Z-CODE GAMES
Book
and Volume by Nick Montfort [This review was previously published in SPAG #43. Reprinted with permission.] Book and Volume is a sci-fi/fantasy/techno mind game that could have been much more interesting and satisfying. It may be entertaining for some but others may find it tedious. I, unfortunately, fall into the latter category as I found wandering around the city fixing computers less-than-compelling gameplay. The game is short and could probably be played in a couple of hours. It opens with you lying on your couch. Your beeper sounds and you are then sent on a series of tasks by your boss that take you into the city. As you perform the tasks weird things happen and you come to question reality. I think there is only one conclusion although maybe had I tried a few more things after finishing the tasks there might have been more to the game. The conclusion I reached was obtuse, it didn't help me to understand the game at all. It should however cause you to at least pause and think about the preceding events even if you may not come up with a satisfying explanation of the game. The game has stripped-down prose that only contains essentials. The interiors of buildings are in a few sentences at most. For example, your apartment consists of a couch and some clothes and no other rooms. The NPCs do not generally stick around to chat and those that do aren't particularly helpful. This helps keep you focused on what needs to be done and you don't spend time needlessly performing useless actions. This terse approach gave the game a cold, impersonal feel that may or may not be what the author was striving for. At times this approach was frustrating. The setting is a futuristic city with some really interesting places that I would have liked to learn more about. The airport for example is not what you would expect but when you try to examine objects you get two-word descriptions. The game's puzzles consist mainly of wandering around the city doing tasks to get a job done. The tasks are not particularly difficult. There are no hints or walkthroughs but there is a map available at http://www.xs4all.nl/~rlbos/bookvol%20feelie%20map.pdf On the plus side the growing realization that something odd is definitely going on is well done. The conclusion fits nicely with the game's feel even though it is difficult to interpret and I don't think anyone will see it coming. It may have some meaning that was lost on me. The game is technically sound and I did not find any bugs. I had no problems doing what I wanted to do and tasks that should not be difficult, ie working with your laptop, are made simple. I don't think this game will appeal to everyone. If you don't know your server from your waiter you may find the game uninteresting and a bit tedious. But if you are a techno/sci-fi enthusiast you may appreciate some of the goings-on and general feel of the game. Building
by Intaligo Productions [This is an abridgment of a review previously published in SPAG #43. Read the full-length review in SPAG #43. Reprinted with permission.] (Disclaimer: I played an older version of Building than what is currently available. So I have not mentioned bugs or typos in this review, assuming that they're probably fixed. But if I've criticized something else that's changed in the newer version, please let me know.) Building is a toughish game. If you're going to play, be prepared to spend a week or two with it. The game begins with nightmarish visions, after which you wake up with amnesia, standing in front of an office building. The story is minimal: you're supposed to be figuring out who you are, but from the beginning you know everything important except your name. It's an office building, you worked here, and it sucked (one "remember" will tell you all that). Gradually you do discover hints that your bosses might have been doing something beyond the usual corporate evils. Atmosphere is the real attraction. Dark, dusty, off-kilter, with remnants of technology lying around, seemingly abandoned mid-use... Contrasted with your memories, the present disrepair is all the more depressing. Another plus: the author implemented as many of the five senses as possible, particularly sounds. A few people have commented on the purple prose in the game. It's a fine line between lush writing and overwriting, and this game has examples of both. Sometimes the author relies too much on adjectives (in the Second-floor Stairwell, I counted 9 adjectives out of 39 words). Strong verbs do more for room descriptions (for instance, vivid verbs like "shattered", "severed", and "caked" improve the Authorized Room). Unusually, "atmospheric" doesn't translate to "story-based" but to "puzzles". The structure is extremely loose. There's one opening puzzle (get into the building), and then the game opens up with multiple puzzles that can be completed in any order. It's like a treasure hunt – once you've remembered enough, you can go on to the