Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.

A lot of the Apollo 18 one-movers followed the basic formula of forcing the player to pay attention to detail to find out newer, more precise moves. Some made an actual story. COWMC doesn't quite, but its different branches certainly provide a lot of amusement. It's got a nice little percent-solved meter, and the mathier among us will see the number of ways through. Some obviously contradict each other. And plus, it starts with your car falling and manages many endings other than the obvious one. Strictly they're implausible, but so's a falling car, and it's more than fun and well-written enough.

You'll need a bit more patience reading than with What's That Blue Thing Doing Here or Leave Me Alone, which are worth playing to compare and on their own, but it definitely pays off. It allows more different actions than LMA, which is more about finding fun wrong stuff and using classical IF commands than about observation. There's more of a narrative than WTBTDH, which has some really clever meta-jokes I'm a bit jealous of.

The one thing I would add to this game would be a (Spoiler - click to show)tally of what you've looked at and maybe how you got it, or maybe even eventually hint which endings you need to re-look at(yes, one of my Apollo games needed this even more,) so you spend less time running in circles (I did, and so did ClubFloyd,) wondering if you took care of X or Y or Z. This sort of violates the strict one-move premise, but given how endings clue new endings & that's part of the game's strength, it could help the player get that last lousy point from a blind spot he may have.

That's technical, though. This is an effective and entertaining use of the one-move limitation, and I'm glad I eventually got to be part of a group that worked through it all.

Mortlake Manor is very old-school in its approach. It has a generous map, a couple of mazes, and even some randomization. But it is a bit on the plain side. There is a little too much walking and not enough reward. I'd have liked more items and fewer rooms, as I spent a good deal of the game looking at my maps and typing in commands without looking at the screen, especially once I retreated through the mazes, (Spoiler - click to show)with the 15-room nonreflexive-direction garden maze (too long!) causing particular annoyance. I tried dropping items in rooms since I didn't get the gauntlet--which probably needs a description, or a clue it can be loosened, so here's where more is less. I just wasn't expecting anything new, and when a player's staring at a chart of which room goes where, the author has lost him a bit.

It's certainly tempting, once you get the hang of text adventure programming, to start creating more rooms, since the first is the toughest--but here, we have several named "east-west corridor" and even two adjacent ones named "back door." This requires nontrivial technical skill to DO in Inform, but instead of adding to the mysterious feel of a mansion, it leaves me wondering what's so special and upset I'll have a few more rooms to walk through if I leave an item lying about. I was especially nervous about (Spoiler - click to show)the hammer, which never got used but was in the corner of my mind--and the game's map. What was it for?

Another thing that could be explored is: (Spoiler - click to show)the ghost gets you points if you study it passively. Why not have it do something, or be able to follow it?

To the author I would say--publish a second release that is not as faithful to the original as this one. Have fun and ask your testers what they'd add. Maybe you can cut down and describe the rooms more, or take advantage of some Inform-specific stuff, while keeping the original somewhere else. Describe the rooms or cut them down, or both. I have one test I like to do for a game--how does the author's by-move walkthrough look when printed out? And this game is a lot of walking around. The story's relatively sparse.

Things like the help and the (Spoiler - click to show)acronymic maze clues in two places show the author has a strong idea of making the game fair. If there's a way to clue without just leaving a few irregular verbs out there to try, then that allows for more immersion and not picking a verb vs guessing one. It helps the player avoid annoyance, but all the same, if a player is looking to avoid annoyance while playing the game, the game needs to change its tack.

I hope this is not too harsh treatment for a first-time author with the guts to put his work out there for opinions. I'm nearly certain the author can make this review obsolete with a second version. In fact, I look forward to it.

(ps - email for transcript if you want it.)

I'm not big on pointing out a bad game is very bad. Eventually, there are only so many ways to say it. So why does this game merit a review, as a 5- or 6-room maze?

