This is a review of wHen mAchines aTtack, by Mark Jones, a z-code game entered in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition. Spoilers below.

Here are some other reviews of this game: Riff, Jenni, Michael Martin, ralphmerridew (includes other reviews), Carl Muckenhoupt, and Lucy (includes other reviews).

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“Your twenty minutes late!” My twenty minutes late what? My twenty minute late pizza? That deliveryman will HANG.

Sorry.

One of my favorite books on writing is called “The First Five Pages.” Because, when you write something for public digestion (for editors or readers in general), you need to hook them within the first five pages.

This game violates pretty much every rule in that book.

There are numerous grammatic errors, overuse of adverbs, telling instead of showing, awkward dialog, switching of tense (sometimes in the same sentence), and misidentification of relevant points.

At one point, there are aliens, and no one is surprised. Then there are other aliens, and everyone is surprised. Apparently souls can be extracted and ‘put into metal’. Eating metal turns you into a robot. Overall, it honestly came off as science fiction written by an eight-year-old, who has heard words and concepts mentioned elsewhere and simply wrote them in, ’cause man, brains in jars and robots and ‘energy balls’ and gory scenes involving industrial machinery are AWESOME.

I gave up and started using the walkthrough… and even skimming the text I was given, it still took me more than two hours after that. Even the walkthrough is confused about which steps follow which. I was convinced something would make sense at the end.

The final scene requires you to sit and listen to an evil alien spouting exposition for nineteen turns, each turn at least a page of reading. It is all confusing. I have no idea what happened in this game. Seriously. There is all sorts of crazy magic going on.

Technical: A lot of nouns are unimplemented, and there are disambiguation problem (many of which show up in the walkthrough!). I got programming errors and the status bar messed up several times. Most of the gameplay involves waiting for someone to explain what to do. The form-cutting puzzle actually worked for me, though, but it came off as an Inform 7 learning experience tossed into the game. The map apparently loves using directions that aren’t reciprocal, despite this being an industrial plant, where apparently confusing employees takes precedence over work efficiency.

Writing: Painful. Awkward, full of errors, and tedious. Most of the room descriptions are simply a vague description of the surroundings (’giant machinery’, ‘large cavern’) with exit directions that are often simply wrong. Extra exclamation points do not make a something more interesting, it makes you look dumb. Telling the reader what he should be feeling is guaranteed to make him feel the opposite.

Fun: If I was an editor in charge of a slush pile, and grabbed this one off the stack, I would have stapled a form rejection to it and sent it off before I finished reading the first paragraph.

Do I hope that the author writes more IF? He obvious gives a shit. He obviously wants to write. He needs to buy a copy of “The First Five Pages” and read it, cover to cover, and make damn sure he uses each and every topic covered. Otherwise – and I’m sorry man – I don’t want to play your next game.

And one more thing: capital letters do not work like that.