Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

There are some jokes which are Not Your Thing but still give you a chuckle. David Whyld's games are like that for me. I prefer my humor with different misdirections. The humor in Paint!!! is, well, direct. You have three assistant painters who help you paint the office of a man with a very, very long Greek name. And you need to paint everything: the floor, the table, and so forth. But there are problems, like Thor appearing, and how your assistant Ted keeps stealing stuff. And the people who have kidnapped your sister, even though you don't have a sister. And the secretary who keeps bringing you refreshments you don't quite need.

This needs to be played through honestly several times before you have a clue what's really going on. But it's rather fun to muddle about. I wound up giving up, but fortunately, the game has a command called LET ME CHEAT. I did.

I am pretty sure Paint!!! violates all sorts of principles of game design theory. Nevertheless, I'm glad it popped up on recommended lists, and I was able to give it a try. It would probably be very frustrating without the walkthrough. It's a change of pace we need in small doses, when our subtle humor gets too subtle and doesn't seem to go anywhere.

The author wrote two vignettes for Neo Twiny Jam, and although A Crown of Ash was a more evocative title, The Real Me lasted with me a bit longer. It's a story of a fairy who's a trans man, but it cuts a bit more about that, to the general "being a bit different and people know it" to having even people who think they understand failing to understand. They see you as part of a block. This happens with any sort of nonconformism e.g. "I really respect nerds' work ethic. But maybe I could use their brains better!"

Having a fairy as the main character was interesting for me because, well, isn't it cool enough to be a fairy and have magic powers? You should be grateful for that. But of course that's not the whole story. The whole story can't and shouldn't be told in 500 words. But enough is captured of the whole "can you be less weird, please?" sentiment that rapidly spills over into scorn, or imagined scorn that nobody every really tried to curb, that the piece was successful for me.

On reading that there was a text adventure called Molesworth I held out high hopes that it was about Nigel Molesworth, hero of Geoffrey Willans's The Compleet Molesworth. If you haven't read it, you should. In it, Nigel chronicles the horrible happenings at St. Custard's, his primary school and dreams of defeating the Mekon.

Here, though, it's a different story. In this game written in Quill, you're looking to disable a nuclear missile at Molesworth RAF. It's a long, wandering game, and it has its own retro charm, but all the same there are so many ways to get lost or killed or trapped with no way to win. There are plenty of rooms with no exit, where you're just dumped. Often the game tells you a joke in the process, but that's not quite enough. Also, you get randomly hungry, and if you haven't found the sandwiches yet, it insults you with "You should've listened to me." This is much funnier when you have a walkthrough handy.

And certainly many of the puzzles are arbitrary! There's a maze that's clued by a newspaper article, but I can't figure how. There's a pub where you trade a CAMRA pamphlet for a pair of wire cutters, and another one that won't let you in if you're wearing a CND badge. (I'd not have known what these had meant if I'd played when the game came out. Thanks, acronymfinder.com!) There's limited inventory and red herrings. Some are king of funny, like the French onions in the Peugeot. The best clues are that you get 5% more for finding certain items, so you know they must be useful!

I'm snarking on the mechanics, many of which are about odd item trades, but there are neat parts, where you need to wear disguises so the military base personnel don't wise up to you. With the limitations of the ZX Spectrum, too, there's only so much to be done. But the game does have a lot of filler rooms, and X is not a shortcut for EXAMINE, PAPER is separate from NEWSPAPER, and so forth. (At least you only need four letters per word.) There are plenty of instadeaths, including at the start when your car is low on petrol. And the narrative voice does mock you a bit for not picking up on some very thin hints.

That said, Molesworth has an innocent earnest retro charm, even though it violates the not-yet-created Player's Bill of Rights and you must do ridiculous things like pole-vault across a stream. It's hard not to laugh at the pronouncement at the end where THIS IS YOUR BIG CHANCE, DON'T BLOW IT. I sort of wanted to see what happened if I did, but I was having trouble with save states on the ZX Spectrum, so I was too much of a weedy wet to try.

Solarium struck me as immediately technically impressive when I saw it rolled out in IFComp. It presents itself as a sort of alchemy game, superficially: you have one element, and it's listed at the bottom, and you have a bunch of paths to choose. Technically, you just click through all the paths, and you amass ingredients until you have everything, though some passages are dead ends until you have certain ingredients. Text is color-coded. Simple and effective, with no multimedia. And as you find ingredients, the backstory fills in.

