BEAT THE DEVIL
                  Written by Robert Camisa

                  Reviewed by Karen Tyers

This is the first of this year's if-competition games I played,
and I chose this one to start with because I liked the title. It
is written in Inform and is therefore playable under several
interpreters, but of choice I use Winfrotz because I find it easy
to use and I can change the background and text colours to suit
me.

This is a traditional text adventure, and the opening paragraph
reads as follows:

"Ohhhh. Ow. Don't you just hate hangovers? Guess you shouldn't
have celebrated your twenty-first birthday quite so thoroughly.
Still, you put on a good show in the bar. Especially when you went
on and on about how you'd sell your very soul for a chance with
the lovely Gwyneth. Bored everyone to tears, except the guy you
were drinking with - that bit seemed to fascinate him. Of course,
given how red his eyes were he had to have been drinking long
before you started. You probably should've toned it down a bit
though, because in addition to the usual pounding head and cotton
mouth, you've woken up with this nagging feeling that there's an
old proverb you should've paid more attention to. It had something
to do with being careful what you wish for ..."

Ok - so very hungover, you wake up somewhere that is NOT your
bedroom, and looking around, you discover that you appear to be in
some sort of shopping mall in Hell and nearby there is a note from
Lucifer. On reading it, you find out that the Devil is not
interested in your soul, but has a counter-proposition for you
which involves you defeating the seven deadly sins. This type of
theme has been done before, but undeterred, I decided to give it a
whirl. You can wander around almost at will, and you will soon
find six of the seven sins, and believe me, they're quite
disgusting (as you would expect). All I had to do was find ways of
making them disappear, and with the collection of objects that you
can lay your hands on, the answers are not as obvious as you would
think. For instance, can you decide what you would do with a
particularly nasty ice cream sundae, a tape of the world's worst
insults and a catsuit?

Two of the things that particularly made me laugh out loud were
the way that you finally defeat Lust, and the un-un machine (wish
I had one like it!)

This is only a small game, and easily finishable within the two
hours allotted for the judges in the competition. It came in ninth
out of 37 which is a commendable effort. Personally I would have
placed it a bit higher - in my list probably about 5th, but who am
I anyway?

There are a few spelling and grammar errors, along with the odd
missing apostrophe, but there were only two bugs that I found, and
neither of them stop you finishing the game. They only had to do
with items staying in your inventory after they should have been
destroyed. The author is aware and I'm sure he will have them
fixed shortly.

All in all a great fun game to play, and one that I would
recommend, even in its unbugged format - it certainly gave me
something to smile about.

Available for download from the ftp.gmd.de/if-archive, on SynTax
Disk 1307 and this issue's disk.












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