Search for the Ultimate Weapon
Sharilynn (2008)
Search for the Ultimate Weapon tries to demonstrate some basic core beliefs held in
Chinese martial arts, as you wander around a Shaolin Temple. The game is small, with passable
writing, but the implementation of the self-coded interpreter only gets in the way. Some
puzzles are too easy, while others rely on guess-the-verb, and the broken out menu system for
talking to other characters doesn't even support black and white choices. There's not much
depth here.
This game is a homebrewed application that fails to adhere to IF Standards. Unless you're
coming up with some amazing innovation, that adds to the game play, why built the game in
its own interpreter? A lot of time had to go into programming this game. There's two play
modes, auto-completing sentences, and changing color schemes; but for all that work, it
still doesn't understand things like 'enter'/'climb'/'tie', and they are commands that are
needed in the game. It also doesn't understand some of the IF shortcuts like 'x' for examine.
There is no compass directions listed in the room descriptions, and some of the puzzles are
so hard I had to turn to the walkthrough.
There are even more technical problems with this game. It will automatically complete
sentences for you, but this becomes a pain when you've already typed 'sw' and need to go
south. You actually have to spell the word 'south' instead of using the shortcut of 's'
because of this feature. But there are a few things it does nicely too, like the color
schemes. They change from night to day and add a little to the game, and a lot of the
objects that are listed below the room description are hyper-linked, giving you some of
the IF options available. There are even buttons you can push for a lot of the IF standard
commands, but I don't think all of this adds enough to the game to justify its own
interpreter, and features like the auto-complete just don't work that well.
Even if this game was coded in something like Inform or TADS, you still have a story that's
not very compelling. Maybe that's because the author had to work so hard on the interpreter,
where the time would have better spent on the story. Tools like Inform and TADS help us tell
our stories, and I think they should be used unless you're trying something that's really out
of their range. What they do, they do well, and if you're only going to write a text adventure,
then writing it in your own interpreter is probably going to hurt it. It's up to you. I gave
this game a 2.