VOID: CORPORATION
                  Written by Jonathan Lim

                Reviewed by Bev Truter on PC

VOID was the only AGT entry in the latest (2000) interactive-
fiction competition run on the Internet. Unfortunately it was
released in an unplayable form - although the source code was
compiled, the AGT runtime-engine was missing - so to play it one
has to transform it into AGiliTy, a close relative of AGT, by
using the AGT2AGX.EXE program downloadable from the Net (as part
of the AGiliTy package). As a result I believe VOID was not played
by many of the judges, so remains largely an unknown quantity re
its placement in the ranking system used in the competition.

Jonathan Lim based VOID on a series of comics he designed, and
many of the concepts used in this text adventure appeared earlier
in "The Expendable", August 1998. He has been heavily influenced
by the dark, rain- filled world of "Blade Runner", and first
developed the VOID world and story while playing RPGs. As a result
VOID is set in a complex, believable, futuristic city on earth;
with a long introduction in a README.TXT file which details the
mythical history of earth from the year 2040 up to 2054, and sets
the scene for your role in the game and plot development.

You begin VOID in the year 2053, playing the part of Dan Clayman,
intrepid privateer and former army officer. Mr Dansker of the
massive New Sydney Corporation, which sells advanced virtual
reality material, needs you for a mission. He wants you to cripple
the entire computer network of FMI - the Federal Military
Intelligence organization.

You start the game on the ground floor of the New Sydney
Corporation Building, with only a pistol to defend yourself
against the many FMI agents who pop up randomly (and frequently)
to attack you. After finding some items necessary to gain entry
into the FMI headquarters, you will have to travel on foot and by
train to another part of the city, and find your way past a
security robot before you can enter the FMI buildings and have a
crack at disabling their computers.

The gameworld of VOID has a neat geography, covering about 32
locations, and most room descriptions are vivid and quite lengthy,
which all helps to give VOID an interesting and entirely
"believable" atmosphere.  Jonathan Lim has clearly created a very
detailed fictional world for his RPGs, comics and game, and has
the writing skills to portray this world very well.  Unfortunately
there's always a "but..."; and in this case it's that he hasn't
the necessary programming skills to make VOID work as a text
adventure. It's obviously the same agent who keeps on reappearing
time after time to confront you, and on typing and entering "shoot
agent with pistol" you get the same response each time - "it
disappears in a cloud of red smoke" - a dead giveaway that the
author hasn't been able to overcome many of the standard AGT
response messages by using his own command file in the game, and
has merely written a "standard" AGT game, the most basic type
possible.

I realize there's been a recent trend in text adventures (or
interactive fiction, as it's often now called) to make them more
like a short story with hardly any puzzles, and perhaps VOID would
have benefited from this. But VOID contains several unconvincing
puzzles, all pretty feeble and very much out of character with the
otherwise good standard of writing and plot.  The puzzles in VOID
consist of two "dark location" problems, two "locked door"
problems, and three "insert something into a machine" puzzles.
There are loads of red herrings lying around in the form of
differently-coloured tablets and phials, none of which are
necessary to complete the game. If you're the sort of person who
enjoys problem-solving in games, then you'd probably find VOID a
tad disappointing.

AGT has an excellent scoring system, which works well if an author
is not tempted to award outrageously high points for every feat
accomplished.  Jonathan has succumbed to temptation and created a
total score of 8001, which of course means that if you miss out on
performing just one or two insignificant actions, you finish
hundreds or even thousands of points short of the full total
possible. If you follow the walkthrough provided with the game you
score only 6000-and-something points. Personally, I prefer playing
games with a minimal score, eg, THEATRE with a final score of
about 20, I think; and SMALL WORLD, with a delightful total score
of 1....  Yes, one.

To be fair, Jonathan mentions somewhere in the introduction that
he made VOID shorter than he first intended, due to pressure of
studying for High School, which means he is a very young fledgling
author. Perhaps if he continues writing games his programming
skills will improve, and I hope we can look forward to some more
J.Lim games in the future.

To sum up: Nicely written game, good story, feeble puzzles.







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