John's Fire Witch

Review by Lauren Meckler

What's going on down in your basement? If you're John Baker, it's a life-and- death struggle between two magical forces, a Fire Witch and an Ice Wizard. And you thought having termites was a bummer! The premise of "John's Fire Witch" places you as a visitor to the Baker residence, where it's up to you to rescue John and the Fire Witch from captivity, acquire what you need to outsmart several fiendish creatures, and ultimately overpower the Ice Wizard himself.

While the scenario may sound a bit simplistic, "John's Fire Witch" turns out to be a pleasantly engaging, unpretentious game that should appeal to a broad range of IF gameplayers. With fewer than 40 locations and a scoring total of 10, "John's Fire Witch" is well-suited to the "snack-sized adventure" label applied by its author. The game's small size and small number of puzzles make it a good introductory game for beginning to intermediate IF players; however, the puzzles are interesting enough to intrigue more experienced players for at least several hours.

The game's parser is also geared toward beginning players. For example, it suggests the proper syntax for saying a magic word when an improper method is tried, and issues a warning if you expose yourself to the dangers of falling into a deep pit. If you fail to heed such warnings, however, you have only yourself to blame; there's no resurrection in this game, although you can undo a fatal command. There are plenty of ways to die, from impaling yourself upon sharp spikes to freezing on an icy bridge.

Often, text adventure games are criticized for being autobiographical in certain regards--if the game's author appears in it or if the author's home is a prominent location, there's always that certain potential for private jokes that are tiresome for most players who just don't get it. Luckily, "John's Fire Witch" rises above such criticism. Although John Baker appears in his own game, he shows up as a human Popsicle until the final stages. In fact, there's one private joke in the game that IF devotees are certain to enjoy; the final location in the game is a Trophy Room that contains noteworthy artifacts from other text adventure games such as "The Lurking Horror" and "Curses".

The most useful bit of prior knowledge for you to have before playing the game is a recollection of the seven deadly sins. A scavenger hunt puzzle involves supplying a devil with a bag containing items that represent these sins. I spent an inordinate amount of time racking my brains for the last two sins after only coming up with five! All the game's puzzles have satisfyingly logical solutions, though some are more obvious than others.

The game's layout is also straightforward; there are no mazes, and locations with similar-sounding names are numbered (i.e., Long Tunnel (1), Long Tunnel (2)) to avoid mapping confusion. You should be prepared to save your game often though, since you may walk into a dangerous situation more than once. Hints are only available to registered players, but you should be able to learn a lot by a careful examination of your surroundings and the objects in them (not to mention a certain dream sequence). The only syntactical trouble I encountered was when solving the getting-the-ring-from-the-bottle puzzle, but I finally managed it with enough trial-and-error.

There are some red herrings among the objects you run across in this game, which I guarantee you'll waste some time on trying to utilize. Among the more useful objects you'll find is a crystal card for transporting yourself among several key locations, and a magic wand that demonstrates some pretty attractive properties.

Registering "John's Fire Witch" will set you back a $6 shareware fee. I even enjoyed the registration notice for this game: "If you enjoy playing the game, you are welcome to show your appreciation by buying me lunch. Right now, my favorite lunch is a soup & sandwich combo at a restaurant on Sawmill Road that comes to six bucks ($6.00), including my usual tip. If you don't want to buy me lunch in person, you can just send me the money."

The game hints at an upcoming (and darker and more serious) sequel. After playing this snack-sized adventure, I'm sure that the next course will be well worth waiting for.

The Legend Lives!

Review by Eileen Mullin

"The Legend Lives!", an ambitious and beautifully written game by David Baggett, places you as Gavin Kelly, a grad student in computer science at Akmi Yooniversity who has just stumbled across a deadly galaxywide computer virus and who must rally forces to defeat this evil Unnkulian threat. The straightforward plot, however, takes a backseat to the eloquent room and character descriptions, a recurring theme of the conflict of nature versus technology, and innovative devices for manipulating objects and travelling between locations.

The descriptions of many of the game locations are highly engrossing and impart a genuine atmospheric quality to that portion of the game. You'll get caught up in the shopping frenzy of the crowds at the Barfee outlet, the hackers' activity in the Data Den, and the hordes of smiling, benevolent Duhdists at Kuwl Starport. I was so disturbed by the descriptions of New Hell and the Watchmen I couldn't get out of that area fast enough. As you meet new characters, such as Jax O Pax or Timon Sketch, additional screensful of text appear that propel the narrative forward. You may frequently need to scroll up several screens to read or reread this prose, which is a minor annoyance. Literal-minded players who like to search or examine every object in a room will find themselves in for a looooonnnng game session.

