Reviews by Andrew Schultz

Bell Park was cathartic for me. Nothing terribly serious, really. It just made it easier to laugh at the tales of Haledjiann and Encyclopedia Brown that baffled me so much as a nine year old. So I gave this game a 2013 IFComp Miss Congeniality vote over a few other strong efforts that were tough to leave out.

I was apparently supposed to be impressed and motivated, but I was just intimidaed. I almost never got any of them, and even when I reread one of the books years later, that whole frustration returned to me. Even the well-written CYOA Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey (available on OpenLibrary) left me awed--though I was younger when I read it.

Bell Park kicks the concept when it's down, though. Bell never really stands a chance with the adult world, taking every possible wild guess and going with it. Or to be more accurate, the game lets you go through all the guesses. there is a lot to laugh at, from the condescending and clueless adults to Bell's constant change of assuredness as to the murderer. Her formulated accusations are perfect for her age, and if the actual murderer is completely unbelievable (if very amusing and creative,) I can easily remember having my opinion on several adults--famous and non-famous--when I was young. This game captures that sharply and without malice.

Some people claimed about the lack of interactivity and different endings, that is about the only fault I can find with the game. Something small like different endings depending on how many choices you/Bell lawnmowered through would be a neat boost, but I can't complain.

Also, the game's Twine layout just looks like a book. The font, spacing and page size. Once I saw it, I wondered why nobody had done it before. I suspect there's a lot more of this stuff you can do with twine. I hope to see it. As well as the straight-ahead just plain writing that Twine lets you do and that this author is good at.

I wrote a song about this game. It has three verses. One for each choice you make. So you can sing it while you play.

"Aaaah" noises in background throughout...last 2 syllables of each line repeated, except the final in the verse which is drawn out. BBAgg, GGGGDE

(Spoiler - click to show)
You must reach...the lift (the lift the lift the lift)/on the graveyard shift/if you get my drift/danger has been sniffed/
Zombies to be biffed/porn and kleenex gift/No time to feel stiffed/Your fate may be swift
Not much that's what-iffed/You just got short shrift/Hey now don't get miffed/now this song's adrift


This game swung and whiffed.

But seriously, this guy seems like a decent artist, if you google.

Mercer Mayer's illustrations were part of my youth. They really brought the Great Brain series alive--which itself could make some good text adventures, with Tom D.'s scheming and puzzle solving. So when I confirmed he was the author of this text adventure nobody'd written a solution for, I figured it'd be fun to try.

Angelsoft parsers, though, tended to be not quite up to Infocom's--undoing doesn't work, and the randomized responses for nonworking verbs are just baffling. And they didn't have those neat InvisiClues. Which were almost necessary for Forbidden Castle. Mayer imagined a very cute world: a gnome with a weird belt, an ogre, a fairy, and other things that'd been done before, but the real charm of this game is how you can ride a dragon or pegasus to places you need to get. The whole map is connected at the end, but you don't see how at first--and there are plenty of weird deaths in the isolated areas if you do things wrong.

And you need to learn what magic items do--you're not told. Some help you around some magical beasts but hurt you around other. Wearing a sword gets you killed. Insta-deaths zap you a lot here, and it's not clear why. You can also assume it's a good idea to (Spoiler - click to show)pick up the bag on the first move, but if you don't, you're totally lost. The game gets in trouble a lot here.

The technical annoyances and Player Bill of Rights violationscan't quite obscure the imagination, though, so a walkthrough is recommended. But there is too much verb guessing and cheap death for an honest play-through. Most people won't have the patience for that.

Mines of Qyntarr is an unquestionably awful game. It plays like when I wrote BASIC tributes to Zork--or I would've if they hadn't run out of memory. Lots of points to collect, lots of simple but illogical puzzles except for the ones based on received knowledge, and lots of verbs to guess. And far too many locations to fit on one piece of paper.

You drop treasures in a well, which is not the trophy case from Zork I. There's a cool talking idol, but there's also a puzzle where the challenge is mostly to look up Funambulate by looking in a dictionary--that's like googling, for you younguns--and another that is different on the Apple than the PC (Spoiler - click to show)"Approach Queen" vs "Checkmate". Plus there's a monster called a yallou, which couldn't be copied at all from the grue.

Sir-Tech bit the dust soon after this, so the promised sequel never happened. I can't say I'm really sad. I wasted money on Wizardry I so I could play II and III. I just thought the games were too tough for me at the time. I'm just not sure I've ever seen such a large-scale, categorically awful game as this. Well, not one you would pay for. It even made me feel like a schmuck for wanting to write a game exactly like this as a twelve-year-old.

I bet there are plenty of reviews that say of a game, "it's good at what it does, but it's limited, and the author knows that." And I sort of have little more to say than that, here, about this game. There are lots of ways to riff on 140 bytes of source code (not counting white space) but playing this game always makes me try to be that much more succinct, and it helps me when I know I'm flailing in wordiness. The names of all objects are shift-characters. The solution (Spoiler - click to show)isn't hard if you don't overthink, and I in fact enjoyed saying, ok, this has to be simple, but even better was what this game opened to me.