endgame. For the most part, the puzzles are difficult but fair, requiring intuitive leaps that are more-or-less well-clued (getting into the corridor of blue light, for instance). But occasionally almost-right actions don't give any hint of the solution (I'm thinking here of getting the ring). I spent time trying to get into inaccessible places, interact with scenery, and look under immobile objects. I like red herrings -- they give a sense of a world that's not just created for specific puzzles. However, in Building it's mildly frustrating, since you don't know what needs solving next at any given time. My advice to players: don't assume you have to open a locked door just because it's there. I found the inventory limit imposed by the game to be extremely irritating. There's no reason for realism in a game with a surreal setting. And I didn't find any puzzles related to the inventory limit. Also, sometimes I'd drop an object and the game wouldn't let me pick it back up on the next turn – granted, a bug, but one that wouldn't happen without the inventory limit. I'd definitely consider eliminating the limit in a future release. The limit makes things especially difficult in one recurring puzzle. Several objects in the game are keyed to particular rooms. But it's almost always arbitrary, so there's no way to know which room until you bring the object there. You might think that a dictionary would "belong" to a library, but in this game it might instead "belong" to the bathroom. You must ensure you've carried every object into every room, but the inventory limit means you keep having to switch which objects you're carrying, and unless you've got an eidetic memory, it's just about impossible. As you explore the building and its environs, you gain memories of yourself a la Babel. However, unlike Babel, there's no way to replay a memory. You'd better have gleaned everything the first time. You can get the game to list memories with short descriptions ("Grocery shopping with Nyarlahotep"). I would have liked it if typing "REMEMBER X" with some of the key words in those descriptions ("REMEMBER GROCERY" or "REMEMBER NYARLAHOTEP") would work. That seems easier for the player than having to go back to the location of the original memory, but any mechanism for remembering would have been useful. So, do I recommend this game? My main experience in playing it wasn't enjoyment but frustration, as anyone listening could attest. But that does go to show that I was engaged in the game, not bored. It's also typical of puzzle-based games. I don't regret having put in the time to play, and I'll definitely download the author's next game. Conan
Kill Everything by Ian Haberkorn [This review was previously published in SPAG #41. Reprinted with permission.] "I hope it is adequately stupid. Comments are appreciated." Fear not, Ian! You game is most definitely "adequately stupid". Which is meant in the best way possible, of course. Though perhaps Ian Haberkorn is a bit confused about which competition he entered with "Conan Kill Everything". When the title placed second in StupidTitleComp (a voting mechanism test for the 2005 Spring Thing) he seems to have thought he entered IntroComp, and created a playable game with that title, possibly hoping to claim a prize before the year was up. Alas, he will win nothing for creating this game other than the renown for creating such an amusing, if small, game. In this game you play the legendary Cimmerian barbarian, Conan, and your objective is simple. Kill everything. No, not every living thing. Everything. The walls of the room only escape Conan's mighty wrath because they "are already dead. Conan suspects that he killed them in an earlier episode." Although a one room game, and as mentioned before, very short, some interesting puzzles exist here. None will stymie a veteran IF player for long, but they puzzles are fair and logical, if progressing to a logical extreme. There's not much of a plot or story to speak off, but given the source of the game, expecting one seems silly. The game itself is technically sound, although more verbs could be implemented as with most games, and what can be reached from the table is perhaps a bit generous. Also, the actions of the fly in the room seem to be a bit too random at times, which can make a long wait. The writing is terse, tight phrasing emulating the 'action, not words' approach of your average barbarian stereotype. This simplistic style actually generates some of the humour, and there are also some great lines sprinkled here and there. Significantly, the game endings take a step back to a director's view of the action as a movie, giving a view that this farce is something of a play within a play. This decision actually helps, as some distance from the absurdity keeps the player from getting too involved and turned off by the stupidity of the main action. Not that these aren't amusing as well. The main complaint against the game is that it is, as I've said repeatedly, quite short, finishable in less than half an hour even if you get stuck at one point or another. More could certainly be added: for instance, Conan's association with beautiful women is a significant part of the mythos, and is missing here. Besides, with such an addition, there's a got to be a joke about the 'little death' that could be inserted somewhere. Still, considering the inspiration, this is an excellent little game. One can only hope that "You Get Transported To Another Dimension and Find This Weird Machine In A Maze And Then Some Other Stuff Happens, It's Really Cool" will be as good if Jacqueline H. decides to produce it. (Though it's certain to be stupid.) The
