Adam Cadre

This year there was one game whose writing was on an entirely different level from the rest, masterful and self-assured.  It was also possibly the most poorly-*coded* game in the entire comp.  I'm speaking, as you've probably guessed, of FINE-TUNED, which is both astonishingly hilarious and astonishingly buggy.  Not only has the author created an absolutely wonderful world, full of "anti-autoists," roving herds of goats, and fist-shaking train engineers, but it dares -- and manages to pull off -- a number of pieces of *participatory* comedy, which is much harder to pull off than just writing a bunch of funny lines that always show up.  For example, the trip down the driveway could easily have been dull, had the PC put on his entire costume and only then started up the car, but by adding a sidekick who's eager to get started, the author prompts the player to try to get moving after donning each article, making for a hilarious sequence... and then you have the gag with the parking brake, which is an instant classic.  I'm talking about the way that, if you don't remember to release the parking brake (and who does?), the mechanic will shout at you to do so; and then if you don't remember to set it, the car will start to roll away until the mechanic sets it for you; and then comes a major event, and the game is truly underway, as you head out on your own for the first time -- and as you attempt to sally forth, the car lurches forward and the mechanic sticks his head out of the ditch he's in and screams, "The parking brake! RELEASE THE PARKING BRAKE!"  I laughed so hard I thought I'd die. But what really impressed me was that *I* had to make the joke happen, or rather, the author had to set things up such that I *would* genuinely forget about the parking brake three times, without me noticing this piece of misdirection, and it worked beautifully.  I so very much wanted to give this game a ten... but after the infinitely decreasing score bug, and the [** programming error **] bugs, and the stack overflow bug, and the hundred other problems, I just couldn't do so in good conscience.  It looks like the author ran out of time; had the game been *truncated*, chopped down to chapter one alone and polished so that even that much was bug-free, this would have been a ten without a doubt.  As it is, it was the second-place game on my ballot.


Paul O'Brian

FINE-TUNED by Dionysius Porcupine

Dammit, people, stop this! I played Fine-Tuned for an hour, and loved it. Aside from a few spelling mistakes and stray bugs, it was a delightful game with terrific writing, fun characters, and a great plot. But the further we get into that plot, the more broken the game becomes, until it finally implodes with a fiery crash that can even bring down the whole interpreter. Naturally, this happens at a climactic point in the story.

This experience SUCKS. It makes me wish I could give negative ratings. It's much worse playing a game that would be great except for how horribly *broken* it is than it is playing a game that's weak but bug-free. It's IF interruptus.

PEOPLE: TEST YOUR GAMES. IF YOUR GAME IS BROKEN, DO NOT ENTER IT IN THE COMPETITION. FIX IT BEFORE YOU ASK PEOPLE TO PLAY IT. THAT IS ALL.

Rating: 1.0


Andrew Plotkin

Fine-Tuned "Dionysius Porcupine" (Dennis Jerz) This game has a terrific sense of atmosphere and prose, a medium-good sense of plot, a weak sense of pacing, and a lousy sense of actually being finished. 

I really enjoyed the absurdly floofy first chapter. The second chapter didn't seem to have much to do with the first, and I didn't gain much confidence that it would hang together at all. The storyline does come together more after that, but it goes in a number of different absurd directions, and I wasn't quite convinced. 

Unfortunately the last bits were full of unpatched seams -- the game may work right if you stay on the intended rails, but as soon as you try to do anything else, you get inappropriate daemon messages, skipped segments of narration, and crashes. 

Even the walkthrough is buggy, for heavens' sake. I managed to get nearly to the end, but the last move is either unobvious or broken, so I didn't see the ending. 

Nonetheless, the game has good writing and a solid sense of what it's supposed to be, which is worth a lot. 

The conversational responses don't track game events very well. You can ask a character about something before he tells you about it, and the resulting text doesn't make sense. (Try "ask aloysius about stranger" too soon, for example.) 

(Debug mode left on in competition release.) 


Maureen Mason

"Fine Tuned" comp score=5.50 mine=9.00

I didn't play the 1st and 2nd winners in the comp - All Roads was further down my list, and I couldn't get Moments to run right - but of the twenty I did play Fine Tuned was my clear favorite.  I didn't reach the gamestopping bugs that made other judges pull its score down, though I can understand their frustration.  I would love to see this game fixed, and more games like it written.

Where to begin about the things I liked?  There's the Hitchhiker's Guide feel - original setting, brash intelligent humor, headlong plot, clueless hero - for one.  There's the fact that lots of things I type in are provided for - something I love in a game, including responses that poke fun at me if I make silly or mechanical moves.  

From the beginning there was also a kind of seamless quality to the storytelling, in major and minor ways.  The story moved me along instead of just laying out a static landscape to be explored - but I felt I was taking part in it, not just viewing cutscenes; I appreciated how, for example, the driving instructions at the beginnning were integrated into the game instead of making me call up some help or about file.  The puzzles were generally a good match for me, and I didn't get bogged down long enough to lose the momentum of the story (e.g., after I spent a few turns trying unsuccessfully to revive a character injured in a ditch, he regained consciousness anyway).  My enjoyment also notched up considerably when I realized I was going to jump characters - and the next phase of the game, though more traditional in its explore-and-solve-puzzles structure, also had that light touch and humor and offbeat plot that made me rate this game highly.


