Judges' 2001 Reviews

>X WINDOW

This large round window provides a surprisingly good view of activity in the city below. The glass faces of the office blocks reflect the setting sun like mirrors, bathing the city in a rich orange light . Moments later the sun passes and I`m left with a view of rubbish strewn alleys and the persistent sound of car horns from the thick traffic clogging the streets.

>L THROUGH WINDOW

I can't see anything through the window.

>X VINE

Embroidery, stitching, needlework? You may not know the precise word, but you know precise work when you see it. The inside vines are each only one particular color: white, red, yellow, or blue. The outside, "border" vine contains each color for 1/4 of a square side, keeping to the pattern: white, red, yellow, blue. Leaves stick out in wild ways, but each of those ways is consistent from square to square. The jutting center vine ends with a curl pointing to the top. *That embroidery really does seem to be masterfully done.

This piece is slightly reminiscent of Ian Finley's Exhibition : it is a portrait of a character who never appears but is revealed to us instead through the eyes of another character. In this case, we learn about the subject of the portrait, a woman named Helen, through the memories of the player character; the player character is also well developed, but it is Helen and her relationship with the player character that are the main focus. The narrative is written in the first person, with the player character telling us his thoughts and recollections associated with Helen's possessions while visiting her apartment. This approach works well; everything we look at has some significance in the characters' past and tells us something about the characters.

The writing has just the right tone of melancholy. Although the text has a number of minor technical errors, the first-person voice has the interesting effect of making the reader attribute misspellings and the like to the main character, rather than to the author, as though that's just part of the character; this effect was probably unintentional, but it somehow makes the typos less jarring anyway. In any case, the writing is effective at establishing the mood and conveying the narrator's feelings in an understated way.

This work doesn't break any new ground, but it's a solid example of indirect characterization.

Lagune is an exploration of a fanciful undersea setting. The work's style brings to mind some early text adventures, in that we find ourselves (as the player character) in a cartoonish world with only tenuous connections to reality and a logic of its own.

The best part of the game is one of the non-player characters, who converses with us in a pictorial language. The conversation doesn't really tell us a lot, but it's fun to figure out what the pictures (which are described verbally, not actually shown to us visually, of course) mean. There's a hint in the conversation of a rivalry with another of the characters we encounter, but sadly this isn't expanded upon, as the other character involved knows nothing of it.

Writing a review of J.D. Berry's Ribbons is a strange exercise, because it almost seems like writing the review is part of the interactive experience of playing the game.

Ribbons is superfically a "still life" depicting a set of entries at an art show, but it is not the art that is on display so much as the nature of art appreciation and criticism. Each piece of art is accompanied by a set of reviews and ratings, and each is presented with its place in the final ranking. A central theme that emerges is the way one's perception of a work is affected by the beholder's preconceptions and point of view, and the way it's affected by one's awareness of other people's opinions. Berry deftly uses the non-linear nature of the IF medium to invite the player to muse about these ideas.

This work has simple and largely conventional mechanics, but it defies every other expectation. It delights in wordplay and non sequiturs, and it's full of self-reference and odd patterns that may or may not have some significance.

One small feature that's a little out of place is the occasional insertion of what seems to be an authorial comment, in the form of a single-sentence paragraph marked with an asterisk. These comments coincide with particular player actions, and seem to shout at you to notice things, as though you're watching a movie with someone who keeps saying "get it?" every time there's a gag. Perhaps they were intended to better define the player character by noting the PC's own thoughts from time to time, but if so, there are so few they seem like an afterthought. For me, the game would have been stronger without the comments, since they only emphasize what is said anyway, and better, through the work's other, more subtle techniques. But I've belabored this far too much: it's a tiny criticism of a hugely engaging work.

This piece was unfortunately too buggy in its current version to properly appreciate. The author includes a note at the end explaining the themes of the work, but sadly this explanation didn't much match the actual experience I had going through the game; my experience was so bogged down in the game mechanics that I largely missed any deeper shades of meaning.

What the game tries to do, according to the author's note, is to show the passage of time and its effects on the people and places in the story. We see the setting in little episodes spread out over time, and in each episode there is evidence of the years going by: the seasons change, the plants in the garden grow.

With a bit of bug fixing, the game would be much improved. In addition, there are a few elements of the game's mechanics that the author might wish to reconsider. The author was probably guided on a number of design decisions by a desire for more "realism," but in several cases the result is only excessive mechanics. For example, in several cases where one or two objects of a given type would have served, the game provides us with five or ten, forcing us to answer disambiguation questions ("which rubbish do you mean") too often and to repeat some command sequences until they become tedious. Another example is the automatic movement system, which probably was conceived as a work-saver, but turns out more often than not to create confusion. In these and other areas, the game would benefit from simpler mechanisms and more transparent gameplay.