{"id":195,"date":"2008-10-13T20:15:18","date_gmt":"2008-10-14T02:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/?p=195"},"modified":"2008-10-13T20:15:18","modified_gmt":"2008-10-14T02:15:18","slug":"ifcomp-2008-nerd-quest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/13\/ifcomp-2008-nerd-quest\/","title":{"rendered":"IFComp 2008: Nerd Quest"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

This is a review of Nerd Quest<\/cite>. In brief: don’t play Nerd Quest<\/cite>. Spoilers, such as they are, past the link.<\/p>\n

Those wannabe writers who have seen their dogeared manuscripts squirted back from a hundred slushpiles, and who at long last take refuge in the arms of the vanity presses, like to think the mainstream publishing industry is a scam. They think you have to be an insider to get published in the big leagues; there’s no other explanation for why they<\/em> keep getting rejected when all these other<\/em> books have shelf space at Barnes and Noble. They look at their half-literate romances and fantasy trilogies, and they look at Norman Mailer, and they can’t see the difference<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Something similar is going on with the people who turn up their noses at TADS<\/a> and Inform<\/a>, and submit parsers of their own invention to the IFComp. (The “parser,” for any uninitiated who’ve wandered in, is the interface you use to play the game. You type a command, the parser parses<\/a> it–hence the name–and spits out the proper response.) There are a few of these guys every year and mostly their games work about as well as the White Knight’s plan to keep his hair from falling off<\/a>. Nerd Quest<\/cite> is not an exception.<\/p>\n

The first thing I type in any IF game is EXAMINE ME. Or, more accurately, X ME. Abbreviations are less work, y’know? (Notice how I abbreviated “you know?” I totally saved two keystrokes there, which I can save for something more important later on, like an extra “to” or something.) The first response I got from Nerd Quest<\/cite> was “Not possible.” The second response was “Not possible.” About half the things I typed were “Not possible,” and that was using the walkthrough. “Not possible” is Nerd Quest<\/cite>‘s sole error message. Why is X ME not possible? Maybe because Nerd Quest<\/cite> doesn’t seem to recognize X, or even EXAMINE–you have to LOOK AT things. Or maybe because your character doesn’t have a mirror handy. Who knows? Nerd Quest<\/cite>‘s author has seen that TADS and Inform have error messages, but doesn’t understand what they’re for<\/em>–to tell the player why the game hasn’t understood what they typed (“That’s not a verb I recognize.”), and distinguish the situation from something that failed to work in-game (“It is fixed in place,” or “You can only do that to something animate”). “Not possible” tells you nothing. It’s the tersest error message ever.<\/p>\n

The whole game is terse, where it’s not illiterate. Room descriptions are a couple of sentences long, and the sentences tend to be things like “There is trapdoor here.” The conference room contains a “beamer.” What’s a “beamer?” Type LOOK AT BEAMER and the game clarifies: “An expensive beamer.” I guess that clears that<\/em> up.<\/p>\n

You’ll need a walkthrough to finish this; between the prose and the fiddly parser it’s often impossible to work out what’s happening or how to proceed. But don’t bother; all you get is a moronic little story about a guy who blowguns a laxitive into his boss’s coffee. Maybe this is the stupider cousin of the guy who trashed the cafe in April in Paris<\/cite>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This is another Interactive Fiction Competition review .) This is a review of Nerd Quest. In brief: don’t play Nerd Quest. Spoilers, such as they are, past the link.<\/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":[40,23],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","tag-ifcomp-2008","tag-interactive-fiction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}