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Title: Byzantine Perspective
Author: Lea
This review gets really spoilery for puzzles (not plot).
( Whoops, botched the cut. )
Author: Lea
This review gets really spoilery for puzzles (not plot).
( Whoops, botched the cut. )
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Title: zork, buried chaos
Author: bloodbath (I'm going to take a wild guess and say this is a handle.)
I played this one last night, but finished up so late I fell asleep before posting. That's what the good cough syrup does. More below the cut:
( Scores and Commentary Below the Cut )
Author: bloodbath (I'm going to take a wild guess and say this is a handle.)
I played this one last night, but finished up so late I fell asleep before posting. That's what the good cough syrup does. More below the cut:
( Scores and Commentary Below the Cut )
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I spent 15 minutes hunting down a buggy bit in one of the games. Not good. Didn't see anyone else mention it, but I will tomorrow, don't despair.
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Title: Snowquest
Author: Eric Eve
This one errs on a much more spoilery side than many of my reviews may.
( Scores and Commentary Below the Cut )
Author: Eric Eve
This one errs on a much more spoilery side than many of my reviews may.
( Scores and Commentary Below the Cut )
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Unavoidable Delays
I started game #2 in my randomized list and I'm having trouble getting into it. I'm not sure if I'm having trouble getting into it because it's not bad, and I can tell it's longish, at least, and it will require a full 2 hours investment, or because it's too similar to a book I'm reading right now (thematically), or because work is so bad I almost walked out today, never to return.
Oh, and apparently I'm sitting my MA exams over the next three business days.
I'll see what I can do.
I started game #2 in my randomized list and I'm having trouble getting into it. I'm not sure if I'm having trouble getting into it because it's not bad, and I can tell it's longish, at least, and it will require a full 2 hours investment, or because it's too similar to a book I'm reading right now (thematically), or because work is so bad I almost walked out today, never to return.
Oh, and apparently I'm sitting my MA exams over the next three business days.
I'll see what I can do.
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Cobaltnine's Horribly Fractionated Scale, Started on the Chalkboard during Making Dinner (Chili) But Continued in Notepad and then Excel because Both Board and Chalk Ran Out and All the Paper is Missing.
Or the C9-HFS-19, for short.
The C9-HFS-19 consists of several subcategories, because I felt like I was being, ironically, too whimsical with my grading last year. I say 'ironically' because I was part of the little outlier group who made gnashing-teeth noises about Whimsy and Twee Nonsense and hoped one of the more...explody games would win last year.
Instead of trying to fit everything to a 10 point scale, every section gets its own scale. I've developed a formula and will round the results to comply with the 1-10 score of IFComp. There exists the possibility of up to 1 bonus point or -2 anti-bonus points based on whether I liked it or not. (For submitted scores, except in extreme cases, the bonus will only affect rounding decimal scores.)
THINGS YOU DON'T GET BONUS POINTS FOR OR SCORED ON:
music or sound
images or video
special effects
I'm sorry if you worked extra to get any of the above working, but here's the thing: I'm picky about my music, I startle easily and sound effects drive me crazy and my apartment is at an intersection with a stoplight and can be crazy noisy sometimes. Second, I played a recent game that had an image that reacted, supplementarily, as a signal to the player. I had to struggle to pay attention to it. However, I found that I could still play the game very acceptably without using that image. While it was nice, I think that's the sort of thing that should be added later to this, the Text Adventure.
BONUS POINT FOR:
See under 'Tiebreakers', Section IV.
The C9-HFS-19 IF Scoring Schema
Or the C9-HFS-19, for short.
The C9-HFS-19 consists of several subcategories, because I felt like I was being, ironically, too whimsical with my grading last year. I say 'ironically' because I was part of the little outlier group who made gnashing-teeth noises about Whimsy and Twee Nonsense and hoped one of the more...explody games would win last year.
Instead of trying to fit everything to a 10 point scale, every section gets its own scale. I've developed a formula and will round the results to comply with the 1-10 score of IFComp. There exists the possibility of up to 1 bonus point or -2 anti-bonus points based on whether I liked it or not. (For submitted scores, except in extreme cases, the bonus will only affect rounding decimal scores.)
