#horsfields

[horsfields]

Crocus siberi firefly. Can you spot the pollinator? And identify it? #pothousehamlet #nursery life

[transgender-chiroptera]

Horsfield's fruit bat, via

[snototter]

A Western tarsier (Cephalopachus bancanus) in Sabah, Borneo

[birdblues]

Horsfield's Tarsier

[iicraft505]

Horsfield’s Fruit Bat (Cynopterus horsfieldii), Pteropodidae, Indonesia, by Farrah Zulfa

[helmstone]

The Forsyte Saga being revived for PBS Masterpiece

The Forsyte Saga being revived for PBS Masterpiece

MASTERPIECE on PBS and Mammoth Screen have announced a major new reimagining of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels. Planned as a returning series, the first season of six episodes follows the lives of the wealthy Forsyte family in 1880s London and is based on Galsworthy’s Nobel Prize-winning tale of love, loyalty, ambition and betrayal. The Forsyte Saga reunites MASTERPIECE with British…

[lesparaversdemillina]

Poldark S1 de Debbie Horsfield

La série mélange habilement romance et enjeux sociaux significatifs, explorant les conséquences d'une crise économique en Angleterre. Les personnages sont nuancés, et l'intrigue captivante offre un richissime contexte. Une redécouverte enchantante.

[manonamora-if-reviews]

Magor Investigates… by Larry Horsfield

============= Links

Play the game See other reviews of the game See other games by Larry

============= Synopsis

You are Magor, court sorcerer to King Kelson Haldane, the young king of the kingdom of Hecate. You are in your chambers, having just had a herald bring the news that the king and Duke Alaric Blackmoon have arrived back from their journey to the Great Sand Sea to investigate reports of Xixon lizardmen being seen down there. The herald also told you, most unusually, that Kelson & Alaric will be coming to see YOU instead of you having to go to the king's audience chamber and that the visit will be informal, so no bowing will be required. You wonder what tales they will have to tell you? "Fancy that," you think to yourself. "The king coming to see me!"….

============= Other Info

Magor Investigates… is an ADRIFT parser, submitted to the 2023 Edition of the IFComp. It was ranked 64th overall. This is the 4th instalment of the Adventures in the World of Alaric Blackmoon series. (this is the first one I've played)

Status: Completed Genre: Fantasy

CW: /

============= Playthrough

Played: 13-Dec-2023 Playtime: around 30min Rating: 3 /5 Thoughts: But we investigate little...

============= Review

Magor Investigates... is a relatively short linear parser, where you play Magor, the court's sorcerer. Though the game is part of a series and a larger universe, it is not required to have played other instalments to complete this game (relevant information is provided in-game). In this entry, you are tasked by the king to work some genealogy magic and find whether the monarch has some relations to another crowned head. While there is no walkthrough, a comprehensive hint system is implemented.

Spoilers ahead. It is recommended to play the game first. The review is based on my understanding/reading of the story.

This was a quaint and low-stake little game. With the return of the King after a difficult quest, you are given the simple (though maybe tedious task) to trace back your monarch's lineage and hopefully find a connection to another royal family. But oh, no! the Archivist is down with a bad stomach ache and can't let you browse to your heart's content. Good news! Being a sorcerer, you have an extensive library, which includes a tome on remedies. Fix up the concoction, nurse the archivist, go back to your main task, and report back to the King. End Credits!

From the premise, and the length advertised on the IFComp website at an hour and a half, I... expected more. Even though I loved the cozy and low stake vibes of the game (with a non-existent difficulty, and super well hinted actions), I was done within a third of the expected time, having completed the 9 out of 10 tasks. The discussions with other NPC are triggered after an action, which you (the player) do not control/cannot change (you can't ask people questions). This is a bit of a shame, because those discussions are at times lengthy (had to scroll back up at multiple occasions), and could have been broken into multiple actions. As for the investigation, only one action is require before the task is complete. And even if the game includes many room, the engine does not let you explore much of it, as it tries to railroad you into one specific path.

Another gripe I had with this game was the visual aspect. I am all for funky and bright interfaces, but the use of this particular palette with the Comic Sans font was quite painful to the eye. And when you have long block of texts on the screen, it is not really comfortable to read. For this aspect, I was kinda glad the game was fairly short.

It was a cute short game, otherwise.

[vintagewarhol]

[highretrogamelord]

Rotary Combustion Engine (demo) for the ZX81

[horsfields]

Hydrangea in flower now for some indoor colour.

Once these have finished flowering inside they can be planted in the garden.

They are hardy and flower in late summer outside.

