Just ASCII + A Column Covering Interactive
Fiction and Other Nongraphical Adventure Games
Adventurer vs. Red Dragon
by Simon
de Vet
(click to enlarge)
By Erik Reckase
Part
Eight: Post-Infocom Interactive Fiction
I’ve just finished playing
a marathon session of Graham Nelson’s excellent interactive fiction game Jigsaw,
and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this
column. Until recently, my interactive fiction diet consisted solely of Infocom
offerings, which, over time, began to taste bland. Sure, you can survive on such
fare, but a little seasoning can wake you up to a world that you previously did
not know existed. It’s much like trying green chile for the first time; once you’ve
had it, you’ll want it on everything you eat. I know that interactive fiction
isn’t for everyone, but I urge you to try out some of the games that I’ll discuss
in this column. It would be a shame if this unique and creative approach to literate
entertainment would disappear simply because this genre lacked proper publicity,
so my goal is to increase awareness and make it unbelievably simple to try out
some of the fun stuff out there. With that rant concluded, here are a few games
that I’ve been playing over the last month or so, with links to everything you’ll
need to try them out.
A final note before I get started. In order to play
these games, you will need an interpreter. As there are two main languages for
developing interactive fiction, TADS and Inform, you will need an interpreter
for each type. Here are links to the most popular (read: free) interpreters
for these languages.
Windows 95/98/NT
Macintosh
Now, on to the games …
Jigsaw
by Graham Nelson, 1995 (Inform)
I had heard a little bit about
this game before downloading it–I kept hearing “puzzle-fest” in the
descriptions, so it sounded like it could be great fun. Little did I know that
this game had much more than puzzles to offer. Instead of a puzzle-fest, I found
myself in an intriguing world full of history and deception. Jigsaw begins
with your character attending a New Year’s Eve party in 1999. This isn’t quite
your sort of party, so you explore the park where the party is taking place. After
entering a mysterious monument, you discover that a stranger, “Black,”
is attempting to change history for the better by altering critical moments in
the twentieth century. Your goal, as “White,” is to foil Black’s plans
by ensuring that the historical events take place.
This game is nearly a
literary masterpiece. The descriptions of the items and locations, while historically
accurate, are also thoroughly verbose, and they leave you with the distinct feeling
that you’ve been to the places described. This is a game for the educated, or
at least with appropriate Internet-searching skills, as you need to have knowledge
about the different historical figures and situations presented in the game in
order to figure out the goal of each chapter. The puzzles in each chapter of the
game range from fairly simple to devious, all the while making sense in the context
of the game. I did have some problems with the parser, where certain commands
that I thought should have worked did not (“move pendulum” did not work,
while “swing pendulum” did) but, overall, I didn’t struggle much with
finding the appropriate language. The plot is fantastic–in fact, I felt far more
compelled to find out the ending to this story than most of the Infocom library.
This is a superior example of what interactive fiction can achieve if taken seriously.
Worlds
Apart by Suzanne Britton (TADS)
This game
is truly an interactive novel of sorts, and a long one at that. You begin Worlds
Apart not knowing who (or what) you are, where you are, or how you got there.
Your goal is to find these things out through interactions with other people,
flashbacks, and magical manipulation. I will forever remember this game, simply
because it was the first to open my eyes to what interactive fiction could be
if enough effort and skill were put into it. I actually developed emotional ties
with the characters in Worlds Apart, much like I do when reading a great
novel–I’m very interested in reading/playing future works by Ms. Britton. This
game is verbose beyond expectations, with flowing descriptions and flowery passages,
all tied securely together by the solid plot. Plus, if you get stuck at any point,
there’s a very thorough in-game hint system that will get you through without
spraining your brain.
LASH
by Paul O’Brian, 2000 (Inform)
I remember, back in 1989,
turning on HBO very early in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, and a movie I
had never seen had just started. Since I’d heard nothing about it, and it looked
interesting (just about any movie with DeNiro in it looks interesting), I decided
to watch. Two hours later, stunned by the conclusion of the movie, I sat open-mouthed
on the sofa, trying to comprehend what had happened. The movie was Angel Heart,
and to this day, it is one of the standards by which I measure storytelling.
LASH
measures up to that standard. For me, there’s nothing more entertaining that
reading, watching, or otherwise experiencing a story that I cannot predict. I’m
not going to reveal much about the plot, but at the beginning of the game, you
control a robotic MULE on a salvage mission to Georgia in the years following
a great civil war. Your goal is to retrieve some important artifacts from a house
and surrounding area. LASH’s gameplay is very solid, with very few parser
complications and thorough item and place descriptions. This is definitely not
a story for children (and possibly some sensitive adults) as there is some potentially
offensive material in the game, but mature adults will enjoy this eye-opening
story that mixes science and historical fiction into an engrossing tale.