Because I never knew about the whole TWIFcomp. It was a great idea and I was surprised at how many people submitted entries and tried silly and even dirty tricks. If you missed the comp, as I did, the results and source are at this link. I hope they stay a long time. And as someone once derided for not liking code-golf even though I should, I found something worth code-golfing and learned about all sorts of computeristic poetry and bizarre programming tricks from this. I bet there is something there for you.

I think one thing it's hard for traditional parser games to do is encourage experimentation--Inform's default rejections are necessarily neutral yet tough to change. "You can't go that way." "You don't see any such thing."

That's not mind control, and more colorful options would annoy people anyway, but it's discouraging--shouldn't you have known beforehand not to X, or not to fiddle with Y?

Living Will's goal is unstated--maximize your money or, perhaps, your happiness, as one of four people close (or who can claim to be close) to ER Millhouse, a magnate who's made in the Congo with his company Droxol Vox. Each choice you make adjusts lawyer and medical fees, bequests (e.g. how much wealth you get,) DV's stock price, and even which of the four people you can be.

The first few times you'll undoubtedly stumble, but there are enough different ways to play the game, from too nasty to too generous, that you can--by the time you've run through a couple characters--predict how the third and fourth will do. I didn't dig in as deeply as I could have, but the parallel stories don't seem to change the basic facts of the past. You can change people's motives or how they feel now, but understanding the core story appears to be key in getting the result you want.

I'm a bit disappointed this game didn't do better in IFComp 2012, though I will waffle here and say I can't pick a game I'd boot from the top half, which this missed. I gave it a Miss Congeniality vote, though I also really enjoyed the games I tested. Perhaps the period-specific writing turned people off, but it seems necessary, to euphemize the dying man's actions.

Because of this and other things, LW feels a bit esoteric to start, and though it's clearly completeable in two hours, you need to have your thinking cap on to enjoy it, and you should try several radically different paths through before giving up on it. It's a good use of Undum's strengths, with the scoreboard that each move changes and a cool map of Zaire, too.

And any game where (Spoiler - click to show)unless you're very clever, the lawyers get most of the loot, even/especially when they help you rip off other inheritors, gets bonus points for me.

Twine seems to remove the need to have a map, etc., that more formal text-adventure languages require. This low barrier may lead to a lot of barely-there games, but when it works (as in this game) it -feels- easy and intuitive and has has a high fun-to-text ratio.

You've got only two actual challenges per game, and they're seemingly trivial, which is part of the fun. You have choices like where to throw chocolate sauce at a space pirate or whether to put anchovies or spices on a pizza. These aren't new gags, but they don't have to be. This game combines pizza delivery jokes with some science fiction tropes, and crossovers like this always help keep the old jokes from getting stale. That, plus well paced text (no responses too short or long) make for a successful formula without feeling formulated.

It shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes to get through the whole game, including the amusing "bad" endings, if you're a completist, and it's well proofread and so forth. I even found that the "right" choice (Spoiler - click to show)was mainly trying for the silliest action, because that seemed to be in the game's flow. And it worked.

This game is a bit too short for me to feel comfortable giving it a rating, but there's more than enough there that if you like this sort of thing, you probably will like this game. Given its quality, I'd like to see something more ambitious from this author in Twine, though I also wouldn't complain about several other short games this fun instead.

American football is tough to write a simple game about. Many early computer game tries stunk as One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird soared. Even other Americans are baffled by the men in motions, the Wildcat formation, bubble screens, illegal procedure, or what's the point of extra points, anyway, since people make them most of the time except when they don't.

Kicker doesn't really deal with any of this. It doesn't try to. It's more about observation, without any direct humor. You're probably the least macho player on the squad--a placekicker. His good kicks are taken for granted and expected. He sees even less action than the punter, who is an NPC in this game and who looks down on the kicker less than the linebackers, the special teams coaches, and other people. And it's not recommended he try anything fancy.

So most of the game is spent observing, except for the time your team scores a touchdown or their drive stalls within field goal range (that's the last third of the field) and you're called into action.

The game even has a nice little scoreboard in the upper right, with the field position in the upper left, but the game text doesn't actually show this. I suspect it's a comment on how you're probably wrapped up in yourself.

The game seems totally random as to who wins or loses, but it's more interesting how your teammates try to ignore you or put you down. So actually, instead of going through the game, you're better off just hitting Z.UNDO to see what everyone is doing.

Sometimes the game is a bit too light on detail--it's not even clear if you're a pro or college kicker--and unfortunately there aren't enough scenarios that might make the game more interesting. Merciless undoing seems to show the game accounts for safeties and also makes long field goals tougher and even lets you incur a concussion, and the plays account for when there is little time left. The mad libs for the plays are pretty good, too, although sometimes a (slow) linebacker successfully covers a (fast) wide receiver.

