cobaltnine | IFComp 2008 - The Hall of the Fount of Artois

Whoo boy, not off to a good start, when 'x' an object doesn't work.

This has been said elsewhere, but, seriously, why make an EXE when INFORM IS PERFECTLY GOOD. Or another authoring language. One with important verbs implemented, such as:
x
read
sit
strike [match]
open

I can't do a lot of what I want to in this game. I can barely look at or examine anything. I can't use the coathanger on the floor where something has slipped - I can't even look at where something has slipped. I can't play any of the pianos. It doesn't know how. It doesn't know how to do a hell of a lot.

Also, given the number of exits in these rooms, verbose mode would have been nice - even if you can't give me abbreviated descriptions when I re-enter a room (room titles alone are kind of shit) or an 'exits' command.

'Liveblogging' from me playing the game, using the damn walkthrough:
Inventory limits. Oh, fun. This seems to be weight-based, too.
I don't see why picking the lock with the OTHER useful item in my inventory shouldn't work, too.
Oh, look, it's guess-the-verb time!

Wait, seriously, this guy is a beer baron?

Oh, look, my hour's up. Good riddance.

Now. let me go over the good.
I really did like some of the writing. There was definitely potential for atmosphere; this was largely killed by the parser's inability to use or recognize many common IF words.

The timing was eh. Losing 15 minutes multiple times while floundering in the dark is kind of mean - how am I to know that a certain direction is dark until I go into it? And then I lose an HOUR getting out of there? Kind of rough, dude.

That being said, I quit in the maze. I was having inventory issues, ended up with a green object - one I should be able to interact with - that I couldn't interact with - and kind of threw my hands up in the air, swearing. The game went from 'The Hall of the Fount of Suck' to 'The Hall of the Fount of Fuck You, I Quit.' And that's a terrible name for a game.

Rating: 4, largely on the basis of the prose. I almost want to start over to read the ending scene(s), but the amount of inventory juggling to do that is not worth my time. I feel like I'd have to slavishly follow the walkthrough in order to get anywhere. Besides, I'm lost in the maze now, and there's a dragon coming after me; I lost a lot of time in Dark that even my save games (Suck1 and Suck2) probably won't help me.

Sub-Rant on Books:

There's multiple books and magazines. I don't want to E-x-a-m-i-n-e each of them. x and read can sometimes, traditionally, give different responses. Let me x the ICD-9 which is on my bookshelf:

>x icd-9
You see a giant goddamn tome that is, unfortunately, one of the highlights of your job. There are several post-it notes marking codes you use a lot.

Now let me read it:
>read icd-9
You can't do that for very long, but you flip open to one of the bookmarks...
"518.89: Other lung disease."
You've pencilled in 'use for lung nodules or other crap the mds don't specify' next to this.
>read icd-9
You can't do that for very long, but you flip open to one of the bookmarks...
"011.44: Tuberculosis of the ear, diagnosed by culture."

Now, any game that implemented an ICD-9 would be a cruel mockery of my life, so let us hope that doesn't exist. But the ability to do multiple things with one object is one of the things that makes an object like a book somewhat powerful in IF.

End Sub-Rant