THINGS YOU DON'T GET BONUS POINTS FOR OR SCORED ON:
music or sound
images or video
special effects
I'm sorry if you worked extra to get any of the above working, but here's the thing: I'm picky about my music, I startle easily and sound effects drive me crazy and my apartment is at an intersection with a stoplight and can be crazy noisy sometimes. Second, I played a recent game that had an image that reacted, supplementarily, as a signal to the player. I had to struggle to pay attention to it. However, I found that I could still play the game very acceptably without using that image. While it was nice, I think that's the sort of thing that should be added later to this, the Text Adventure.
BONUS POINT FOR:
See under 'Tiebreakers', Section IV.
The C9-HFS-19 IF Scoring Schema
- Workingness and Technical Thingummies
Total: 0-3 pts
0 pts: doesn't work at all, turns out to be spyware, etc. This happened last year. Your maximum grade if you get this? Also zero.
1 pt: later bugs that render the game either unwinnable or unplayable or glitchy.
2 pts: fiddly bits, significant interpreter incompatibility, or Windows only exe files. I'm on Windows, but I hate these things.
3 pts: I open the file, I play the file, the file and I come to a mutual agreement about going our separate ways and seeing other files. - Writing
Total: 0-11- "I speak English well, I learn it from a book." - 0-2
0 pts: Needs someone fluent to go over the text with a big red marker
1 pt: Ap'os'trope's (apologies to Mr Pratchett) or other verbal allowances.
2 pts: Even your meanest English teacher would go over this little to no red ink. - Stories - 0-6
NB: Storytelling is different than being a great writer. Stephen King, for example, is generally a good story-teller. That doesn't mean he's the best writer - for fuck's sake, the end of The Dark Tower tells us that - but story itself means more than writerlyness. On the other hand, well, there are limits.
0 pts: No story. A Rybread Celsius submission.
1 pts: A setting and some names.
2 pts: Some of the scenery gets described.
3 pts: The PC has emotions and feelings. I still don't.
4 pts: NPCs react to different things appropriately and differently OR there is significant world-building. This is the first level of *good* stories. Still may be flawed - perhaps something feels slap-dash or I can't finish it in 2 hours. The two-hour limit is part of the comp. I'm not just being cranky about it, but I do want to get through these.
5 pts: Attention to detail; significant world-building and NPC building, little inaccuracy either in reference to real-life things or within the logic of the world.
6 pts: Socio-cultural analysis or thought-provoking issues are treated well, made compelling, without resorting to cheap emotional tropes. - Special IF issues in Setting, 2 credits, MWF - 0-2
0 credits: Failure to give me anything to work with here.
1 credit: Oh, look, it's [A school/A haunted manor/a bland spaceship/generic fantasy-land]. Sigh.
2 credits: Huh, that's a new setting/very different treatment of an old setting.
(There is a slight chance this can be applied to the PC instead of the setting, if the PC is a very different type. In that case, setting does not get rated; it does not stack.)
- "I speak English well, I learn it from a book." - 0-2
- Puzzle Complexity
Total: 0-5
0 pts: No puzzles. This isn't necessarily negative, but it is generally expected. Low scores here should be made up in creativity or interactivity.
1 pt: Object, verb, result.
2-3 pts: Average, thinking required, moving some stuff around, maybe combining simple objects, but nothing innovative. Complex puzzles that are unnecessarily or illogically complex can fall into this range.
4-5 pts: Complex puzzles with creative solutions or multiple solutions.
- Tiebreakers, or, Personal Issues with Gaming
Total: -2-1 inclusive.
-2 points: Managing to personally offend or insult me on a non-shallow aspect of my personality.
-1 point: You know what? I hate Wes Anderson and Napoleon Dynamite and American Idol. I have a right to my opinions, but they might not be popular.
0 points: Well, that was two hours.
1 point: You managed, through luck, since I didn't beta and I don't know any authors this year as far as I know, to find a topic I love and you treated it well. Alternately, an interesting aspect of 'interactivity' will get this.
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Okay, I guess this means I need to make a more generic Interactive Fiction logo. I have to admit, I didn't beta or anything this year, and plans to write a game fell apart about the same time I made plans to apply to a new grad school. (Oh, what a long and sordid story I'm not going to recount. Let me put it this way: largely not my fault and if things don't get settled in a month, there's gonna be lawyers.) Last night I thought to myself, self, isn't it about time for IF Comp?