Corn Identity by Carl Muckenhoupt,
Serhei Makarov, Tama
Wise, J. Robinson Wheeler,
Alexandre Owen Muñiz,
Admiral Jota, Andrew Schepler,
Jacqueline A. Lott, Sam
Kabo Ashwell, Dan Shiovitz,
John Cater, Duchess, and Mark
Musante [This review was previously published in SPAG #43. Reprinted with permission.] The Corn Identity is a unique experiment in collaborative interactive fiction. Thirteen authors were each responsible for taking the previous author's source code and, without having seen the whole story, constructing a new segment before passing their code on to the next author. The concept is somewhat similar to the party game "Whispers" or "Telephone," where a phrase is passed from person to person with increasing loss of fidelity. The release notes say "It should be obvious that this idea can't be effectively applied to interactive fiction. So of course we had to give it a try." But what emerges is not the muddled mess one might expect: instead, the conspirators have created a dreamlike pastiche of corpses, puzzles, a distressingly ballooning inventory, and scenarios alternatingly disturbing and goofy. It manages, surprisingly, to be entertaining. Awakening groggy and trapped in a twenty foot steel cube, the player must explore a sequence of connected areas and solve a variety of puzzles from simple to middling-tricky, in order to unravel a mystery that seems to involve corn, murder, shadowy powers-that-be, drugs, and a lot of colorful buttons. As might be expected, the style of the game varies; in some parts you may die without warning and need past-life experience to solve puzzles, while in others you can't die at all and the puzzles are self-explanatory; some parts of the game feature well-implemented areas while others are bare-bones and empty. Interestingly, the tone of the story also varies, from deadly serious "X-Files"-like mystery to goofy self-referential comedy to political satire and back again. What's perhaps not so expected is how smoothly the game transitions between all these states. Any given moment feels self-consistent; it's only when you think back to fifteen minutes ago that you realize you're essentially playing a different game. Like a dream or a David Lynch movie, the game hustles you along through self-contained situations that flows smoothly into each other, almost succeeding in distracting you from the fact that the big picture is making less and less sense all the time. This is often annoying, as items tend to become useless as you move on to the next segment, and plot threads are introduced and discarded so frequently that the story slowly becomes a tangled mess. You never know when the game will throw you a curve ball revealing that the new author has no idea what a certain plot thread signifies, or rather, used to signify. The ending, in particular, is unsatisfying, since it fails to tie up the myriad of loose ends that the hapless final author could not even have known about. But on another level, the experience is fascinating. Something taken for granted in interactive fiction is that the game always knows more about its story than you, and your goal is to figure out what commands will convince it to give you more of its knowledge. Here, after the first few segments you honestly know more about what's going on than the author did, and the game is funniest when it acknowledges this shortcoming:
In a context where the author knows nothing about the character's distant or even immediate past, and indeed has no idea what the character is even meant to be doing, this otherwise humdrum line had me grinning from ear to ear. "The Corn Identity" is by no means a great game, and by many standards may not even be a good one: it is often sparsely implemented, breaks no new ground in terms of story, structure, or content, has a poorly-hinted puzzle or two and enough dead-ends and red herrings for three games its size. For IF novices in particular, it would be an off-putting introduction to the medium. But for those familiar with the conventions of IF or the styles of the individual authors, it's an amusing, sometimes clever, and always surreal adventure. Dawn
of the Demon by Paul
