Façade for Mac

By: Derek Yu

On: August 21st, 2006

FaÃ§ade, the AI-driven interactive fiction game that puts you in the middle of a uncomfortable dinner party, is now available for Mac. Provided you have a 2.0GHz G4 or G5 (or better), you MacHeads can try out the game that the New York Times apparently called “the future of video games.” Which I think was a bit premature, considering that this is the future of video games right here.

But really though, the game’s AI and text parser are pretty impressive, so you should check it out.

(Source: Insert Credit)

Posted in Adventure, Interactive Fiction, Macintosh, Windows

Shih Tzu

It’s a neat experiment, but I found myself really wishing my options were much more limited. The idea is that you can type anything you want naturally, but even when I tried to behave in character I still found that a lot of the time it still wasn’t getting the idea of what I wanted to express.

Since there were underlying limitations getting in the way anyway, I’d much rather have those elucidated up front through some kind of interface where I could feel confident that my input was being received correctly. If not an old-fashioned LucasArts conversation tree (which I know is precisely what they were trying to kill), at least something else, something closer to Ultima VI keyword-grunts even, would have given the player a much greater feeling of control, and (paradoxically even) interactivity. I found the false illusion of freedom more damaging than any actual lack thereof.
Some guy noname

Interesting point, Shih Tzu. I remember playing Half Life for the first time and having a similar revelation.

That first level where you are walking around in the lab, the other characters wandering around and talking were all an attempt to immerse you in the game world. It was pretty impressive. Yet, all I could focus on was how eerie they looked because the graphics were not advanced enough to really pull off the illusion. They looked like freakish mannikins pretending to be humans.

On the other hand, simple old 2d games don’t suffer from this problem because you accept that the game is a translation, or artistic interpretation, of reality. It’s like reading a comic book.

When a game tries to present every little nuance and detail of reality, whether in visuals or interactive dialogue, its shortfalls become ever more glaring. I guess this is because your expectations are raised beyond what the game can deliver.
Jimmy

Totally agree with Shih Tzu here — until computers can actually understand what I’m saying, don’t ask me to talk to them.
Sergio

Why can’t I download a non-torrent 1.1 for PC? It’s INSANE!
failrate

Because the damn thing is huge, and if they offered a direct download of the PC version, they’d probably exceed their upload bandwidth for the month.