And it is!
I'm going to formalize my new schematic over this afternoon. It looks like there's only 24 games this year, which means I should be able to finish it, even while I do things like write this stubborn application essay. With luck - tonight!
And it is!
I'm going to formalize my new schematic over this afternoon. It looks like there's only 24 games this year, which means I should be able to finish it, even while I do things like write this stubborn application essay. With luck - tonight!
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I'm stuck. I'm really, really stuck. I've actually only had two ideas, ever, and now that I've discarded both I'm kind of meandering without concrete ideas.
The first was an injoke which would be relegated to the outside periphery of IF and required a lot of fiddly bits for one relatively important, recurring aspect of armor. To re-write it without the injoke kind of removed any particular tension and, bizarrely enough, turned it into a cooking game. Too close to one of the puzzles from Savior Faire, so I threw it out.
The second idea worked, it really did. But I have to put it, not even on the back burner, but all the way back into the freezer. It's huge. Last count there were over 30 locations, across a town, with three buildings that had at least three rooms, one of which had to have SEVEN for plausibility's sake. NPCs were going to be hellishly complicated or the town was going to be creepily deserted. It starts with a good puzzle and then...kind of fizzles out from motivation. Originally, I thought of a motivation (love) for my main character, which lead to a very good puzzle. Then I decided it was pretty contrived. The character doesn't actually want to fall in love and leave town.
Zonked out from the ridiculous heat, I was sprawled on a couch and said to a friend, "I don't know where to staaaaart." Okay, it was a bit whingey.
"Start inside a door," my friend says. Ha, ha. That was a bug/feature I encountered once in a Rybread Celsius game. I somehow managed to get stuck inside the property of the name of the door, or something like that. It was special.
"You know," he continues, "from the point of view of a termite, maybe."
"Nooo," I say. "I can't write 'A Day for Soft Wood.'"
People'll think that's AIF material anyhow.
The first was an injoke which would be relegated to the outside periphery of IF and required a lot of fiddly bits for one relatively important, recurring aspect of armor. To re-write it without the injoke kind of removed any particular tension and, bizarrely enough, turned it into a cooking game. Too close to one of the puzzles from Savior Faire, so I threw it out.
The second idea worked, it really did. But I have to put it, not even on the back burner, but all the way back into the freezer. It's huge. Last count there were over 30 locations, across a town, with three buildings that had at least three rooms, one of which had to have SEVEN for plausibility's sake. NPCs were going to be hellishly complicated or the town was going to be creepily deserted. It starts with a good puzzle and then...kind of fizzles out from motivation. Originally, I thought of a motivation (love) for my main character, which lead to a very good puzzle. Then I decided it was pretty contrived. The character doesn't actually want to fall in love and leave town.
Zonked out from the ridiculous heat, I was sprawled on a couch and said to a friend, "I don't know where to staaaaart." Okay, it was a bit whingey.
"Start inside a door," my friend says. Ha, ha. That was a bug/feature I encountered once in a Rybread Celsius game. I somehow managed to get stuck inside the property of the name of the door, or something like that. It was special.
"You know," he continues, "from the point of view of a termite, maybe."
"Nooo," I say. "I can't write 'A Day for Soft Wood.'"
People'll think that's AIF material anyhow.
Tags:
Nearly Free Books! Get 'em now before I curb-cycle them or give them to the great big guy who loves Buffy novels at the Free Bookstore!
Send me an e-mail, this username at the gmail and I'll ship it to you cheap.
Organized by Genre:
Fiction:
* Ira Levin: The Boys from Brazil (alternate history)
* Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (acceptable beach reading, huge)
* Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (acceptable beach reading)
* The Ruins (better that you thought, horror)
* Dagon, but not by Lovecraft or any real author (shameful beach reading, horror?)
* John Saul: Suffer the Children (shameful beach reading, horror)
* John Saul: The God Project (shameful beach reading, horror)
* John Saul: Comes the Blind Fury (see above)
* Clive Barker: The Damnation Game (horror?)
* Ruin Mist: Elf Queen's Quest (written by a spammer, generic fantasy, might be part of a series.)
