IFComp 2008 - Concluding

[cobaltnine]

Spoilers for: Buried in Shoes, Opening Night, Violet, Delta Project and a generalization about all the Windows games.


I did not play:
1. The Missing Piece, Search for the Ultimate Weapon, or Lair of the Cybercow. All of these are down at the end of my randomized list, but I excluded them a few days ago in hopes that I'd finish the rest. The other Windows games I played were, franky, crap, and I just don't want to install any more damn programs on this. This computer is acting up, and I'm trying not to make it angry. Lair required the Adrift 3.90 interp, which I thought I'd installed, but couldn't find, and then couldn't really be bothered.
2. A Martian Odyssey, Anananananachronist, and April in Paris. Sorry, games #33, 34, and 35. I apparently just don't have the willpower to grind through you tonight.

I did not rate Buried in Shoes. Both Buried in Shoes and Opening Night were similarly linear games (Opening Night less so) with war themes, and both were simple games with heavy emotional content and no glaring errors. I managed to rate Opening Night only because it was less linear; I have difficulty giving a score to something that's really just interactive story-telling.

As for content, I feel like not much has changed since I was a beta-tester back in college. There seem to be more 'let me tell you a story' type IF, but they're less likely to have big blocks of text.

Themes were slightly more diverse, I think, than what I recall from when I was a more active IF player. There's only one university-based game, and that one didn't strictly have to be (the protag could have been doing a big work project, or been an author, or been shot for all I care, because I hated it. I'm not alone, because Stephen Bond also hated it. Yay!.) I almost want to say there were some pretty dark themes this year: two war games, a bunch about death or horror themes. The one game everyone praised as cheery I hated, just like those damn Apatow/Reitman/Anderson movies. On the other hand, there was one cute and charming one that honestly made me happy. I'm not all yay doom and gloom. Now let me put the death metal back on.

Edit later on the 16th: Looks like I'm disappointed this year. $500 should by you all the copies of Juno and The Life Aquatic you want.

This was my first time recently getting through more than three or four Comp games (I might have gotten through the minimum for submitting ratings in '02 or '01: again, back in college.) It was an interesting experiment.

From a writing standpoint, I really don't know if I can write legitimate reviews of each game. It was good for me to work through how I wanted to score something - a few times I went into typing with one rating in my head and bumped it up or down as I sat down and thought about it again - but I suspect they're somewhat boring. Near the end I got a bit 'oh no, not again.' No wonder most of the blogs who decided to do reviews maxed out at a dozen, at most. How the hell do movie critics do it?

Oh, right. They're getting paid.

During my side-trip to Denver and the Rocky Mountains, I outlined the structure of a game I've had sitting in my head for a little bit. I hope to get it done in Inform 7 over the next few months. It's pretty large and ambitious, but part of doing it will be to get more hands-on with coding. What little experience I have had so far - throwaway game scraps, along the lines of Delta Project, only I didn't submit them - did help me note where there were some problems that were difficult for an author to fix, versus problems that were avoidable. I hope that this, as well as this year's experience with the games this year, will help me develop a slightly more precise schematic for rating.

Comments

violet

[(Anonymous)]

I'm Jeremy Freese, the author of Violet. Obviously, I'd have preferred if you liked my game, but I appreciate your taking the time to play it nonetheless, and all the effort you spent reviewing my game and others for the competition. As an author, it's been an interesting experience to see not just how differently people have ultimately liked/disliked my game, but what different interpretations they have had of its emotional content. I suspect the game I intended was a much darker shade of twee than the game you experienced, but any failures there are my fault.

I loved Juno, really liked Garden State, did not like Napoleon Dynamite and hated the Life Aquatic.

Re: violet

[imrihamun.livejournal.com]

I suspect simply that your game has an aesthetic that, while currently popular, is one I seriously dislike. (Not that many people do, as you've seen, and it causes some strife in my own househole w/r/t movie viewing.) I did perceive your 'darker' strain, but it felt a bit passive-aggressive to me and I resented it somewhat. Now, many people were grossed out by the horror games, so I'd really just see much of my reaction as a version of that. I am grossed out by twee and I've had bad experiences with Australians. Perhaps you are just wise enough to tap into the collective unconscious and write what you thought the people would like. Some of us are curmudgeons.

Although I do like zombies.

Unfortunately, all I could think about while playing was 'how many synonyms for 'darling' did he program in? and why?' From a more concrete standpoint, my best suggestion would be, in a general vein, that some of the puzzles would have been improved by allowing alternative solutions. I never encountered alt. solutions mentioned in other reviews, and was not going to play-through again. All in all, while the puzzles are solid, they appear solid if arranged in one way, and only one way. Personally, I found that more rewarding puzzles could be solved multiple ways (possibly with variant point-awards) and I did see similar statements echoed throughout other reviews. Not that this makes or breaks anything, as certainly some good games do not have this.

Re: violet

[(Anonymous)]

(Jeremy Freese again.) Yeah, I painted myself into a corner with the alternative solutions issue. Violet is my first game, and the vast majority of the programming/IF-learning-curve was after the basic structure of the puzzles was already set. I had the idea to have the solutions of the puzzles all be thematically related. I decided even to have the game-story lean on this tie among solutions. Then, mostly from beta-tests, I came to appreciate other alternative solutions that would make sense. So I had to figure out ways to rationalize disallowing some solutions that would have made otherwise sense to allow. I still like the idea of thematically-connected solutions, but it involved a bigger tradeoff with gameplay than what I appreciated.