It's not some fantasy with wizards and mythical beasts. It's about the Cold War, and what might have happened with just a bit of supernatural nudging. Someone claims that, hey, we can use nuclear missiles without retribution from the Soviets if nothing happens! Because Communism's bad, right? And people get killed, but it's not as bad as the alternative! You, as part of a fictionalized version of President Eisenhower's Solarium project, are one of two dissenters in a 3-2 vote to launch the plan. The person who breaks the tie says "What the heck, let's bomb 'em." You-the-player learn quickly that your alchemical quest is about locating the other dissenter, with whom you felt a close spiritual bond, to gain closure.

So bombing occurs. It's rather more large-scale than the pre-emptive strike on Iraq, and the enemy is better equipped to counter. But things seem great at first, and there's one scene that reminded me of the picnics people had watching the first few Civil War battles, except in 1860, bystanders weren't going to get harmed. There's another scene where the entity who sold the nuclear attack has possessed the President himself, and you and your mate kill him. It's not even the grisliest.

All this is in service of relocating your friend, but more, who tried to stop the bombing. You both go in and out of bodies, only you do not have the same control over it that the archon (who possessed the President) did. But perhaps the right spell can bring them back one last time. You wrestle with whether you deserve to exist, and if so, how you can go about fixing things.

On rereading Solarium years later, I realize there's a lot of stuff I missed the first time through, but I still got a lot from it. There's a discussion of the overthrow of Iran's socialist regime, which of course had and still has its own side effects. The fervor and religious corruption are still strong. We've seen that you don't even need supernatural powers to manipulate large segments of a population. Simple slogans do the task. And if there is no archon to possess people, we've seen people sell their souls and dignity for power and attention, quickly leaving behind the people they suckered into voting a certain way. And we're not going to use nuclear missiles--but we have plenty of snake-oil salesmen saying that what we do to the environment can't really matter, right?

Solarium has two endings, and they both revolve around ultimate but painful recovery, one for the world, and one in your relationship. They're worth both checking, but I remember the ominous feeling as I clicked the back button (it's in TiddlyWiki format instead of standard Twine)--what if this wipes out my progress? And, of course, it can't change the holocaust that happened. It also establishes it's importance, without seeming to nod menacingly at you or tug on your sleeve to say, you know, you really should find me important or relevant. It has a self-assurance that's rare even among high-placing IFComp entries.

Mikko Vuorinen's The Adventures of the President of the United States was about a president who just got bored of the responsibilities having power and went globe-trotting. I'd played it first and was amused to see King Arthur's Night Out which seemed to address similar things. The main difference is, the game itself doesn't make it out of the castle.

Guinivere, his wife (warning: I'm guessing this is a translation thing, but X QUEEN made me cringe), doesn't want him hanging around with "Lance and the boys." (Sir Lancelot, of course.) She is watching to make sure he doesn't go anywhere. But he has a plan to sneak out--or, rather, you do. You'll find one gauntlet, and then it's obvious you need to find another. You also have secret crannies where you hide gadgets from Guinivere. But what, ultimately, for?

This is all minorly silly and perfectly harmless. Arthur is shown to be a bit of a booby as he looks for a way to distract Guinivere. The puzzles are probably things you've seen before. Arthur's method of escape, though it's been done before, probably hasn't been done by a king.

The command above aside, KANO gave me a few good laughs. It's competently enough executed but never really fully soars. Nevertheless it's a nice distraction if you want to play something Arthurian but don't have the time and energy for an epic. I played it in my head a couple times after getting through it. As text adventures go, it's comfort food.

The Chasing is remarkably low-key for a game with such a title--there's no way to lose the chase! And it's unusual without being weird. Sure, it has a few anachronisms, and a few of the horses you track down have odd names (Unhesitancy--it seems like an awkward English translation) but it finds a niche. It's well above a simple first work but shunned by people who want to make complex things. Not that either of those choices should be looked down on. But sometimes we jump from the first to "let's make something complex" and leave holes to be filled in.

