IFComp08 Review: Magic
My least favorite technical flamewar on the newsgroups involves the dynamic creation of objects in IF. One of the two major IF languages permits it easily; the other forbids it entirely. Every time this comes up, I kind of wonder what good it does you.
Some variation of 'it lets you programmatically generate bunches of otherwise mostly-identical objects' seems to be the usual answer - TADS 3's Dispenser class even does it in realtime.
The usual counter is that there are ways to fake it in Inform.
I have a new counter now. I have a deck of cards in this game, and I want to do something with a random one, and my > VERB CARD command provides the standard disambiguation reply: "Which card do you mean, the..." and then lists all fifty-two possible choices.
So, you know, I'm all for language runtimes not encouraging that.
As a game? It's puzzly, but the puzzle chains were far too deep and too poorly-cued for my taste. The ultimate goal was never really that clear to me, even after I won, and I while I usually had a clear grasp of what the puzzles to solve were, I never had a clear idea of why I wanted to solve them. This made setting priorities very difficult, and as a result I mostly just played off the walkthrough.