expected the players to know the overall premise coming in, since the game never explicitly tells it (or even tells the player what their immediate goal is). On the other hand, the game is small enough that this isn't really an issue -- there're just four rooms and one puzzle -- so you can pretty much bumble through without knowing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. In fact, it's small enough room-wise that I'm surprised that the implementation isn't any deeper: your wife is in bed asleep in the first room, but you can't wake, kiss, or talk to her. On the other hand, there are a number of bits of writing that are quite snappy, and I was evilly pleased to see a response for >PUSH GRANNY.

The second segment, by Jess Knoch, is set on a boat in the middle of the lake. Just starting this shows a few bumps in the segment-game idea -- the story-so-far at the beginning of the game disagrees with the previous game over whether your wife came along, and the boat's suddenly gotten a lot bigger than it was last game. This segment has the best puzzles of the four, I think: they're not too hard, but they fit the environment and I had to think about them a bit (although there's one thing that seems like a puzzle but as far as I can tell is just a red herring -- sort of a weird choice in this short a game). The writing is fairly straightforward, but Knoch definitely gives the impression of having done her homework about boats. Unfortunately, there's no game three in the series so I was unable to find out what happened next, but it wasn't too hard to pick up the plot with game four.

Game four, Josh Giesbrecht's Kaboot's Story, was my favorite of the four games, and not just because the PC is a hamster. Well, ok, it's *mostly* because of that, but it's also funny and cute on its own merits. My notes for this game say "storing things in cheekpouches = awesome", and I don't think I can put it any more clearly than that. The family seems to have weird priorities if they're more worried about building a snowman than freezing to death, but luckily the heroic hamster is here to save the day. Save the day multiple times, in fact -- I played through this game in just 22 turns and still had to shepherd the family through three crises. The puzzles themselves aren't particularly challenging but they don't slow the game down either, so there's nothing wrong with them being the way they are. I guess that's really the secret to the appeal of this game for me: it was about the same length as the other three games, but had like three times the number of events, and that made it feel extremely fast-paced and fun, especially with the cheerful writing to back it up (the thing with gangster chipmunks was totally ridiculous but also pretty funny).

Game five, the fourth and final game written for this project, is Tommy Herbert's Fran and Bart Want a Snowman! Despite the previous game being about a hamster who fights off a puma, I found this game the least plausible of the four. Possibly this was inevitable given the premise -- you have to bring the snowman back down off the mountain, and there's no real way to do that without pretending snowmen are much less likely to fall apart than they actually are. The game also feels a little overwritten most of the time, but there are a few very funny bits -- especially the ending text -- that are noteworthy. The coding, on the other hand, was uniformly solid: this felt to me like the best-implemented of the four, despite requiring the most complex commands. Unfortunately, there was no game six written, so the cliffhanger that game five ends on won't be resolved, but I'm sure it all worked out happily in the end.

While none of the games are large or groundbreaking, taken as a whole the Sextet is pretty fun -- it's cool to see multiple authors give their own takes on a parts of single story, and I hope we see another project like this in the future.

Dastardly by Andy Chase
Platform: Z-code
An entry in the 24 Hours of Inform contest
Author's web site
Download: Game's home page or 24 Hours of Inform Site or Baf's Guide
Additional links: SPAG's original copy of this review
Reviewed by Greg Boettcher

[This review was previously published in SPAG #42. Reprinted with permission.]

I came to Dastardly with pretty low expectations. I had never before played a game from 24 Hours of Inform, the contest for which this game was written. I was expecting something not much better than a SpeedIF game. What I got instead was a game that has much to admire in its atmosphere and character development, although it does have a particularly serious flaw.

The third 24 Hours of Inform contest had two basic rules: write a game in 24 hours, and set the game in a theatre, featuring a petticoat, an advertisement, something which is repainted, and a trapdoor. These requirements led Andy Chase to set his game in a financially troubled theatre in Victorian London. Your are an ambitious playwright, while your financial backer, James, has ruined your hopes by turning your theatre into a burlesque house while he indulges in excesses of drink and flesh.

