[IF Competition] Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort

-
Þis time, þe spoiler space is a short Inform 7 program.
"Thorns" by Victor Gijsbers

Include Unicode Character Names by Graham Nelson.

London Bridge is a room. "You have eyes for only one [unicode 254]ing: '[unicode 222]e Olde English Pubbe', right across [unicode 254]e street."

But Adrift may not have unicode support, so on to þe review of Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort.

I expected to hate þis game. Þe blurb seemed pretty bad, and þe opening screen was even worse. See, I þink you can only poke fun at someþing effectively if you understand þe þing you're poking fun at; so to make a humerous parody of old (or faux-old) English, you need to be able to write it very well. So I shuddered when I saw þis:

‘Twas writ using ye olde
ADRIFT 4,
for which all rights of copy & such
doth hereforeto belongeth to
Campbell Wild

Ye First Version
released upon ye
Twenty-Ninth of September in ye
Ninth Year of ye
Second Millenium
Anno Domini. 
Þere are so many mistakes! I þink "hereforeto" should be "heretofore", "doth belongeth" is evidently wrong, "Second Millenium Anno Domini" is utter nonsense, and anyway, we live in þe ninþ year of þe þird millenium. Þis game, I þought I knew, is going to be incredibly tedious.


But þen someþing unexpected happened: Yon Astounding Castle started to charm me. It told me "Typeth not of ye word help, for yon message knoweth not what it talketh about.", which was a pretty funny way of dismissing þe standard ADRIFT help text. Þe game also turned out to have a nifty "win" command.

And þen I typed "climb tree", which was obviously what I had to do, and þe game refused to understand me. So wiþ some trepidation I typed "climbeth tree", and... yes, it worked! Þat had me laughing. Okay, it's a bad joke, but at least I get to participate in þe bad joke.

It turns out þat Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort is a well-constructed and quite long dungeon romp, full of jokes þat are mostly pretty bad, but add up to someþing þat is often really funny. Þe game just keeps sending jokes at you, and at a certain point your resistance wears down and you start enjoying þem. Þe gnome who says "Gno matter, on with ye gnext gnaming riddle." becomes funny, as does "Ye be pretty sure ye building is yon hovel of some kind, for ‘tis filled with all manner of hovelry." Þen þere are þe footnotes, þe weird chain of -akeries, þe intricate machine wiþ its intricacies, and so on... noþing here is going to win a best joke contest, but again, þe overall effect is not just zany or wacky, but genuinely funny.

Þe puzzles are good (þough a few seemed too difficult, such as þe one wiþ þe magic cupboards), þe implementation is good and polished, especially for an ADRIFT game, and all in all, playing þis was a very enjoyable experience.

It is, of course, not doing anyþing interesting wiþ plot, narrative, interactivity; it is simply a treasure hunt wiþ an evil wizard added for extra special effects. It won't move you, it's not art. But if you are looking for entertainment, Yon Astounding castle! of some sort gives you a lot more þan you might expect from þe title.

Comments

  1. Jim Aikin11 October 2009 at 18:24

    My pet peeve is people who try to write old English without understanding the verb endings. "Climbeth" is third person singular -- as in "Yon fool climbeth the tree." It can't be use as an imperative, nor as first person indicative, so "climbeth tree" is ugly and wrong as a command.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Conrad12 October 2009 at 04:41

    At least ye auyor didn't mix his "ye"s wiy "thee"s, as I've seen before in professional games.

    Konrade.

    ps - the _Zelda_ game where Link's a kid.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more