The Chasing fills one of those holes in for me. It's a very welcoming game, like Anssi's others, both in the setting (you track down your horses who have run all over the valley, and you also visit fellow adventurers to give them invitations to a party) and in the non-crushing level of difficulty. The horses are all hidden, and you-the-player don't know their names. They're only revealed when you find them (the horses are all hidden--perhaps to avoid implementing them,) and they're named after various virtues you exhibit to remove the obstacle that was scaring them, or you, from doing what you want. Patience is found after waiting several turns in the right place. Courage is found after visiting a potentially high-risk area. And so forth.

It's a tough one for me whether the player should know their names beforehand--I kind of enjoyed the reveal, but on the other hand, it would be nice to have a general impression of which horses are still out there, and the horse names don't spoil anything. Perhaps an option to reveal this would be nice, although the puzzles aren't exactly crushing or unfair in any case. Sometimes people directly ask for help, and other times, it's a matter of noting what's in the description. Another puzzle rejects the right verb, saying, not now.

I think there's an art to gaining people's attention without holding it hostage, in conversation or in gaming, and Anssi Räisänen's games always do that. We only have so much attention to hand out each day. It may be a weakness that you sort of have to take a relatively simple backstory at its face value (your horses somehow all fled at once) or NPCs often seem to be there more in support of a puzzle, only to chat a bit and leave once you solve it. This works well in the context of removing red herrings, and I'm a lot more okay with that than most people, but I can see how others might want the feel of sociability. For me it's good to have social stuff and text adventures in separate chambers.

I'm also struck by how there are relatively little good didactic text adventures. Of course, there is Trinity, which discusses morals and a world-shaking event, and A Mind Forever Voyaging, which discusses ethics on a macro scale. But there is so much to fill in, games that might not catch fire or have a mass audience or crush you with their impressiveness or profundity, but you feel better for having gone through them. I did so more than once with The Chasing, which I found on a "favorite ALAN games" list and quickly said, yes, it belonged there.

From 2011 to 2012, I remember ClubFloyd being a very busy and welcoming place when I managed to visit. There were the Apollo games and the New Year's competitions and also replays of the very best IFComp games. I even entered something to a New Year's Speed-IF. Playing on ClubFloyd made it that much more fun.

World Builder was one of the games from the Hugo competition, and I forgot about it until years later. The Hugo games, by and large, angled for silly fun and jokes, which was welcoming, especially as I was still learning about game design, and I worried that the major parser programming languages were radically different. (Some let you do some things easier. But most cover the basic syntax.) You didn't have to have an overarching narrative or super puzzles to make an impression or provide entertainment. Also, the writing period for entries was about four days, so there wasn't going to be a lot of branching--perhaps it didn't help that one of the prompts was about world building, or something like it. Many of the entries had kind of big text dumps.

But World Builder tried for that narrative, where you were a Dr. Frankenstein type who created a sentient cyborg called Hugor. Hugor breaks free from your control, pulled into a vortex by an antagonist whose name is Minfor.

Given what Minfor anagrams to, it's clear bigger themes are at play, but I don't think it's "Inform vs Hugo, death match." It feels to me like Hugor may have real concerns of: can I offer anything Minfor doesn't? Should I try to offer everything it does? Why not just be subsumed into it? Anything I do, can't it do as well or better? So Hugor is fighting for identity, too. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. At any rate, this is a real concern--what could a relatively new or unpopular/refurbished programming language bring to the parser game? World Builder left me with these thoughts, and it wasn't until years later with Adventuron that we discovered something--that less is more. Adventuron got rid of a grammar-style parser and went with two words and will comfortably escapt Minfor's maw.

There aren't any real puzzles, but I enjoyed the drama and misdirection near the end, where it looks like everything is going to fail, but it doesn't. And jogging through again, the descriptions are strong, the dialogue maybe less so, but enough to give us sympathy for AIs who maybe see things we don't. And if Hugo were sentient, perhaps it would feel inferior to Inform just on the basis of games written in it? Perhaps ripped off it hadn't got a fair shake?

Looking back I wasn't sure if it was the camaraderie of being able to play along, or not having to concentrate on every move yet be able to catch up, that left me with good memories. That was surely part of it. But on replay I forgot how World Builder got me to think of bigger issues, and perhaps it was what stirred me to get the idea for my 2012 IFComp game, one which relied on Inform being Inform to build a world all about anagrams. That's certainly a "enough of my thoughts, what about my deeds" way to look at someone else's creative work, but it made me take a step back then, and now.