* Palahniuk: Lullaby (Palahniuk)
* Eugenides: Middlesex (acceptable beach reading, gender studies)
Fiction but Doesn't Think It is:
* Black Holes (crackpot)
* Dreams, and What they Mean To You, some lady (woo-woo) (NB: kind of crap condition)
Non-Fiction and Inexplicably Small:
* Everybody Loves Ramen ('cooking')
* Sudoku 1, entirely clean of me doing any Sudoku (stay classy NY Post press)
Send me an e-mail, this username at the gmail and I'll ship it to you cheap.
Organized by Genre:
Fiction:
* Ira Levin: The Boys from Brazil (alternate history)
* Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (acceptable beach reading, huge)
* Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (acceptable beach reading)
* The Ruins (better that you thought, horror)
* Dagon, but not by Lovecraft or any real author (shameful beach reading, horror?)
* John Saul: Suffer the Children (shameful beach reading, horror)
* John Saul: The God Project (shameful beach reading, horror)
* John Saul: Comes the Blind Fury (see above)
* Clive Barker: The Damnation Game (horror?)
* Ruin Mist: Elf Queen's Quest (written by a spammer, generic fantasy, might be part of a series.)
* Palahniuk: Lullaby (Palahniuk)
* Eugenides: Middlesex (acceptable beach reading, gender studies)
Fiction but Doesn't Think It is:
* Black Holes (crackpot)
* Dreams, and What they Mean To You, some lady (woo-woo) (NB: kind of crap condition)
Non-Fiction and Inexplicably Small:
* Everybody Loves Ramen ('cooking')
* Sudoku 1, entirely clean of me doing any Sudoku (stay classy NY Post press)
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In my head...
I used to have 'The University' - in my head, it had windy corridors with dormitory rooms branching off, and a library with a long balcony, slanted roof, and skylights, among other things.
Lately, I think I've developed 'The Manor.' The room with the kiosk/card catalog full of jewelry and mineral specimens is painted strangely. The shadows of the furniture are painted in. If you move a chair, you know where it belongs in the right 'setting' of the room.
I used to have 'The University' - in my head, it had windy corridors with dormitory rooms branching off, and a library with a long balcony, slanted roof, and skylights, among other things.
Lately, I think I've developed 'The Manor.' The room with the kiosk/card catalog full of jewelry and mineral specimens is painted strangely. The shadows of the furniture are painted in. If you move a chair, you know where it belongs in the right 'setting' of the room.
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Taking a cue from Kleenexwoman, I browsed through the very old fiction I have stored on my computer. A lot of it is in text files, others in such basic .doc files that Wordpad can kind of handle them. A handful were encrypted. I tossed two of those that I knew were utter trash. A bunch of them are text files of things like Lovecraft's poetry and Anarchist's Cookbooks and A O Spare's magical theory.
The dates on these documents? 1997-1998. Oh, god, they are terrible. The poems are...rejects from high school literary magazine quality. I shudder at them. The names I use in the stories I wrote are atrocious (I've always had a thing for 'good' names. I'm trying to dampen that) and a lot of them are wish-fulfillment nonsense. Some of them even came true, which is kind of freaky.
The dates on these documents? 1997-1998. Oh, god, they are terrible. The poems are...rejects from high school literary magazine quality. I shudder at them. The names I use in the stories I wrote are atrocious (I've always had a thing for 'good' names. I'm trying to dampen that) and a lot of them are wish-fulfillment nonsense. Some of them even came true, which is kind of freaky.
I've been online for years. I have an icon - I didn't bring it over since no one ever noticed it - that says '28.8 bps modem!', like they did in Hackers. I remember getting one and having it be fast. While there wasn't much chat in the early, Telnet only days (I was actually a bit too young; I watched my father and his college friend demonstrate it once,) there was Compuserve and then AOL. Then there were the years of hundreds of little providers, once we slowly broke out of the glorified intranets that the former services tended to be. That's about when I wasted my high school years on IRC, late, late night IRC sessions with, well, weirdos. Benign weirdos mostly. I only hacked a little. I only took apart a few telephones. Nate and I met over this. In the late 90s it changed from being a somewhat insular group of people who knew how to navigate around online to everyone. Ugh. Everyone's on now. I'm not a huge fan, to be honest.