Dan Shiovitz

Fine Tuned (Dionysius Porcupine): Man, such a disappointment. This game is funny (it even has actual jokes that made me laugh), it's well-written, it's got a great setting; too bad it's buggy and unimplemented enough to be only barely playable and not, as far as I can tell, winnable. You're a happy-go-lucky adventurer in the dawning age of the automobile; there are nefarious villains to thwart and beautiful damsels to rescue and stuff. You have a sidekick, which is pretty much all I should have to say. And this is all good, but the game also crashes randomly, gets into guess-the-verb holes, and I know only one person who's gotten past the cellar scene and she can't explain how she did it. So don't play this version, but if the author cleans it up and releases a real version post-comp, definitely play that.  


Petter Holmlund 

With hindsight, i wish I had rated the following games higher, as they ended up at a lower placement than deserved:

[18] Fine Tuned, by Dennis Jerz [21] The Gostak, by Carl Muckenhoupt [38] an apple from nowhere, by Brendan Barnwell

I believe that those three will remain in my memory long after the top ten are forgotten. Not because they were bug-free, or profound, or all that original or similar in any way other than making me go "Wow, I wish I had written that." Only those three. My compliments.


Demian Katz 

Fine Tuned by Dionysius Porcupine

I'm troubled by this game. On the one hand, it's funny, original, different and unexpected. On the other, it's full of typos, inconsistencies and interpreter-crashing bugs which get worse as the story progresses. If its flaws were properly dealt with, it would be wonderful. Not necessarily groundbreaking or brilliant, but highly entertaining nonetheless. As it is, it has some great moments, but it's frustrating and difficult for all the wrong reasons. I couldn't finish it due to its bugginess, even using the provided walkthrough. It's too bad you can't just enjoy the story as the author presumably intended -- I certainly would have rated this higher had it been more playable. Hopefully a bug-fixed version of the game will show up after the competition is over.


Cedric Knight

"Fine Tuned" (5LI Z) is a jocular Edwardian adventure that immediately caused Terry-Thomas (English actor) to spring to mind, and which contained an unusual approach to scoring.  It is justifiable to warn people that the score does not give an accurate impression of your progress through the game.  It led me to believe the game was nearly completed when I was still near the start of a long and meandering plot. It took nearly 20 minutes just to read all the text when playing back a recording, a sure sign the game was too long, and it is a borderline "tram", only avoiding that classification because of lack of realism. Quantity is no substitute for quality, and the author would have done better to present a single chapter from it with more polishing and a greater degree of player choice.



Jonathon Blask 
Fine Tuned
"This game is high-larious. After a dozen or so moves into this game, I had high expectations, hoping that this would be the well-coded comedy that I've felt hasnt been well represented in the IF comp to date. Then I ran into a bit of poor game design and pacing problems, and then, later on, I encountered the bugs that ruined the experience for many. As it was, I thought the premise and characterization was so refreshing that this game was up there with my other highest ranked games."


Craxton

Fine Tuned (finetune.z8)

Rating: 4 The one phrase that comes to mind when thinking of this game is "U $t00p!D N00b!!!11!". A very promising start, which establishes a fast pace, sets the stage quickly, and sketches out characters cliche yet familiar. The game then continues along, it's straightforward linearity neatly disguised by the delightfully campy writing. But then the bugs take over, and oh dear... The game scores your actions despite the fact that you can easily go over the maximum score, and fullscore elicits a bafflingly buggy response. Also, "score" is disabled in the second chapter, incongruous. More damning is the way I was somehow able to get the game into an unwinnable state, and the walkthrough that has UNDO commands in it is just funny. A lot of promise, but too many bugs to be enjoyable. Still, the writing is enjoyable, and the predictability of the plot keeps it's otherwise harsh puzzles down. Receives a 4 out of 10 from Lord Craxton. Keep trying.



Sean T. Barrett

Fine Tuned Jaunty fun for a while. Some really nice touches (get hat and give it to MacDougal). I'm not sure I like the combination of a small number of rooms and every-few-turn teleporting for the driving sequence.

Insanely buggy. "BLOW HORN" works, "HONK" errors. Random "[** Object number 62 has no property mel_enters to read ]" due to a daemon I suspect. And our favorite, fatal stack overflow, from "ASK PROF ABOUT SALOMONDER".

I crashed without a save game, so I quit.

score: 6, time about 0:45, status: chapter three crash


Stephen Bond

FINE TUNED, by Dionysius Porcupine

Lame pseudonym. But this game has potential. I think IF has been crying out for a 1920s scarf-and-goggles daredevil hero, and FINE TUNED's Troy Sterling could be just the man. That he's vain and incompetent and not particularly heroic makes things even better. There are some wonderful anticlimaxes here, with the dashing Troy 'restoring the forces of light' by paying the electricity bill, and doing heroic things like removing an unsightly steel bucket from the road. I also liked the banter between Troy and his clearly long-suffering assistant. In fact I enjoyed the whole first chapter.