Drallos [This review was previously published in SPAG #43. Reprinted with permission.] Dawn of the Demon is a text adventure set in the world of Infocom's Zork about a thousand years before the founding of the Great Underground Empire and the use of G.U.E. dating. It is also a prequel for a graphical game, Zork: The Hidden Evil, which is being produced by The Zork Library. In Dawn of the Demon, you play a nameless adventurer in search of the Demon's treasure which is rumoured to be hidden somewhere in the forest south of the One River. Geographically, the game is fairly large with over 130 locations, including the cities of Pheebor and Borphee, a large forest, a maze, and a sizeable network of grue-infested tunnels. I was a bit disappointed with the cities which were portrayed blandly and with few Zorkian characteristics. Pheebor, for example, does not yet sport the aqueducts or marble spires mentioned in the Encyclopedia Frobozzica, but instead offers an understated royal palace with guards, an "acedemic-looking" library with yet another librarian sporting glasses and a hairbun, and a coffee shop which somehow isn't called Starbloits or Pheebucks. The great Arch is being built in the plaza, however, which does help connect this Pheebor to the ruins seen in Beyond Zork. Minor touches like this aside, I can't help but feel that several game locations were unused for either story or puzzle purposes. The forest, for example, does its best to have enough landmarks to distinguish one part from another, but there's still very little in there for the player to interact with. Likewise, Borphee has to have a harbour and marina because it's famous for it, but it's just filler here and plays no part in your story. For your Zork nostalgia dollar, the game both hits and misses, not unlike Star Trek: Enterprise. The hungus, easily my favourite NPC in the game, scores a bullseye by deftly combining humour, plot exposition, and a puzzle into one neat package. Instead of zorkmids, which won't be minted until about 1600 years later, we have zoons, another borrowing from Beyond Zork. There is some clever business with the grues involving how they perceive the world, but I was less happy with the portrayal of grues as a people with a primitive culture, as if they were Morlocks. A more obvious miss is an accidental mention of the Flathead mountains long before there were any Flatheads; the coffee shop and a CD-like disk are anachronistic. Some of the events in Hades might contradict what we think we know about Yoruk, who won't show up for centuries. It gets tiresome to point out unpolished prose and spelling errors, but darn it, they're in there. The game also inspired me to invent two new terms to describe particular style errors -- the "pointless porch" and the "duh-scription" -- both of which are exhibited in the following example:
A "pointless porch" is a unnecessary location between a street and a building. And could there be a better example of a "duh-scription" than the description of the hilt below?:
Even with these weaknesses, I still liked the game for its attempt to add to the Zork ouevre. I appreciated the in-game help menus which helped me through the game's major bottleneck. If you dislike mapping, there is a pdf file of maps available. Also, the game will detect if you're having trouble talking with an NPC and suggest topics to ask him or her about. The
Great Machine: A Fragment by Jonas
Kyratzes Interactive Fiction should be, as its name implies, interactive. This means that a reader must have some kind of meaningful choice when deciding what to do next - if the reader has no meaningful choices whatsoever, the story would have been bettered served with the more common medium of the linear, written text. The meaning of choices in an interactive fiction story can wildly vary, of course: they can have a meaning as possible solutions to a puzzle, as ethical choices, or it can even be as simple as deciding what things and places to explore next. Interactive Fiction should be interactive - but once in a great while a piece is written that is not interactive, and uses this lack of interactivity as a way to reinforce the point that the story is making. One famous piece of IF, which I will not name to avoid spoiling it for anyone who has somehow managed not to play it, uses a carefully hidden lack of interactivity to make a point about free will and fatalism. Why do I bring this up? Because in the end, anyone's appreciation of The Great Machine will depend to a large extent on whether or not one thinks that this piece used its lack of interactivity to effectively make its point. The Great Machine is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style story about war, and especially about war being bad and incomprehensible. We see the world through the eyes of a traumatised soldier, who is also ill and emotionally unstable. This is reflected by a wide use of a very fragmentary style of writing, with parts of sentences and even single words following each other without logical connection but with lots of white space and rows of dots between them. This writing style does work to some extent, giving the piece a surreal and vaguely unsettling atmosphere; however, especially towards the end of the piece it is used too often and becomes quite annoying to read. Taking on the task of portraying the horrors of war, The Great Machine faces it with courage. No humour here to soften the horror, and no shying away from fly-covered corpses of children either - this is good, and although this may mean that some find the narration unsettling and unpleasant, I would argue that that was the aim of the author. It is unfortunate, however, that sometimes the horrors are forced upon us too heavy-handedly, the following being an example:
Show, don't tell - the old adage may be tired and overused, but it is nonetheless true. Another reason why it is hard to be truly moved by the piece is that we cannot identify with any of the characters - no NPC is talked about enough to get to know him or her, and the player character himself remains a nameless, almost abstract entity. This makes it hard to become engaged with the themes of warfare, cruelty, emptiness, madness and lack of freedom that the author wishes to explore. Also, gives the short length of the game, this rich thematic content may simply be too much to explore in any depth. Against the backdrop of the war story, the narrative mentions a 'Great Machine', which crunches the world between its wheels; the player character dreams about himself being tied to a wheel of fire, spinning around for eternity. This is where the non-interactivity of the piece comes into it. No matter what you do, the story progresses much the same way and always ends in the same way - with the wheel having turned one complete cycle. Potentially, the non-interactivity and cyclicity of the story reinforce the theme of 'the great machine', thus strengthening the piece and making it into a good piece of IF. Unfortunately, for me at least it never became clear what the author wanted to convey with his machine metaphor, and the narrative as a whole seems too light and short and filled with other details to comment effectively on the shackles of fate and eternal recurrence. To me, the lack of interactivity made The Great Machine more irritating than moving, and that cannot have been the author's goal. It may be, however, that the metaphors of 'the great machine' and 'the wheel of fire' carry more resonance with other, and in that case they will probably enjoy the tale. If I have understood it correctly, the current piece is actually a fragment of a larger piece that is in the making. I believe that with just a little bit of editing (making the narration a bit more coherent and a bit less repetitive) this piece might make a very fine chapter in some larger, more interactive work. As it stands, though, the lack of interactivity is merely unfortunate and the story too short and lacking in characterisation to engage us with the dark themes that it wishes to explore. I do not especially recommend it, but I do recommend keeping an eye out for the larger project. Rock
'Em Sock 'Em Robots by Benjamin Mullins [The following review was previously published in SPAG #41. Reprinted with permission.] This is a cute little game in which you play the blue "rock 'em sock 'em" robot and are determined to defeat your eternal adversary, Red. The obvious goal comes very easily; it is the bells and easter-eggs that make this game worth your five or ten minutes. Many actions give funny responses, and there are several humorous ways to end the game. Although the game will draw its laughs, there are not really enough things to do to make it a serious endeavor. Still, it accomplishes its goal well enough for what it is. Neither the coding nor the writing are very spectacular, but they both pass. The game has been tested and is not terribly buggy, although the Inform debugging commands are still present. Most everything works the way it obviously should. The only thing that disappointed me was one object that when used suggested something that the game did not incorporate. The writing similarly is fine. In fact, in places the prose is pleasantly witty. At any rate, the small amount of time that you put into this little work should be fun. Things
that Don't Exist by Nicholas Matteo This is a one-room game, and here's the room description:
There are many dozens more nonexistent things listed, which I have cut for the sake of brevity. Certainly, you can play the game to see more. If you play the game, try typing "swim." Also, examine the "women safe from your powers of seduction," who, incongruously enough, do exist. In addition, examine the last digit of pi. In the original release of the game, there was a bug where you could pick up the last digit of pi, but this was corrected in Release 2. One unusual aspect of this game is that you can't move around, you can't pick anything up (in Release 2, at least), and in general... the player's ability to change anything in this game world probably does not exist! If you're up for 60 seconds of amusement, download this game. Otherwise, be warned... substantial content in this game does not exist! txt