They are acid loving lime hating thus prefer ericaceous compost.

Hydrangea, Hydrate! They like to drink!

We have lots to choose from.

Stay fit, stay healthy. Keep gardening!

Horsfields Nursery Tel:- 01226 790441

Open seven days a week 10am - 4pm including bank holiday Monday

Info@horsfieldsnursery.co.uk

Horsfields Nursery

Pot House Hamlet

Silkstone

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S75 4JU

Like to keep in the loop & receive helpful hints & tips on gardening?

Click link to sign up to our news letter

http://eepurl.com/bwMctr

Beautiful plants in a beautiful place

#plantnursery

#pothousehamlet

#gardeningideas

#upperdenby

#horsfieldsnursery

#horsfields

#gardencentre

#silkstone

#gardencentrenearme

#gardencentrebarnsley

#gardencentrepenistone

#gardencentrenearme

#hydrangea

www.horsfieldsnursery.co.uk

[wornoutspines]

Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale (Season Premiere Review) | A Nice Blend of Mystique and Small-Town Intrigue

Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale feels like a Sunday show to me with a murder mystery at the center of it and some drama. #SeasonPremiere #SanctuaryAWitchsTale #Review #Witchcraft #Mystery Check out my full review

Debbie Horsfield (Creator), V.V. James (Novel) CAST Elaine CassidyHazel DoupeStephanie Levi-JohnHolly SturtonElish LiburdSophie MensahStephen LordAmy De BhrúnDarragh GilhoolyBarry John KinsellaAdam Isla O’Brien Review The show introduces us to the town of Sanctuary, where witches have coexisted with regular humans for centuries, providing an alternative to conventional medicine. Despite being…

[detournementsmineurs]

Eleanor Tomlinson et Gabriella Wilde dans la série "Poldrak" créée par Debbie Horsfield, 2025-19.

[patrickbrianmooney]

IFComp 2023: Larry Horsfield's "Magor Investigates …"

This is a review of a game entered into IFComp 2023, the twenty-ninth annual interactive fiction competition. This year, there are 75 games in the Comp, all free to play. There’s some good stuff in there this year! Anyone is welcome to play and vote on the entries during the Comp period, and you need vote on only five games by the middle of November for your votes to count toward the games’ overall scores!

As is my wont when writing IFComp reviews, I shamelessly steal Jacqueline Ashwell’s rubric for scoring, because, well, it’s thoughtful and fair.

This review, like all of my reviews, is potentially spoilery. You may want to avoid reading it until after you’ve played the game. That’s up to you.

My uncle is the family genealogist. This means that when he goes on a vacation to, say, Normandy, instead of spending his time eating French food, seeing scenery, drinking French wine, taking photographs, going for walks in the countryside, trying to get attractive French people to help him learn more French, shopping, and taking photos, like you or I would do, he spends his time rummaging through old birth certificates and land-grant decrees and marriage and divorce and baptism and burial certificates in country records offices and churches and tombstones in churchyards.

Then he comes home and we don't see him for two weeks, both because he's recovering from jet lag and because he's furiously updating his genealogical records. And then he sends out an updated copy of something I have to start a Windows virtual machine to view, and I go meet him for a beer, and ask how his vacation was. And instead of telling a story about bicycling through the countryside, or drinking too much wine and learning some French from a server at a bar, or a play he saw in Le Havre or Rouen, or the perfect baguette, or the quality of the wine, or what the light looks like in the late afternoon, he'll tell you how he spent four days visiting eight offices in three counties trying to reconcile the different dates that appear on seventeenth-century marriage certificates.

Which is fine! It's not my jam, but I respect his meticulous research and the fact that he's pursuing his interests, even if they're much more interesting to him than they are to me. By his standards — and whose standards are more important? — he had a really good vacation, and a big chunk of the reason why is because he finally cleared up that marriage-date question that's been nagging at him for more than a decade. Also he discovered several hundred new people in his ancestry who are now eligible to be the subjects of research themselves at some later date. And as I finish my third beer and get up to walk home, he'll conclude "We sure do have a lot of Norman ancestors." This is unsurprising, on the one hand, because we already knew that; he's got a pretty well-researched set of ancestors already, and that was already a fairly well-established fact. (And, on the other hand, it's really not surprising because his last name is "Norman." Which is kind of a tell.)

