Downtown Tokyo, Present Day review Perhaps 1998 was the year that authors gave up on text alone and resorted to other means of keeping players involved--Arrival and The Plant used HTML-TADS graphics and sound effects, Photopia used a color scheme, some others (Enlightenment, Muse) used .gif files external to the game. And then there was Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, which featured some dramatic moments rendered in...ASCII art. On the other hand, the drawings fit the tone of the game nicely, which is a cross between spoof of and homage to old B movies, and the whole effect is rather enjoyable.

There's one interesting experiment going on that doesn't, unfortunately, work as well as it might: the player inhabits both the protagonist and a movie-theater onlooker, and commands sometimes are directed to the viewer persona rather than the protagonist persona without warning. Part of the reason it doesn't entirely work is that the protagonist's actions are all in the third person--"our hero enjoys a long slurp of soup"--but some of the library responses trickle in now and again. To be sure, it's pretty hard to keep that from happening, but it also doesn't take much of it to break the spell. (On the other hand, it reminded me of the actual experience of being in movie theaters--being absorbed in what's happening on the screen and suddenly having the spell broken, either by a flaw in the film itself or by some distraction in the theater. If that was the intent, it's quite well done.) Then again, I'm not sure there's a better way to keep the viewer and the protagonist distinct, and if they're not distinct, this could turn into a "you're sucked into the movie" game, which wouldn't be a tenth as interesting. It's a flawed experiment, but it's not a bad idea.

The plot is minimal, and it's to the game's credit that the whole thing is rather casual about the story--plenty of room for even time-sensitive actions, and the story essentially stops in the middle so that you can wander around and have fun. This is the sort of thing I'd disapprove in most IF but which works just fine here, since B-movies don't exactly set a high realism standard and it's so much fun to play with the toys you're given. Indeed, this middle section (if you can call it that in such a tiny game) is the best thing about Downtown Tokyo; the beginning and end come off more as quotations, homages, than as parodies, and the parody is much more fun. The author provides for plenty of silly actions, logical and not. Still, even if you're inclined to try those silly things, this won't detain you for more than 10 or 15 minutes, and there isn't much reason to come back to it. Adding to the fun is the satire: the author claims never to have seen a monster movie, but he has a good feel for Hollywood cliches anyway. At the end, for example, when the hero and heroine are together, we learn that "their clothes are alluringly torn," pointing to the way films like to fuse danger and sex. Likewise, when people fall, they fall in slow motion, so that you have plenty of time to react.

The only real problem with Downtown Tokyo is that it doesn't work particularly well as a game. At the outset, for instance, you can do essentially nothing for about 20 turns; so determined is the author to make fun of the plot contrivances that he doesn't let you interfere with them, logic be damned. The controls in the helicopter you end up flying around are rather nonintuitive--at least, the initial hurdle to overcome is a little strange. It's also distinctly possible to get lost in the city--the unimportant locations don't loop back, so you can wander very far away from the relevant scene. It wouldn't have broken too much with logic to keep the player from wandering away ("You can't leave now. Your reputation as a hero as at stake."). As it is, the game provides some cute satirical moments but not much more.

There isn't a lot to Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, but what's there is pretty funny; the author manages to spoof old monster movies in a variety of ways. This was intended for the chicken- comp, and it would have been among the better entries had it been entered. As it was, in the real competition, I gave it a 6.