Anyways, I thought I might as well post my thoughts about the various
games for people to see what's good both from playing the game and from a
programming viewpoint. (thus the post to both r.g.i-f and r.a.i-f) There
shouldn't be any spoilers, but if I've blurted something out, it's only a
mild one and not important to the game.
My rating system is a bit different from others as I'm rating them on
playability and programming difficulty. Many games are playable but are
lacking something from a programming point of view and vice versa. It's
ten point system with four categories -- Quests (3) -- how many quests?
was it fairly easy to decipher what was supposed to be done? how easy
were they to solve? how much thought went into them? Characters (3) --
Were the characters believable? Were they infused with life and/or
personality? Places (3) -- How were the descriptions? What about
decorations? Were there things that could be taken but not needed? How
did the game handle looking at decorations? Parallelness (4) -- Was the
plot quite linear? Was the player able to do things in a number of
different orders?
Here's the first review, on Wishbringer----
WishBringer -- Stone of Dreams
------------------------------
This adventure, by Professor Moriarty, who also did Trinity and Beyond
Zork, was part of the Zork family and was rated Introductory by Infocom
(or whoever did their ratings).
It starts out with you being a mail clerk and having to deliver a package
to an old lady at the Majick Shoppe. It ends up with you on a quest to
save the town while looking for Chaos, the old lady's black cat.
The interesting part of this adventure is "Wishbringer" the stone of
dreams. With it and some weird props, you can wish for seven different
things: freedom, flight, darkness, etc. However, wishing is unnecessary,
it is possible to solve the adventure without using a single wish.
This adventure could be used to introduce others to the Interactive
Fiction field. There is one simple quest and you're told what it is right
up front. Everything in the story relates to solving this quest.
Unfortunately, in setting the quest up right from the start, the player
can miss getting the props he needs and there is no way out, except for
restarting. The game relies on a player's necessity to walk everywhere
and take everything. To be honest, the game really stumped me the first
five or six times I played it because I went straight to the Majick Shoppe
to deliver the package. Then when the lady did her thing, I was out a
bunch of equipment with no hope of retrieving them.