I say this to point out that genealogical research is not everybody's favorite thing; it's not mine. If it's yours, you might be intrigued to realize that this game turns on a question of genealogical research; but it turns out that the research itself is continually deferred almost until the end, as there are a number of other tasks that need to be performed before the research can be done, and the research, when it does happen, requires only a few commands; the answer is on the first scroll the archivist hands to you once you get to the "researching" part of the game. So if you came in hoping for a painstaking simulation of textual research on old documents, it's not there, sorry. What replaces it is fart jokes. (Well, fart jokes and castle exploration.)

There's no real problem with coming in in the middle of the story, which is a good thing because this is one of a dozen and a half or so games in a series, and I haven't played any of the others. But the in-game summaries made me feel at home enough with the relevant plot to avoid feeling like I had no idea what was going on.

I think what put me off about the game in the end, primarily, was just that the tasks didn't ever feel like they added anything substantial to the feeling of participating in a story. The puzzles were mostly relatively easy: you need to make an herbal remedy for the archivist's stomach trouble, so you have to go find the book containing the recipe, then go down to the herb garden and pick the relevant herbs. All of this is guided so explicitly, and is so straightforward in the first place, that there's very little actual interactivity. There's no real agency for the player; the game simply tells you what to do next, and you slog along doing it. The game keeps you on task fairly effectively; you're not allowed to pick the "incorrect" herbs from the garden, nor to explore in directions that the plot hasn't given you a reason to want to go in, nor to take many objects from the room in which they are found.

There's also just not all that much plot there in the first place: in order to find the relevant genealogical fact, you need to find the archivist; doing so, you discover he's ill, and you need to cure him; so you go find the recipe, pick the relevant herbs, and wrestle with the parser to get the tea made:

> pour kettle into mug Pouring the copper kettle into the ceramic mug won't help you in this game.

> put hot water in mug Sorry, I'm not sure which object you're referring to.

> put water in mug There isn't a faucet here.

> x kettle A copper kettle for boiling water in. On one side is a tiny brass plate and it has a handle and a spout. It is full of hot boiled water.

> fill mug from kettle Filling the ceramic mug from the copper kettle will not help you in this game.

> pour kettle I don't understand what you want to do with the copper kettle.

> get mug (from the archivist's table) Ok, you take the ceramic mug from the archivist's table.

> put water in mug Ok, you pour some hot water over the leaves in the mug. You must now wait until the goodness from the leaves infuses into the water.

> wait You wait while the chemicals in the leaves infuse into the hot water. Eventually, you judge that the infusion is ready for Stinker to drink. You have just completed task 5 - Brewing the Infusion

I suppose, in the end, the question is one of relevance and the amount of effort required to accomplish a task relative to the difficult of the task being accomplished. It took me 350 or so moves to finish the game; much of that was just poking around and looking at objects and trying to manipulate them. The parser was stubborn and lacked what I tend to think of as contemporary affordances: you're constantly being told that you can't do X, because Y needs to happen; why does the parser not just take the minimal step of doing Y on behalf of the player? It frequently feels like a finger-waggling gatekeeper: nuh uh uh, you can't leave the room until you've taken the scroll that you have to return to the archivist! OK, fair enough; a promise is a promise. GET SCROLL. Nuh uh uh, you have to roll it up first! And so how to complete even basic sub-tasks becomes part of the puzzle structure of the game; but it's neither an interesting nor a meaningful puzzle. It's just struggling with a prissy (or perhaps malevolent) rules lawyer.

And after spending an hour or so working at this, where I finally find an object I need buried in a dependent clause in the description of an object that's barely mentioned in the room description. And once all of the obstacles have been overcome, what's the narrative payoff? That two characters who appear in other games in the series and who appear briefly at the very beginning and very end of this game are, it turns out, sixth cousins. This resolves an outstanding mystery in the series as a whole; but if you haven't played the rest of the games in the series, you'd only know that if you'd paid very close attention to the supplemental plot information that's supplied in response to meta-commands.

So I suppose my real complaint, even more substantial than the difficult parser and the stock responses and the excessive hand-holding and the work required to get an ADRIFT game running on Linux, is just that the game as entered is too small a slice out of a much larger narrative panorama, and the writing, puzzles, and design aren't interesting enough on their own to make up for that, for someone who hasn't played the other (quickly counting) 17 games in the series.

There's an interesting nugget of a game buried in there, and I'd like to think that the other games in the series are better-chosen excerpts from that larger panorama, but I don't know; I'm just playing this one game that was entered into IFComp 2023.

My rating: 4/10.

(I also drew a map of the game's geography as I played.)

[justasimplebogcreature]

This dumb ass likes to eat rocks

[herpsandbirds]

Horsfield’s Baron (Tanaecia iapis puseda), family Nymphalidae, Lornie PCN, Singapore

photograph by Michael Khor