So, anyhow, I'm feeling like I'm nearing the end of one phase of my life. My philosophy, the one I subscribe to, at least, says that my 27th year is the end of a third cycle. 18-27 was a lot of figuring shit out. It wasn't a great 9 years, but I don't think it would have been able to be such for most people. It's a prime figuring-shit-out phase, and I think that's always going to be rough. That being said, I feel like I've got a decent handle on public versus private faces. I'm OK with letting this be my primary handle. I tried a few others out: Imrihamun, my Sumerian handle from an abandoned fantasy fiction project; Marsh, who isn't a handle so much as a character that isn't necessary to be a whole separate thing; and one other. The other one is private for now, until it has been reborn. Like all truly precious things, I was not looking for it. I received it as a gift, and I treasure it.
But what this means is that over here, what I say here will include some public things. It will include things like the fanfic I wrote at one point, and the interactive fiction reviews. I imported Imrihamun from LJ. I think I will work some IF things out here, and depending on how much it starts showing up, I'll put a filter on. Until this fucking MA is done, don't expect much.
That being said, guys, pick your colors. Also, how do I set up a homepage? It keeps telling me nothing's set up.
So, anyhow, I'm feeling like I'm nearing the end of one phase of my life. My philosophy, the one I subscribe to, at least, says that my 27th year is the end of a third cycle. 18-27 was a lot of figuring shit out. It wasn't a great 9 years, but I don't think it would have been able to be such for most people. It's a prime figuring-shit-out phase, and I think that's always going to be rough. That being said, I feel like I've got a decent handle on public versus private faces. I'm OK with letting this be my primary handle. I tried a few others out: Imrihamun, my Sumerian handle from an abandoned fantasy fiction project; Marsh, who isn't a handle so much as a character that isn't necessary to be a whole separate thing; and one other. The other one is private for now, until it has been reborn. Like all truly precious things, I was not looking for it. I received it as a gift, and I treasure it.
But what this means is that over here, what I say here will include some public things. It will include things like the fanfic I wrote at one point, and the interactive fiction reviews. I imported Imrihamun from LJ. I think I will work some IF things out here, and depending on how much it starts showing up, I'll put a filter on. Until this fucking MA is done, don't expect much.
That being said, guys, pick your colors. Also, how do I set up a homepage? It keeps telling me nothing's set up.
All right. Let the reading commence. I think I'll probably move my IF reviews here, too.
It's snowing again.
The snow that came on the holidays - Xmas eve - was so beautiful. So few people were at work, so the hospital was quiet. Not quite a skeleton crew, because, after all, how small can it get at a major hospital, but as close as a Level I Trauma Center is going to get. No one visiting, no tours of med students clogging the main arteries, no business meetings in the rooms off those halls, no construction crews on the Cancer Center or hauling materials for it through the atrium. Usually it's so full, and so busy it's unbelievable that the sick get any rest. The atrium was dim as the snow covered the big windows and I think the fountain must have been turned off, a noisy white dandelion puffball silenced to its shell, the silent brass star at its heart.
The snow was getting so deep they were shutting down the shuttles, so I was leaving early to catch the last one. Crossing the bridges between buildings, you could look outside and see the nothing. The missing ambulances, the missing food carts, and no-one double parked. If something had happened and the overhead pager went off, everyone would have jumped. It was so, so quiet.
The snow that came on the holidays - Xmas eve - was so beautiful. So few people were at work, so the hospital was quiet. Not quite a skeleton crew, because, after all, how small can it get at a major hospital, but as close as a Level I Trauma Center is going to get. No one visiting, no tours of med students clogging the main arteries, no business meetings in the rooms off those halls, no construction crews on the Cancer Center or hauling materials for it through the atrium. Usually it's so full, and so busy it's unbelievable that the sick get any rest. The atrium was dim as the snow covered the big windows and I think the fountain must have been turned off, a noisy white dandelion puffball silenced to its shell, the silent brass star at its heart.
The snow was getting so deep they were shutting down the shuttles, so I was leaving early to catch the last one. Crossing the bridges between buildings, you could look outside and see the nothing. The missing ambulances, the missing food carts, and no-one double parked. If something had happened and the overhead pager went off, everyone would have jumped. It was so, so quiet.
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