When I wrote guides at GameFAQs, I had this silly goal of writing one guide for each letter. Z was always going to be a toughie. I'd seen other Z games I liked (Hi, Zork,) but they had guides. But there was another four-letter game starting with Z that gradually pulled me over. But its map was huge! I got killed a lot! And the controls? Weird! I was used to parser games when everything was text. Zyll uses the F-keys, maybe being written in DOS. It all takes a bit of getting used to. Between that and the pauses as you walk between each room, I wound up putting Zyll off for a while. There were other Infocom text adventures to look through, and so forth.

Zyll's both very basic and very odd to me. It combines simple RPG and text adventure elements and does its own thing well without going breaking ground into either genre it flirts with. Modern players who pull this game down may find the most memorable feature to be the way the game makes them wait unnecessarily, but if there's someone else to play it with, whether cooperatively or in competition, it can be very entertaining. It's decidedly as ancient as its environs now, although at the time it was groundbreaking for its controls, the timed wait between rooms, and also for being on an IBM PC. Some of the ground wasn't worth breaking--to move, you push F1, then F2-8 for compass directions, F1 for up, and F7 for down. F10 works through minor commands like throwing or reading things. Fortunately all this is in a menu with ten items, and once you gain the spatial recognition to say, okay, F5 and F6 are in the third row and so forth, the awkwardness dissolves. It took me a few playthroughs, and it does take fewer keystrokes than typing. Zyll isn't as big on room or item descriptions as your average Infocom game, so you don't need to EXAMINE or whatever, and the only NPCs out there are for combat. Or fleeing. It's very mechanical.

And it's built so two people can share the keyboard to play competitively or cooperatively. Player 2 uses the numpad. This has its own traps, as 7 maps to F1, 8 to F2, and so forth. The rows don't quite line up. It feels like it should work somehow, but it doesn't. Zyll does its darndest to, though, highlighting commands you can use in green text. Maybe if there were more Zyll-likes, it would be more intuitive.

However, it's big enough so that walking around is intuitive well before the first time you get through. I spent quite a while writing out rough maps, wandering around as a Thief, whose main virtue was being able to flee. It turns out thieves are best by far for getting through Zyll, because combat is complex. I always meant to play as a warrior or wizard later, but I never did. Wizards have all sorts of neat spells which seem cool in theory, but being lazy, I didn't want one more command to remember. I was just glad to be able to bring the Orb of Zyll back to the Orb Room which, when you find three of the five big treasures, wins you the game. The Orb is super-heavy, so you can't carry any other items.

And that sort of makes thieves the dominant class--you can flee from anything, and if you're careful, you can pick off one item at a time. Slowly you tick off rooms that don't have them. But how many rooms are there? A lot! It took several play-throughs for me to discover ... yes, THAT room links THERE. Oh, I see how these rooms connect. It was a great a-ha moment for me when two big areas connected, something one wouldn't see in Infocom games, which tried to be economical with rooms and disk spaces. Zyll certainly isn't as vivid as a Zork. But it has all the elements of a fantasy adventure, without having to create a character party or deal with combats. There are boats for navigating underground caverns and random teleports, too, which play a certain role in two-player games. I had fun rolling the dice with them when still mapping out the full world.

Nonetheless the big drag for me was how you couldn't switch off the delay walking between rooms. In such a big game as Zyll, it added up, even when I cranked the DosBox speed up. (The timer is set to the system time.) It seems like there should be a secret code once you solve things, at least for single-player mode. After a few tries, I honed my strategy enough that I was able to win fairly quickly, maybe not getting all the treasures as a thief but enough to win. Zyll really only tracks points, but after a while, I didn't worry about maximizing that.