adventure by Mr Pants This short game was designed for a digital arts festival in Cardiff, Wales. The game was projected on the side of a church, and attendees were invited to submit movies by sending text messages to a number projected onscreen. As an idea for an art installation, it's clever, combining 21st century text messaging with the text adventures of the 1980s. As a game, however, it falls short. The player begins the game standing in front of the installation itself, and the surrounding environs apparently match those in the vicinity of the festival. While this is a potentially clever idea, the game itself is too poorly implemented to make this conceit very interesting. It recognizes few verbs; it doesn't implement many of the things it mentions, and it is filled with self-deprecating excuses, such as "There is an invisible wall here. The sign of lazy game progamming." This is all a shame, as it's exactly the kind of thing that would cause potential players to immediately lose interest in the whole affair. IF needs to grab the reader before they receive that first "I don't know what you're talking about" message--otherwise, there is no incentive to continue playing. When you begin the game standing outside a church and the response to ENTER CHURCH is "That's not something you can enter," the game is not inviting your participation. The author is saying, "I didn't spend much time on this, and neither should you." The game continues along with a few puzzles in the way of the ultimate self-referential goal of shutting down the art installation. The puzzles make very little sense--one involves either a pun or a very poorly-described item, I'm not sure which, and the other is a lazy contrivance--but on a larger sense, in an installation like this, who is going to be able to solve puzzles anyway? One of the puzzles hinges on you having seen something earlier in the game, which is unlikely to happen unless the same person has been texting commands the whole time--which is incredibly unlikely when each command costs real money and, to boot, most are not understood. Since I wasn't present at the festival, I can't know for certain, but one puzzle solution may have involved information actually present at the festival, outside of the game. If this was the case, it's a good idea, and perhaps the only way to have made something like this really work: get the audience involved in real life too, running around the festival looking for clues, and encouraged to come back to the installation and text the game their discoveries. If the author exhibits future games in this format, this may be an interesting twist to throw into the mix, making the game perhaps unplayable as a standalone experience but more worthwhile as a piece of art. "txt adventure" was an interesting experiment, and I applaud the author for trying something new. In the end, however, I think the experiment needed a much more inherently interesting game with a much more fully realized parser and implementation to be anything other than a curiosity. As an author myself who has spent a great deal of time thinking about making my games attractive to people who've never played a "txt adventure," I expect this game merely reinforced the stereotypes of those who interacted with it that IF is archaic and not at all fun, something that has no place in the world of cell phones--and text messaging. Wumpus
2000 by Muffy St. Bernard [The following review was previously published in SPAG #41. Reprinted with permission.] Wumpus 2000 is a rather bold amalgamation of everything the average member of the IF community hates the most. We have hunger daemons, randomized combat, and arbitrary death. Best of all, the whole game is a gigantic five-level maze. Don't move on to the next review just yet, though. There are some interesting things going on here. As its name would imply, Wumpus 2000 is an homage to the early '70's IF progenitor Hunt the Wumpus. However, Wumpus 2000 adds to Hunt the Wumpus at least a suggestion of a plot and more interactive elements, thus changing its form from an elaborate logical puzzle to a full-blown, if rather unusual, text adventure. The player is a newspaper reporter whose expose has angered the wrong people, resulting in her being deposited into a monster-infested toxic waste dump below her city. The objective is simple survival and, ultimately, escape. To do this, the player must explore a 5-level, 100 room dungeon which is randomly generated for each game, building up equipment and experience in preparation for her showdown with the game's ultimate foe, the wumpus itself. In classic dungeon crawl style, the monsters and challenges get steadily tougher as one progresses, but the