"Legend" boasts an impressive, fairly diverse cast of characters. Some character descriptions are eloquently and succinctly expressed, especially those for the old man in the living room or the Hoppian salesman, while others seem deliberately enigmatic, such as the Watchmaker or the bartender. However, character development was left incomplete on the whole, perhaps due to remaining loose ends in the storyline. The stories of Reb Glaz, your absent girlfriend Ada, and the development of the relationship between Jax and Mare were unresolved and left me scratching my head by the end of the game. And even though we do get to see what happens to JC, the artificial intelligent being, your inability to interact genuinely with him makes it difficult to form an appropriate emotional attachment by the end of the game.

Your ability to access new areas of the game hinges upon your expertise in consulting a color chart, entering three-dimensional coordinates into a matter mover, and decoding any encrypted coordinates. This very imaginative spin on solving locked-door puzzles adds an appropriate beam-me-up sci-fi atmosphere; it also presents an ongoing challenge almost to the end of the game.

Over the course of "Legend" you must also achieve a certain degree of competence in using various computers, vending machines, a transmogrifyer and other conversion machines, and a little mechanized toy named Squirt. These puzzles range widely in difficulty but all allude to our dependence on technology. The red herring quotient in "The Legend Lives!" is high, but you'll enjoy playing with the various trinkets as you strive to hit on the correct solution. Mercifully, the number of cheezy A kmi products is relatively small!

A progressive online hint sy stem and a humorous, often wry collection of footnotes add to the game's polished appearance. The fairly extensive hint system is a welcome relief for overcoming mental blocks. As far as I could tell, though, you can't solve the game through hints alone; there are at least some puzzles you must solve on your own. You can encrypt the hints if you're likely to peek and want to resist the temptation. However, I saw no way to skip the beginning hints if you wanted to see, for example, only the seventh of seven hints. Without hints, some puzzles will be extremely time-consuming to solve (such as the transmogrifyer) or next to impossible (such as using Squirt).

One of my favorite parts of "Legend" was the Unnkulian III game-within-a-game. Although I've seen this device utilized in a number of other text adventures, this piece of mini-IF is really a work of art: it's tied in so eloquently to the rest of the game and serves to acknowledge the rest of the Unnkulian Unventure series in such an appropriate way.

"The Legend Lives!" is excellent proof that interactive fiction can be as much fun to read as to play. More fiction, and more fried eggs, please!

Hotel California

Review by Greg Soultanis

Inspired by the Eagles' classic song of the same name, "Hotel California" is a very short but enjoyable adventure marred only by a extremely limited parser. As the game opens you find yourself at the Hotel California; once you check in, you're free to roam the premises, talk with other people you meet, and learn the secrets of the hotel's existence. The haunting, enigmatic quality of the song is truly captured in the game's atmosphere, but is it a solid enough foundation to base an entire game on? The song is, after all, only a few verses long. Nevertheless, nearly all of the song's verses and imagery is produced verbatim in this game, as in the exchanges below:
>ask woman about hotel
The woman responds enigmatically, "We are all just prisoners here of our own device."

or

>north
The clerk blocks your path! "Sorry," he says. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

And so on. My favorite bit of dialogue is the song's chorus, which you hear repeated from time to time by strange voices in the corridor. The only way you can really interact with the other characters is to ask them about certain items, and they may respond with a clue or some useful advice. But any interrogation of the other characters quickly deteriorates into a guessing game.

The game's author is very upfront about the parser's limitations. In the game's instructions, he states that the parser works by first searching for a verb it recognizes, then recognizes the words that follow the verb only if they are typed in exactly as they are described in the game. For example, if you see a clothesline, the parser won't recognize "rope" as a synonym. The parser also can't deal with adjectives as such, so if for example you see a pair of white gloves, "take gloves" will procure them for you but "take white gloves" will produce "You can't see that here!" When adjectives become necessary to distinguish objects from each other, such as a match that's lit versus one that's unlit, the game resorts to defining "litmatch" (one word) as an object. Pretty clunky.

Since the game's parser is so limited, I was frustratedly playing "guess-the- verb" until I found in the library room a dictionary listing all the verbs the game understood. This really speeded up the game for me! At first I thought it was highly unusual for the game's author to provide this kind of help, but then I was reminded of the similarly useful (though not complete) verb lists in some of the Infocom games' packaging.

The puzzles themselves are mostly of the getting-past-obstacles variety, such as needing the right clothes to access a certain room. There are several logical ways that you can die suddenly, such as by jumping out a window (although I think you'd be more likely to only break your leg jumping from a third-story window).