Zyll is an odd game, and I haven't found another like it, which is a shame, even if it's technical and dry. It develops a big expansive world, but by the time you're comfortable in it, and you know the rooms where the potions may randomly start, the delays are a bit tiring. It doesn't necessarily deserve immortality, but the process of discovery for me was quite fun. Just seeing a different layout of keys, from an age when one-key commands were random (remember Z for ZTATS in Ultima?) has a certain amount of appeal, and guess-the-verb is not a thing. However, the challenge and reward-for-time topped out quickly once I figured how to win as a thief. Warriors or Wizards just seemed too finicky. Nevertheless, I'm glad I pushed through to write a guide for it years ago, even if there is a better one now at CASA.

Danger Mouse was, and still is, a wonderfully spontaneous cartoon that can be appreciated by kids and adults alike. I always hoped one day to see all the episodes when I saw him on Nickelodeon, and it took a while. In the meantime I discovered this game and also a DVD of all the Bananaman episodes--Bananaman came on after Dangermouse, see. Dangermouse is not perfect and goes off on tangents, thus making it perfect for crazy text adventures written on 140K drives. Because if the authors get low on space, a deus ex machina will actually work! It wouldn't be true to the series if there wasn't one.

And even with many of the main elements of the show are left out(no escape of your oft-winged car from under the pillar box where DM lives and no Stiletto, Baron Greenbacks's right hand crow) it's a great example of what people managed to do back when they had to make do with very little memory. It even retains the sarcastic narrative voice in its room descriptions. One can almost picture Danger Mouse tapping his foot, waiting for the next part to load on the Commodore or whatever. (Still, thank goodness for emulator warp speeds!)

At the game's start, Colonel K calls in, and after bumbling over a few words, directs DM to find some terribly destructive weapon called a pi-beam hidden deep in the Black Forest Chateau. The beam is actually hidden in something else (hint: the show was always pun-heavy.) The game focuses on brief narrations to tell you what's going on, and it's choice- instead of parser-based. This saves memory for some neat little doodles floating about the screen giving a rough picture of what's going on. Good choice--Danger Mouse with a parser would be the wrong sort of sophistication.

You will get an extra option if you bring the right item to the right place such as a key to a room with a locked door, which drops the difficulty, which back in the days of slow loading times was a good thing. Solutions stick out like the sort of levers Penfold trips over to spring a trap. Making the wrong choice may provide useless entertainment but never kills you. It just knocks you back to a location that is not so far along in your quest. You'll also find some locations containing several items, of which you can only have one at a time. Here's the only weakness of the choice-based format: there's no inventory option. Usually you'll need two or three such items in a certain order and although you can sweep through all locations with every item pretty easily, the items' uses are relatively sensible even if the situations where you must use them are random as you'd expect.

Danger Mouse, alas, has no saved games. Not a huge problem in this day of emulator save states, but a hassle back them. Halfway through you're given a code number to access the second part. Fortunately these load times are the only really slow parts of the game, and the rest of the time you'll be occupied between finding the one-way access routes between important locations and working your way through some minor-nuisance mazes. The drawings along the way will keep you entertained. There's not a ton of color, but Penfold's iconic too-tight suit jacket shows(too bad the tie isn't in full splendor too,) and Danger Mouse finds many ways to look nonplussed. There are even cameos from Count Duckula and Baron Greenbacks. But a good deal of the scenery is recycled, which is not all a bad thing, because the show occasionally made fun of itself for the repeated backgrounds, and besides the Commodore had limited memory and disk space. The game gets a few of them and doesn't abuse them. Too much. There's also a motif of moving in even wider circles as the game goes on, which works well enough for such an absurdist cartoon. DM himself would frequently run into an obstacle or enemy several times before finding the right way through.

Danger Mouse, the show, worked well because it had many silly pictures to go with puns children might not understand. The game works much in the same way with quips as "the lone shark takes a great deal of interest" or the red herring you find, which by now feels overdone, but it deserves credit back in the 80s. DM and Penfold also stumble through the requisite trap doors and secret passageways with the help of goofy gadgets or common items used for extraordinary purposes, and so for a game with such simple controls (maximum five choices on any screen,) the clever narration and pluck make it a credit to the cartoon show that inspired it. Yes, a full-fledged Infocom-style adventure would have been ideal, and Danger Mouse in general seems to cry out for multiple point-and-click remakes, replete with a Bananaman sub-game for people who'd saved the world with Danger Mouse would have been a big hit. But I really can't complain. It was fun before I managed to get those Danger Mouse DVDs cheap on eBay and after.