The Phoenix games are often accused of having an unconscionable amount of
maze, and not without justification. To determine just how much justification,
this document lists various statistics for each of these games, plus, for
comparison, the three Doom games. Some other statistics have been added to
satisfy curiosity into the internals of the games, and how they differ: some
games have many rooms and few objects, others are the other way around; and
some games are long on messages but short on vocabulary, others the reverse.
The statistics are:
- Year: the year the game was published
- Room: the total number of rooms, as read from the source code. Note that
some games have rooms such as "the contents of your stomach"; these
are not counted here.
- Maze: the number of these rooms which are part of a maze. As a maze I have
counted any area which is confusing, but not areas which are merely
large and complex, but regular; for example, in Acheton, the inside of
the pillar counts, the big room around it does not. At times this was
a judgement call; I counted Birnham Wood in Avon, but this is up for
discussion.
- %: the percentage of Maze rooms in the total number.
- Ob: the number of portable objects.
- St: the number of static, non-portable objects. This does not include the
"player" object, nor any other pseudo-objects, such as markers, which
are never seen or referable to by the player. Where there are more
than one or two of those, I've added a note.
- Word: the number of words in the vocabulary, including synonyms and words
which have no meaning, but are still usable.
- Mess: the number of messages, including ones which are only ever used as
part of another message, and ones which only call other messages.
- Code: the size of the source code, in kilobytes.
1. Acheton also has pseudo-objects for ten opponents in the end game, as well
as ten weapons, one pseudo-object for "no weapon", and the rack that holds
them. In the Topologika version, the weapons are normal, takeable objects.
2. Brand X also has ten pseudo-objects for its riddles.
3. Fyleet has 26 pseudo-objects for the letters of the alphabet.
4. Nidus has 12 pseudo-objects for handling its spells.
5. Sangraal has 6 pseudo-objects for handling mazes.
a. Of Hezarin, only the Topologika version is available. The numbers here are
estimates based on a map. The number of static objects counted in the game,
in particular, may well be much larger than that noted on the map. Of the
number of dictionary words and messages, and the size of the source code,
a realistic estimate cannot be given.
b. The Doom games were never available in a TSAL version. They were first
written for Topologika and later ported to Inform. The numbers given here
were determined by mucking about with the ZCode files. They should be
reasonably comparable with those for the other games, but note that what is
coded as a static object in Inform is often merely a status change in TSAL.
No source code is available for these games, but the size of an Inform file
could not be reasonably compared to that of a TSAL file, in any case.
Not all mazes are equal. For example, Avon seems to have a lot of mazes, but
that is mainly because it plays out over three days; the central area re-uses
the normal rooms for all three days, but the mazes are all unique to one. And
Hamil also has a lot of maze, but most of that is one large Hamiltonian(!)
path finding exercise. Acheton and Crobe, by contrast, really do have as much
maze space as they appear to have. And keep in mind that it's easier for a
single maze to appear large in a small game; Nidus, for example, has only one,
but the rest of the game is compact.
One can draw two conclusions from these statistics. One: yes, for some Phoenix
games, though not for all, the accusation of being maze-heavy is justified.
And two: having fewer mazes is not necessarily a mark of better quality;
Hezarin only has one small maze, but is, in my opinion, not nearly as good a
game as Crobe, which has several larger ones. Your mileage may vary, but the
verdict that fewer mazes = better game seems to be disputable at any rate.
There are also a few games which were only ever published by Topologika for
the BBC B, such as Castle of Riddles; some which were published in a greatly
shortened form for that machine, such as Hamil; and one, Quondam, which was
once available on Phoenix but now only survives in its BBC version. These
games are not included in this document; the restrictions of the BBC B make
comparisons to the original versions not really useful.
Four games which are only available in MS-DOS format are included, though,
because a comparison between the MS-DOS and Phoenix versions of games where
both are available shows, those do have very similar statistics.
Xerb is still missing in its entirety. If anyone has a version of it, even if
only the source code, lying about, do send it in to the IF Archive.