Directions in the game are limited to up, down, and the four major compass points. There are no room games given, an annoying drawback for mapmaking. The game is scored out of a total of 75 points, but there's no notification of when you are awarded points. Even after playing it, I'm still not quite sure what I was awarded points for. Another drawback to the game's interface is that you are only allowed one saved game. I'd be really interested in playing a port of this game in one of the other text adventure systems that have overcome interface limitations such as clunky parsers or limited saved gamefiles.

The game contains some self-referential text adventure game parlance; I had to smile when I walked into a dark room and read "It is very dark. You hope Infocom has a copyright on grues." But it's odd that if you ask the clerk about the key to your room, he says, "It's not hard to figure out. Go to your room and type 'unlock door.'" While it's not surprising that the character told me what to type, I was taken aback that he told me to type it.

The game suggests that a sequel may be in the works, and the author is also said to be working on a much more involved text adventure called "The Summoned". Another story from Dan Harris-Warrick Enterprises will definitely be something to look forward to if a much better parser is used.

Review by C.E. Forman

"The story begins on a one man archaeological dig in a remote English forest, in the heart of Devonshire. The one man with whom we are concerned here is a Professor Edward Lynton, an unfortunate academic doomed to die a violent and mysterious death..." So begins the tale of "Demon's Tomb," a nifty little piece of IF that in many ways far surpasses the earliest efforts of Infocom, but in other ways falls unfortunately behind.

"Demon's Tomb" is divided into two parts. In the game's prologue, the player assumes the role of Professor Edward Lynton. Trapped in an ancient tomb he has uncovered, a deadly fire spreading all around him, Lynton knows there is no escape and begins to work furiously to save his research in the hopes of alerting someone, anyone, to the horror he has discovered. Whether the player succeeds in this or fails miserably, s/he then enters the primary phase of the story, in the role of Professor Lynton's 16-year-old son, Richard. Richard is concerned that his father's interest in the tomb is starting to become an obsession, and, with his faithful but essentially brainless canine companion Sam, has come talk some sense into him.

As Richard, it is the player's job to determine what has happened, and more importantly, what is still going on out there in the forests of Exmoor. The more items you have Lynton preserve in the prologue, the more you'll be able to accomplish when you play Richard, although achieving complete victory eventually requires you to save everything. This is an original and interesting method of maintaining non-linearity in the game's puzzle structure, as the player can save a few items, then restore and try others to explore different possibilities in the game. Saving all of Lynton's research is the major challenge of the game, requiring flawless execution and perfect timing, but if you don't quite get it right, you're still able to do some serious exploration with what you do manage to save.

The downside to this is that it's all too easy for a player to use the information obtained from Lynton's death to do better the next time. The game even provides you with a bit of insight into Lynton's final thoughts, letting you know what you should be concentrating on. Even worse, some of the puzzle s you solve as R ichard exist only to provide you with information. Since there are no random elements in the game, the player has the option of completely bypassing these puzzles the next time through, thus eliminating a large portion of the game altogether. Also lost is the threat of the time limit -- the player is given only a few hours of game time to complete the quest. But by skipping puzzles, hours of time are saved, and any possibility of tension is gone.

Some of the puzzles are generic, but a few, particularly the prologue, are quite good. There are a couple of minor red herrings that serve only to waste players' time, but nothing you'll spend hours trying vainly to use.

The game's parser is adequate, not as advanced as Infocom's, but it allows you to accomplish what you need to without playing guess-the-verb, as well as letting you do some fun stuff (Sam accounts for a large portion of the game's humor). A menu-driven parser is available for non-typists that allows you to select verbs, objects, and prepositions with just a few keystrokes. The menus include a wide variety of words, never giving puzzles away. No specific scoring system is used in the game, but the few places where a player might screw up big-time are easily recognized.

Other nice features include a game configuration screen with a lot (and I mean a LOT) of options, previous command recall, user-defined macros, EGA graphics that are crude but available for players who want to see them, and my personal favorite, the "pretend-to-be-working" mode. The game also offers built-in hints in the form of a "THINK ABOUT" command that lets you see what Lynton or Richard makes of a particular item or place. This system does an admirable job of steering players in the right direction without giving away the entire solution.

Despite its shortcomings, "Demon's Tomb" is a likeable game, one that I feel more players should try. It doesn't overwhelm beginners, and makes an effort to challenge more experienced players as well. So check it out, and see if you can help Richard piece together the mystery of Professor Lynton's startling discovery.

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