rewards -- in the form of more powerful weapons, and treasures which can add to the player's score upon escape -- also increase. You will also have the opportunity to get physically stronger in a couple of different ways, a nice stand-in for the conventional RPG experience level trope. Taking advantage of these opportunities is essential if you are to have any hope of defeating the tougher monsters on level 3 and below. Yet the heart of Wumpus 2000 remains mapping. There has been considerable discussion on the IF newsgroups about potential alternatives to the traditional compass style of navigation. Wumpus 2000 is interesting in this regard, for it dispenses with directions altogether. Rooms are numbered from 1 to 100, with rooms 1 through 20 on level 1, 21 through 40 on level 2, etc. Exits from each room are listed not with their direction but with their destination. For instance, the exits from the first room of my game looked like this at the beginning:
After I had explored a bit, they looked like this:
Mapping this is not really that difficult, although it does require a slightly different frame of mind. One must stop thinking directionally and start thinking solely in terms of connections. Deeper in the dungeon, things start to get a bit more complicated. You will encounter steep slopes upon which you can lose your footing, rushing water which can sweep you away in undesired directions, and other such obstacles. Things get really tough in the bottom couple of levels, when you run into things like this:
As you can see, there are now multiple locations located in the "same" room. Mapping this sort of thing requires some real ingenuity, as well as resorting to the old standby of dropping items about the place and hoping no wandering monsters carry them off. For the truly masochistic, there is an option to turn off the room numbers altogether throughout the dungeon. Needless to say, I didn't partake. Other than exploring and mapping, you will spend your time collecting and experimenting with a variety of useful and not so useful items, fighting monsters, and slowly building up your character. There really are no traditional set-piece puzzles. The game is completely simulation oriented, with it challenges all arising organically from the environment. I would say its gameplay has as much in common with Nethack and its cousins as it does with traditional narrative IF. Dungeons and Dragons tropes get pretty unbearable pretty quickly for me, but the game's saving grace is that it never takes itself particularly seriously. Monsters are silly and fun, and you will even find some very humorous little notes left by the dungeon's earlier (doomed) explorers. It isn't the sort of thing I usually enjoy, but I had quite a good time with Wumpus 2000 for the first few hours. I found it fairly challenging, but not ridiculously so like, say, Nethack, and figuring out how things worked and reading the game's humorous little descriptions and asides was a lot of fun. Eventually, though, things got simultaneously more difficult and tedious, and I started to cheat, making copious use of the UNDO command. The presence of UNDO destroys much of the challenge in a game like this, for virtually any combat can now be won by UNDOING anytime the result in a given turn is unfavorable to your character. I'm frankly rather surprised that the author didn't disable it, although I'm not disappointed. I seriously doubt I would have ever completed the game without it. Even with UNDO, winning the game for me involved some more extensive cheating. I found myself on the last level of the dungeon, having killed the dreaded wumpus, with two of the three keys I needed to make my final escape. Naturally, I couldn't find the third. In the end, I hacked into the object tree to find that last elusive key and win the game. Sometimes a man must do what a man must do... The prospective player should be aware that there are a few bugs to be found. The worst of these is that doing an INVENTORY while holding the gem pouch you find on one of the later levels will crash the game with an illegal opcode. Perhaps another release will be forthcoming to correct this issue, and a few other more minor niggles. For me, the problem with a game like this is that increased challenge just feels like increased tedium. At some point it all becomes work rather than fun, and then I either give up or cheat. I suspect that many other IF players are, like me, looking for something fundamentally different in their computer entertainment than that which Wumpus 2000 provides, and so I am not surprised that there has been virtually no discussion of this game in the community since its release. Still, if you think you might enjoy a heaping dose of RPG-style simulation and old-school mapping puzzles to go with a little bit of narrative, give Wumpus 2000 a try. It really does do what it does very well, and I don't know of any other modern parser-based game quite like it. |