IntroComp2011: Stalling for Time
If I were to sit my lazy ass in the sand and create a list of words which make me cringe when I spot them in IF titles, stalling would be one of them. I’m not going to explain why, since I believe explaining things rips more crap holes in the fabric of space-time than Albert would have liked. I also won’t explain why, because I have a four line limit to these intros.
> a rock will spoil it all
Stalling For Time by Dominic Delabruere
There is an award here from the start: best intro to an intro. The fact that I’m about to praise this so much is probably reason enough not to trust me when I say a game rocks ass, or when I say it sucks ass. But this is me, and this is my space, I’ve payed for it, I own the password, and so I’ll exaggerate any praise I want.
Here it goes: Stalling For Time’s starting is perfect. You’re this depressing, but cool guy, standing near a creek, holding a huge rock. You have no purpose for this rock and you can’t go anywhere with it, and so you drop it in the creek and climb out of there, getting in your car and driving south to meet your uncle Ted. The absolute absence of reason to any of this creek-rock-climb scene is delicious.
There is also a very cool prose happening here, a prose with attitude. All descriptions are sparse, but I don’t see such as a minus point at all. The words flow, the scenes flow, it has a highly cinematic pace. Truth is, I don’t need a fully implemented pisser, with fully implemented descriptions of faucets, to imagine a fully gross motel pisser; I don’t need to know the numbers of the other rooms to know that they have them, and to form a lifelike picture of a motel hallway in my imaginatorium. Delabruere (heck of a name to say out loud!) seems to know this (or he’s just too lazy, but either way…), and so he writes just enough to form a clear picture of the setting. Here, pace is what matters, and I welcome it.
Stalling For Time is a “road movie”, and as an intro is a very small one, to be honest. Three (or two) fellows in a car, one of which is a Japanese kid, who I pictured as a mangarobotmonster of sorts*, traveling somewhere of little importance, because is not being there that matters. I don’t imagine this growing to be a master piece of existential depth, or a master piece of any depth, just a well paced, well written, cool journey, with just enough depressing notes to make it bearable.
So, when this intro ended, it got me exclaiming “what, already?” to myself. Part of it is due to the very short length, I know, but it still is what I expect from a good intro: to make me wish it wasn’t an intro.
* Though explaining the Run-Time error when trying to talk to him. I refuse to see that as a bug in the game. To me, that’s just the mangarobotmonster twitching erratically on the bed.
[...] said, my favorite review of the “Stalling for Time” intro is on Leandro Ribeiro’s blog Fourty Two [...]