{"id":357,"date":"2009-10-05T19:27:34","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T01:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/?p=357"},"modified":"2009-10-05T19:27:34","modified_gmt":"2009-10-06T01:27:34","slug":"ifcomp-2009-the-grand-quest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/05\/ifcomp-2009-the-grand-quest\/","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2009: The Grand Quest"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is another Interactive Fiction Competition<\/a> review.<\/p>\n

\n

The Grand Quest<\/cite> started so<\/em> well. It had a Maltese Falcon<\/cite> style setup about a legendary artifact which for its owners “is the beginning of their true lives, marking the end of the mundane, and the start of the fantastical.” It had a PC complete with interesting hints of backstory—he’s held down a job, raised a family, and now has gone, carrying reminders of his loved ones, in search of his life’s obsession. It looked pretty good!<\/p>\n

Then I started playing. Damn. <\/p>\n

The first sentence in the first room is “Behind you is the entrance that you worked so hard to find.” This was the first thing I tried:<\/p>\n

\n

>X ENTRANCE
You can’t see any such thing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the next room are several stools:<\/p>\n

\n

>sit on stool
That’s not something you can sit down on.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the room after that are two tables:<\/p>\n

\n

>x tables
You can’t see any such thing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Eventually the game just broke down entirely. I don’t think this was tested. But it might not have mattered if it had. The Grand Quest<\/cite> is nothing more than a series of arbitrary puzzles. Not the good kind of puzzles, the ones that arise naturally from a game’s story or environment. Puzzle<\/em> puzzles, posed free of any context by a disembodied voice. If I hadn’t been forced to quit by that bug, I might still have been too disappointed to go on.<\/p>\n

I’d like to play the game suggested by that intriguing prologue. Too bad this isn’t it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review. The Grand Quest started so well. It had a Maltese Falcon style setup about a legendary artifact which for its owners “is the beginning of their true lives, marking the end of the mundane, and the start of the fantastical.” It had a PC complete with interesting hints … Continue reading IFComp 2009: The Grand Quest<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}