I've probably said more about this game than the author intended, and it's an amusing curiosity. But given how the game started--my team went down 9-0 and I kicked a field goal--I sort of expected a dramatic end. And I think it would be amusing if someone could rig together a string of fake field goals, two-point conversions and so on to try to capture a game's feel and do more than this observational piece.

Given the author wrote a game about waiting in line, I think his game gave the intended effect. Nevertheless, there's the possibility for more, with maybe giving, say, the special-teams coach a turn, though I don't think a text game from a more active player's perspective could be effective.

Also, I really want non-default responses for (Spoiler - click to show)score and any sort of swearing, both of which are integral parts of the game, for better or worse.

It's tough to write a tutorial game without making it sound patronizing, and it's tough to write an example without it feeling like an example. The Inform docs do a good job of explaining how to do specific things with the language. But it's tougher for a complete game to show you what to do.

And I think Sand-Dancer does this. Because I'm not strictly grading it on being a game, I'm not giving it a starred rating, because as an example, I think it gets five stars, and I find it hard to dissociate the learning tool from the game.

As a learning tool, it shows how to use basic Inform syntax, but more generally, it captures various stages of creation on the game's website, which is a nice blueprint for anyone making a game who wonders where to start and how to keep it coherent. This is more a comment on process than content, but I really like when programmers are willing to share their code and ideas, and it is well done. Especially in a game where there are a lot of things that may leave you wondering "how'd they do that? I'd like to do that." The game does a bit of everything with the Inform language--scenes with NPCs, opening new areas, variable text, and even defining new objects and concepts.

As a game, it offers a lot of possibilities. You play as Knock (Nakaibito) Morales, a high school dropout who's crashed his Jeep into a cactus with a cold desert night approaching. He's impregnated a girl and is not really sure he loves her. He's hardly a hero, but the game never gets too sappy or too judgmental. He has to pass a few survival tests, although there's no real way to fail them. The game, and the book about the game, stress a lack of cruelty to the player in the narrative, and I think it works well.

After passing each survival test, Knock visits a spirit animal who replaces bitter memories Knock needs to let go of with virtues. Virtues allow you to do things that seemed too hard before, such as (Spoiler - click to show)being brave enough to reach inside a spider web, and once you get more resources, you meet more spirit-animals that guide you toward your ultimate choice. I very much like the setting and uncomplicated puzzles, too--the Arizona desert is probably a mystery to many Americans, far enough but not too far from cities, without any silly Wild West romanticism or melodrama.

But what I remember about this game was the "I see how they did that" moments that go beyond how they did something in Inform. General design and user-friendliness principles come out in the game, too. I'd really like to see a similar sort of game for other IF programming languages, because I think it'd be handy. This sort of thing seems ideal for collaboration. But I think the key is never trying to blow the player away, and Sand-Dancer is never too fancy. But it's never too simple to feel like you're being herded through a tutorial.

The source and notes on Sand-Dancer at its website were good enough to make me buy Aaron Reed's book eventually. That adverb should not have applied. But that is another review for another site.

Back before Choose Your Own Adventure got tiresome for me, I still wondered. Why wasn't there more where what you did before affected the choices you could make? Without cheating? I think there were a few examples--one CYoA asked if you had talked to a weird guy who gave you a clue, with a better ending if you did. It couldn't track game states without being spoiler-ish.

The Ascot takes advantage of this in many ways, both to slip in a few jokes and provide different endings. The humor's pretty off the wall, from the not-so-subtle railroading (there're several riffs on the But Thou Must trope) where you pretty much have to take the Ascot, to making sure you only type YES or NO, to forcing you along to a park or searching where you need to. It's rather fun to be heckled by the good-natured parser, and I enjoyed trying to be stupid. The side paths don't take too long, although you do get stuck if you (Spoiler - click to show)utterly ignore others' help.

What characters there are, are good. Gertie, your friend, is a good agent for moving the game along, and the beast you fight at the end is silly and fearsome.

But just a string of jokes wouldn't be enough. The author took huge risk (Spoiler - click to show)including the "decent" ending and not the best one in his walkthrough and, in fact, not showing us the best way through. This almost surely cost him a couple places in the standings. However, knowing what I know, it was a pleasure to work things out, and as someone who played the game after the comp, I'm glad he made this choice. Other reviewers have alluded to this, but really, figuring out what to 'really' do is clever. I think it's adequately hinted that you need to do something, and the sheer lack of options makes it frustrating you don't quite know what you do. Until you figured it out.

I giggled stupidly after finding what to do, and the final puzzle is a delightfully annoying brain teaser, consistent with the game's friendly needling. This game packs a lot of fun into a short amount of time, and it leaves me hoping there are other games out there. It's clearer than many other multiple choice games, and it offers an example of how restricting choices can make for a tighter puzzle. I am sure there are other ways to do it, and I hope to see them.