Re: [bookclub] Crobe!

[factmoose@hotmail.com (Richard Fairweather)]

"Lucian Paul Smith" wrote:

>Well, we have a little less than a month before the competition begins, so
>let's use some of this time to chat about the latest bookclub
>selection:  Crobe.  How did you enjoy this game?  Has IF evolved since its
>inception?  Are there things Crobe could have learned from modern IF
>practices (besides the obvious, like advances in parser technology)?  Are
>there things modern IF could learn from revisiting games like this one?

In a slightly unwieldy way, here is a review of Crobe which I intended to be
sent for inclusion in the new issue of SPAG (missed the deadline, though,
sorry). It's obviously not a traditional Bookclub gambit, but hopefully it'll
spark some comment at least.

CROBE (by Jonathan R. Partington, converted to Inform by Adam Atkinson and
Graham Nelson)

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. For an example
of the universality of that epithet, simply look to the Phoenix games of the mid
1980's - relatively barren of description and resolutely unaccomodating to the
user's mistakes - and compare them with today's more player-friendly, verbose
puzzle-fests, exemplified by the likes of Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina and
Augmented Fourth. It is perhaps this gulf in user-friendliness more than
anything else which has prevented the vast majority of today's IF enthusiasts
from seeking out the Phoenix games; indeed, I myself wouldn't have downloaded
Crobe - one of the easier Phoenix games, so the accepted wisdom goes - from the
IF archive and actually made a concerted effort at solving it had it not been
selected as a piece for the IF Bookclub (http://textfire.com/bookclub/). And
that would have been a shame, for, under its primitive room descriptions and
frustrating two-word parser, Crobe has a lot to offer.

The plot is as flimsy as you might expect: the seaport of Crobe has been ravaged
by a band of trolls, and you must find and kill their leader, Karg. Actually,
though, in much of the game itself you do no such thing - you simply wander
around a typical three-act cave crawl, finding treasures and giving them to the
Warden of Crobe, a powerful wizard who pops up occasionally. When you've given
him all the treasures, he will point you towards the endgame. Treasures are
mostly found upon solving the many puzzles that are spread throughout the game,
and it is in the puzzles that this game shines. The large majority of them (the
frog puzzle and successfully defeating the cyclops, for example) show a wit and
invention that transcend the primitive parser and inability to examine objects;
however, a few are rather obtuse (eg the method for getting past the stone
sharis seems slightly forced), and one puzzle in particular requires the player
to have some knowledge of computing/mathematics, and also the ability to realise
that this knowledge must be used in what has up until that point been an
entirely fantasy-based game. This last quibble can be explained by the fact that
most of the Phoenix games were designed by mathematicians at Cambridge
University, and were initially only played by academics there; although that may
come as scant consolation to today's IF players who get stuck at that point.

The main feature of Crobe that sets it apart from modern IF is that it is
fundamentally "cruel" (by any standard); here, you can render the game
unsolveable alarmingly easily. Examples include giving a treasure you've found
to the Warden of Crobe, then later finding out that treasure is needed to solve
a puzzle - you will be unable to retrieve the treasure from the Warden, as he
will only return normal, non-valuable objects to you. Thus the game is
unwinnable, and a saved game must be restored. My criticism of this feature of
Crobe is not that the game can be put into an unwinnable state - this is a
"feature" of much IF - but more that there is no ingame indication that an
unwinnable state has been reached (not even a message hinting you might not have
wanted to have pushed the statue of the lemming over the cliff just yet after
all). Hence reverting back to a previous saved game may not help, as *that*
saved game may be unwinnable, and the player remains blissfully unaware.

So far, so mid-1980's, you may be thinking. And you'd be right to some extent;
Crobe certainly has flaws which characterize this era of IF in the minds of
today's enthusiasts (poor parser, simple plot, lack of description), but when it
comes down to it, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the range of puzzles, I enjoyed the
subtle humour - heck, I even enjoyed one of the mazes (the marsh one, even
though it's not really a proper maze), a rare feat indeed. On the other hand,
Bedlam provoked fury, interacting with the throne was hardly intuitive and I
could have done without the constant saving and reloading every time I tried
something new. Overall, though, this is one journey into the past which proved
worthwhile.