Home of the Underdogs
About News FAQs Contact HOTU GoogleGroup Music Manuals
Category Applications Action Adventure Education Interactive Fiction Puzzle Role Playing Games Simulation Special Sport Strategy War




Support the EFF
Welcome How you can help
Browse Games
Welcome Random Pick
Welcome By Company
  Welcome By Theme  
Welcome By Alphabet
Welcome By Year
Welcome Title Search
Welcome Company Search
Welcome Designer Search
Recommended
Welcome Freeware Titles
Welcome Collections
Welcome Discord
Welcome Twitter
Welcome Facebook
Welcome File Format Guide
Welcome Help: Non PC Games
Welcome Help: Win Games
Welcome Help: DOS Games
Welcome Recommended Links
Site History Site History
Legacy Legacy
Link to Us Link to Us
Credits Thanks & Credits
Abandonware Ring

Abandoned Places

dungeoncrawlers.org

Creative Commons License


Game #2932
Hall of Belated Fame Inductee  Augmented Fourth    View all Top Dogs in this genre
Interactive Fiction   Conventional

Rating: 7.57 (14 votes)

Augmented Fourth box cover

Augmented Fourth screenshot
Emily Short’s review says it all about this funny, well-coded game cast in the mold of Infocom’s Enchanter series:

"Augmented Fourth is a fairly easy puzzle romp whose appeal lies in wackily charming worldbuilding and sly jokes/reworkings of classic IF and fantasy tropes. It's well-crafted and polished (going to show, perhaps, that there's no reason an author's first-ever release can't be competently assembled) and I encountered no bugs. It did, however, have some irritating patches, mostly related to the design of the puzzles.

Augmented Fourth uses an adapted-for-its-genre version of the Enchanter spellcasting concept: as a trumpeter you can play pieces whose magical power works transformations on your environment. And like the Enchanter spells, these pieces must be painstakingly acquired and learned (though, fortunately, Uri has dispensed with the irritating requirement that one learn them over and over again. Once you've learned a piece you know it; musicians are apparently less absentminded than magicians, as a rule.) This is a fun system in its basic concept, and one reason it has been reused so many times over the years, I imagine, is that it permits the author to put considerable freedom into the hands of the player.

There are, of course, a couple of possible downsides. One is the combinatorial problem: you can trust that your players will try the spell in just about every conceivable situation, not only in the one or two places where it will solve a puzzle but in all the others, including several where it ought to cause major trouble. Uri does a good job of providing interesting failure messages where the spells are not going to work; he is also aided by the fact that the music-spells are not directable, so instead of having to implement an interaction (or failure) for every game object, he only has to deal with every location. This, I can only imagine, made things a lot simpler.

The other downside is that the spells themselves do fairly odd and abstract things. This is delightful when it works; when it doesn't, one is often left wondering what's missing and whether one is even trying the right thing. In one sequence of the game in particular I was most of the way to the correct solution, but kept failing because I hadn't set things up quite properly. I had the idea; I just didn't have the execution exactly as Uri envisioned it, and there were no "you're almost right" messages to help me along, so I was left to wonder whether I had the right spell at all. Making this even more frustrating is that the spells fail randomly, especially during the early section of the game; you can easily 'misplay' a piece, not because it's not the right piece for the moment but because the random number generator is not on your side. This, boys and girls, is frustrating. I suppose the idea is to convey the feeling of accomplishment as the game goes on and you become a more proficient musician, able to play correctly the first time, but it also makes the early puzzles a pain.

There are moments of surrealism in the game, and plays on the names of things reminiscent of the un-un-machine, the T-remover, and other such mechanisms of text-only adventures. There is much talk these days of "simulationist" IF, of achieving "immersion" by getting the player to identify as strongly as possible with the PC; Augmented Fourth pursues a different direction, never trying to pull the player in but keeping much of the amusement value of the game precisely at that interface between player and player character. I think I derived as much amusement from the score notification system as I did from some of the puzzles. At the same time, there is a consistent story providing context for all this -- which the player also receives in an unimmersive way, by receiving flashes of what is happening "meanwhile" in another part of the kingdom. The result is stylish and entertaining, even if not emotionally compelling particularly; I never felt suspense or was particularly concerned about the jeopardy of my PC, for instance. But that was, in this case, fine.

Where Augmented Fourth shines most is in the goofy style, which, with its numerous animals and brightly colored objects, frequently reminded me of a children's book. Combined with the relative easiness and the elegant implementation (which deals nicely with book objects and other tricky items), this makes it a pleasant way to spend a few hours."

Reviewed by: Underdogs
Designer: Brian Uri
Developer: Freeware
Publisher: Freeware
Year: 2001
Software Copyright: Brian Uri
Theme: Humorous, Fantasy
Multiplayer:  
None that we know of
System Requirements: Inform
Where to get it:   IF Archive
Related Links:  
Links:    
If you like this game, try: Wishbringer [Solid Gold], Spellcasting 101, Mother Loose

© 1998 - 2024 Home of the Underdogs
Portions are copyrighted by their respective owners. All rights reserved. Please read our privacy policy.