In the "about" menus for this game, Andy Chase says that Dastardly probably contains a lot of historical inaccuracies. Maybe, but I didn't notice any. In fact, I really liked the game's setting and atmosphere. Another thing I liked was the extent to which its characters were developed, far more than I would have expected in a speed-written game. You may not be able to talk to James much during the opening segment, but you can read your journal to gain insight into him, yourself, and others. Before you are done exploring the theatre, you have a fairly good idea of what you must do, and why.

Unfortunately, this game has a serious bug that prevented me from being able to finish it. I thought maybe it was just me, so I asked my girlfriend, another IF veteran, to play the game, but she got stuck at the same place that I did. I wrote to the author and found out that we had both essentially done everything we were supposed to do, but were stuck because of a serious bug that often turns the final puzzle into a roadblock.

The other major flaw is shallow implementation, whereby a lot of scenery items can't be examined, and lots of other details are overlooked. Of course, this is what you'd expect in a game written in 24 hours.

Do I recommend Dastardly? Well, I guess that depends on whether you're willing to write to the author for help, because I'd expect most people to get tripped up by the game's major bug. But if you are so inclined, then yes, play it. It's a short, enjoyable little game, with decent characters and an interesting but flawed puzzle.

I'll be able to recommend this game much more strongly when Release 2 comes out, or if hints or a walkthrough are released. Even if there is never a Release 2 (and there usually hasn't been for 24 Hours of Inform games), this game shows promise, and I'd be interested to see whatever Andy Chase does next.

P.S. Now that I've written to Andy Chase for help on finishing his game, he told me that his interest in Inform is somewhat rekindled. He says that a new version of Dastardly may indeed be on the way, though he can't say when. To check for any updates, or to get the most recent version of the game, visit: http://achase.net/files/32/dastardly

Within a Wreath of Dewdrops by Sam Kabo Ashwell and Jacqueline A. Lott as "Alphonse de l'Entaille"
Platform: Z-code
An entry in the 24 Hours of Inform contest
Sam Kabo Ashwell's web site; Jacqueline A. Lott's web site
Download: Game's home page or 24 Hours of Inform Site or Baf's Guide
Additional links: Dan Shiovitz' original copy of this review
Reviewed by Dan Shiovitz

[This review was previously published on Dan Shiovitz' web site. Reprinted with permission.]

It's a little hard to figure out how to judge Within a Wreath of Dewdrops. It was written as an entry in the 3rd 24 Hours of Inform contest, and so it's basically one step up from a Speed-IF in terms of development time. In that context I guess it's pretty good; it's no ASCII and the Argonauts, but it's coherent, doesn't have any obvious bugs, and the enjoyment in the game comes from something more than just absurdist humor.

Still, it seems like a pity. Within a Wreath of Dewdrops has a clever concept and witty writing, but they're squeezed into a tiny game that, frankly, is not very well designed and tends to just sit there until the player figures out what to do next. The last puzzle is cute, but the earlier ones feel like — well, like they're from a Speed-IF. I think this game could use a little room to grow. Now that there's no more time limit, I'd encourage the author to reconsider the game's construction and interaction, and rewrite the game in a more natural size. Still, even in its current version, Within a Wreath of Dewdrops is amusing enough — but thank goodness for the in-game hints.

23:15 by Jon Ripley
Platform: Windows
An entry in the 2nd Annual (2005) 1 to 2K Classic Text Adventure Competition
Author's web site
Download: Game's home page or 2K Comp Site
Reviewed by Aaron A. Reed

The winning entry in the 2005 2K Classic Text Adventure Competition, "23:15" tries to tell a story in the miniscule space afforded to the earliest home computers. Awakening in a suspended animation tube, the player discovers that she is someone called Natasha, onboard a space station with a stolen fuel supply and a crew soon to die if the player doesn't save them. What follows is all the exploration and puzzles that a few kilobytes of text and code can get you--not much, but perhaps more than you'd expect.