But then the bugs started to kick in - lots of weird things started happening in the train station and the game rapidly became unplayable. It seems that other people ran into the same problems, and the game is not finishable. Not for the first time, someone has released a game into the competition that's too buggy to finish. Don't do this, please. You're not going to do yourself justice, and it's more likely that you'll just end up annoying people. Me, for example.

So despite the promise of the opening, I can't rate this one very highly.

Rating: 3


Valentine

Fine Tuned Author: Dionysius Porcupine Rating: 4
* The game wasn't completely without potential, and it kind of featured a story, but... it was just too bug-ridden. I resorted to the walkthrough rather soon, but in some cases, even the walkthrough wasn't helpful - mainly because of bugs. Yes, there was quite a collection of them - occasional typos, inappropriate responses, spots where actions unexpected by the game author got you stuck, and even fatal errors, which caused the program to crush altogether. Even worse, the walkthrough itself seemed not to be complete; therefore, I couldn't make it to the optimal ending, much less find out what all the trouble was for. The puzzles... Some of them were just stupid, while others probably would be OK - if only they were implemented better. The setting was rather minimalistic, which probably was a good thing - if it wasn't, the bugs might make the game totally unplayable. The narration tone was that of false cheerfulness - another aspect that didn't particularly excite me. Nevertheless, I liked a few characters in the game - in particular, the main villain (Salomonder), and the farmer MacDougal with his stupid jokes. Still, they weren't sufficient to make me like this game.


David THornley

The writing is generally good, and the character switching interesting, but the world is again sparse.  The points based on your actions in being friendly to people help establish a character without being too heavy-handed, and it looks like there is a mystery and romance going on.

Then, when things were getting interesting, the game started spitting out errors and then crashed.   I looked at the time and found I'd played for about the magical two hours, and realized that I wasn't going to get back to the crash site (the program, not the ones in the game) in time to rate anything.  One reason for the time taken was the frequent requirement to hit the space bar when driving.  Pausing the text should be reserved for special occasions when surprising things are happening, not when driving down the road and seeing a boy on a pony.

BTW, the walkthrough seems to be for a slightly different version of the game, or perhaps one in which random events happen differently.  If the game is not deterministic, providing a simple list of commands is not a real good thing for a walkthrough.  I was thereby discouraged from trying the walkthrough back to the crash site.

Not to mention, what is a .z8 game doing in a competition with a two-hour judging limit?  It isn't to provide additional richness to the world that wouldn't fit into a .z5, because it doesn't.  It suggests that the game will keep on going and going for some time, long beyond a reasonable two hours involving exploration and experimentation.  (Actually, looking at the walkthrough, I wasn't that far from the end.  So, what did over a quarter meg of game go to?  Stuff that I never got the chance to explore?)

Anyway, it's rating time, I don't know what the revelations are, I can only surmise about the romance, and this is because the game crashed on MaxZip.

You know, despite the rating, this is the game I would most like to have a cleaned-up post-comp version.  It seemed like it had a lot of promise, which was betrayed by the bugs and by the fact that it was just too big for a comp setting.  Rating:  2



Timofei Shatrov

 6: Fine Tuned (finetune.z8) (Boring too) Long and boring.



Billy Harris

Fine Tuned:  (3)

Hello, Mr. Sterling. Your first command is ENTER CAR.

I am the back-seat driver from hell. At each point I will tell you what your next command should be. If you don't follow my orders, I will berate you. If you continue to defy me, I will use my god-like powers to subtract points from you, even if that means your score will be negative. I can tell already that you are stubborn, and forgettfull, so let me repeat that the first thing you should do is ENTER CAR. 

[Actually, parts 2 and 3 got much better, but after lots of bugs and a fatal error, I stopped playing]

Bug report:

>slow You can't get much slower than standing still.

You zoom past the woman, who hides her face from the dust, gasping for breath.

The road flows by at an exhilarating rate.

[Your score has just gone down by one point.]

{So am I standing still or am I zooming by??}

=-= >read book (in the old tin bucket)

You can hardly do that from inside the Dynamo.

The road flows by at an exhilarating rate.

You're coming up fast on the old tin bucket.

{except that there is no book inside the bucket}


Scott Starkey

 Fine-Tuned by "Dionysius Porcupine"

Fine Tuned features a Victorian Era daredevil and his automobile.  The tone seemed light, and caused me to laugh a couple of times.

I did not find any bugs, however, I did take a couple of issues.  Getting in and driving your car, though a bit humorous, is also tedious and pedantic. I also played a little game of guess-the-verb trying to assist a man that was hurt.

I was just wondering:  Is this game so big as to justify being a .z8?!


Akilesh Ayyar

Fine Tuned (7): I really enjoyed the dialogue, style, and difficulty level (pretty easy -- perfect for me) of the game. It also anticipated commands well. However, was quite buggy and gave me all kinds of software errors, crashes, and incorrect descriptions (e.g. Sweet would sing in Prof's house in Chapter 2, and Prof would compliment her, even after he had gone upstairs). I enjoyed most aspects of the game... till it became unwinnable due to bugginess in Chapter 5.