Author: emshortif

iPhone IF and CYOA

Two applications in the new iPhone App store caught my attention particularly: an implementation of Advent (already discussed some on RAIF), and what looked like an educational Choose Your Own Adventure book (or similar) called “The Battle of Waterloo” (from TouchTomes, by Graham Perks and Elizabeth Jones).

They’re both seriously disappointing. Advent is, I think, basically a case study in how to do an interactive fiction interface wrong on the iPhone. There’s no scrollback. The background images (of cave interiors, your feet, whatever) are distracting. The creators haven’t leveraged the game dictionary to provide helpful autocomplete for commands — something that should be possible and would make command entry considerably less laborious on this platform. Overall, yuk.

“The Battle of Waterloo” is indeed a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and is as unpredictable and surreal as the original series. Some of the outcomes lead to swift military outcomes (so swift, in fact, that it’s hard to get a clear sense of what is going on in the battle). But there are also inexplicably horror/paranormal outcomes, which make it seem more arbitrary and less like historical re-enactment. Add to that an assortment of typos and punctuation errors, badly written dialogue, maps too tiny to read (but which you can’t zoom into), and a maze for pity’s sake — and what you get is essentially a mess, something that reflects almost none of what we’ve learned in the last several decades about interactive storytelling or multimedia education.

On the positive side: I do find the iPhone screen big enough to read comfortably. There’s room for good stuff to be done for this platform. It just hasn’t happened yet.

Sonny

Sonny is a flash RPG, mostly tactical fighting with level-up abilities. It’s a pretty nice piece of work, in that the design is smooth and there’s some nice voice acting and it starts out with a narrative hook in which it’s not clear that the protagonist knows who/what he is, though the player does.

The game totally irked me, though, because about 1/3 of the way through the putative plot, the gameplay stops pursuing it. There stop being narrative interludes. The rest of the play is hack-and-slash stuff with no framing. There isn’t really an explanation for why this happens.

From looking at the comments on Krinlabs’ forums, it looks as though the designers just ran out of time writing the original, and intend maybe to come back and address some of the loose ends in Sonny 2. But grr. I feel as though the first game cheated me of what it promised — and didn’t even offer a good explanation about why the story cuts off where it does — so why should I trust that Sonny 2 will make up for these sins?

Instead, I made up an interpretation of the game which makes it make sense on its own. I find it aesthetically pleasing. It’s not the canonical reading, and I’m sure Sonny 2 will blow my interpretation out of the water. But if you’re interested, spoilers after the tag.

Continue reading “Sonny”

Vespers, some years late

I’ve been meaning for a long time to play Jason Devlin’s “Vespers”, and today is the day I got around to it.

It wasn’t quite what I expected. From various references to it, I had thought it was going to be a game about moral choices in a Christian (or coherently anti-Christian) framework, when in fact it’s pretty theologically dubious; it’s perhaps better described as a horror story with morally-framed puzzle solutions.

But more after the cut.

Continue reading “Vespers, some years late”

Time Management, meet Tower Defense

At least six months ago, lured in by the Chocolatier and Tradewinds games, I joined Big Fish Games’ Game Club, and now I get a game credit every month. The last few months, I’ve been at a loss for how to spend it. That’s partly thanks to the relative dearth of material for the Mac, partly to the grinding uninventiveness of some segments of the casual game industry. I don’t like hidden object games or platformers or shooters very much; despise match-3 and mahjong. I enjoyed Diner Dash and the first few of its clones I played, but now there are so many that I wince at the sight of any two-word-title ending in Dash, Frenzy, Fever, Mania, or Madness.

This despite the fact that I’ve played a whole bunch of tower defense games, and enjoyed them all. Some game mechanics are inherently more resilient than others, and the resilience has to do with the strategic richness of play. It’s easy to introduce new strategic problems to tower defense games. Continue reading “Time Management, meet Tower Defense”