While the game claims to understand a large number of verbs and objects, it also expects you to know exactly which ones to use in any given circumstance. "unscrew screws with key," for example, produces results, while "unscrew screws," "turn screws," "turn screws with key" and other variations do not. The game also does not tell you the limitations of the parser, which combined with the word-guessing and the stock error message "Impossible" makes for a very frustrating experience. Other non-standard behavior (such as "search" producing the results you'd expect from "examine") only raises the blood pressure further.

Behind the hobbled parser is some potential--the opening grabs attention, a note from a friend intrigues and invites speculation, and the evironment is well described, considering the word limitations. Some clever bits with the map and a regular placement of obstacles make this feel like an actual game instead of a masochistic coding challenge. Ripley does his best with the self-imposed limitations, but I've never encountered a game of this genre that is anything other than an echo of actual fun. Worth a play for fans of this form of early text adventures, but others will find little to enjoy here.

Smile by Chris Molloy Wischer
Platform: Windows
An entry in the 2nd Annual (2005) 1 to 2K Classic Text Adventure Competition
Download: 2K Comp Site
Reviewed by Aaron A. Reed

One of two entries in the second 2K Classic Text Adventure Competition, "Smile" by Chris M. Wischer has just about everything stacked against it. Not only is it entered in this minimalist competition which tasks authors with writing games in less than 3,000 bytes of source code, it also does not take advantage of the loophole of storing extra data such as game descriptions in an 8K external file. With half the available space taken up by a rudimentary parser, Wischer has only about a hundred words in which to try to tell an interactive story.

The existence of poetry means that it should be at least theoretically possible to create art or entertainment in this cramped a space, but Wischer's game is not up to the task. In the scant space available, the author sketches a time traveller crashed into a dystopian future where surplus children are exterminated and doctors encourage everyone to "smile." The cramped format does not allow the between-the-lines theme to be explored or developed; the game can be won in less than two minutes, and the whole affair really amounts to little more than a coding exercize, although at least it is one with aspirations.

Dog Show by Mrs. Drallos' Fourth Grade PACE class
Platform: Z-code
An entrant in the Lotech Comp 2005
Download: Lotech Comp 2005 or Baf's Guide
Additional links: Dan Shiovitz' original copy of this review, Jason Dyer's review
Reviewed by Dan Shiovitz

[This review was previously published on Dan Shiovitz' web site. Reprinted with permission.]

Like all the entries in the Lotech Comp, Dog Show is a choose-your-own-adventure style game. Like a number of other entries over the years, it's written with Adventure Book. Unlike any of the other entries, or indeed any other IF game I can think of, Dog Show is credited to the efforts of an entire class of fourth-graders. I'm a little surprised they managed to pull this off at all, let alone create something that is really pretty stylistically uniform and works as an integrated whole.

The premise of the game, like you might guess from the title, is you're a kid attending a dog show. Gameplay consists of going around to watch the different exhibits and presentations at the show. I don't know how they designed it, but it seems like this would work pretty well for a class project — you could design the basic map and then assign different people areas of the show to write. Most exhibits seem to only consist of one "page" and description, but a few have a slightly more complicated structure (eg, you see a dog and then can choose to pet the dog), and I see the authors have grasped the traditional CYOA model well enough to stick in a few choices that kill the player. The descriptions do a good job of setting a consistent light-hearted mood, and never let you forget that you're thrilled to be at the dog show.

The one suggestion I'd make for a future game is to add some kind of plot structure. Dog Show offers pretty much total freedom to walk around; you can't close off any branches of the tree, and the only ways to end (that I found) are to hit one of the two death endings or to quit. This is interesting, and I'm sure easier to design, but in general it makes a more satisfying game if there's some kind of plot, even if it's fairly simple.

Anyway, on the whole I found Dog Show to be a fun little romp, and not long; it's worth the time to check it out.