I managed to map it, or I think I did, by seeing (Spoiler - click to show)if the room I went to had a description or not and undoing a whole lot. This is an interesting exercise in logical deduction--and if you like this sort of thing, it's worth doing once if only to say 'Hey, I'm better at this when the Zork I thief maze scared me and I actually had ITEMS to leave around.' It is not as potentially hair-pulling as some guess-the-verb games without walkthroughs. In theory. However, GtVs have plot and humor, and you can see what the author is thinking later, and you can pretend he really meant to X or Y.

So my practical side is satisfied that this game is just awful. But my solve-everything side noted that Googling showed you apparently CAN get to the last room and get that item. But straightforward logic doesn't seem to work. Or maybe you have to visit rooms in a certain order. So I feel half-guilty writing a review for a game like this because it may make someone else try the same thing I did.

Yet at the same time I think anyone who likes to play with fire (or the occasional bad game) doesn't deserve to suffer more than five minutes through. If there is anyone out there with a walkthrough, or who remembers, "Oh, you do this," it'd be community service to post it.

But please don't try to play the game again if you don't!

I can't give stars because if you like this sort of thing, you'll like the game (I did,) and if you don't, you won't. And I hope this review doesn't wind up looking like a beta-test for a game meant to be part of a speed competition, where these things happen & are part of the fun.

Because speedily written games don't have to be profound. If they try too hard, in fact, they'll fail. So often they are battles of quick laughs vs implementation. This game's subject is a good one--one of the worst passages in a truly terrible book I read many years ago--and it borrows from a blog post that gives a shell of a ridiculous game.

The solution is straightforward if you (Spoiler - click to show)follow the link on the game's page and it's also one of those games where you only have so many items and so many things to do, and the verbs are hinted well. The extra endings, good and bad, added to the blog post are quite funny, too.

In the first version, you can (Spoiler - click to show)just take the skateboard to make like a tree and leave before distracting Strickland, which gives a funny if not logical ending, or you can (Spoiler - click to show)reach a "win" room (irony?) if you go west with 6 points, instead of opening the door to the west to stick yourself in a no-win situation. You can also (Spoiler - click to show)set off the smoke detector without shooting the matchbook at it.

These are mistakes. I think. But then, the full solution also follows the rule of (Spoiler - click to show)making everything in the game have a purpose, so it could be the author throwing in another joke. Especially since these errors are far less grating than the awful writing the game makes fun of. But I don't want to think too hard about this. This game gave me several minutes of genuine juvenile humor which allowed it to get away with glitches. And I really like Strickland as a text adventure villain.

If the author revises, though, I demand (Spoiler - click to show)a clever rank for if you score 0 out of 8.

There's some flexibility with Speed-IF. People are given several things to put in a game and a soft time limit of three developing hours. TMV follows all the rules except the time limit, and that was the right one to break.

The reader quickly sees the game is based on A Christmas Carol, and the title gives away the plot's basic outline. Scrooge, is once again visited by three ghosts, and he needs to use what he sees to foil his evil twin's plan--people trust Scrooge TOO much now. There's all sorts of Dickensian intrigue with opium dens and dark alleys and such without directly copying Dickens, and while there's no shortage of good description--much of which makes some good puzzles clearer--the game never really textwalls the player.

And why should things be impossible? I don't think many people think A Christmas Carol suffers from being shorter or easier to read than Bleak House. The ghostly visits also provide natural breaks when that give a great idea of how far along you are, so the game is well-paced.

A bonus point: when I was part of the group that played this at Club Floyd, at several points we realized where the idea suggestions for the Penultimate Not Numbered Speed-IF would be dropped in, and it all fit in well. Not just for a few belly laughs, which is perfectly good in speed-IF, but even Doom III brought out part of the author's alternate Victorian London. This sort of thing would be terribly corny in a graphic adventure (I bet people could muck up the ghosts, too,) but with text, you don't have as many tools to overdo things.

This game stayed with me enough to write a review of it three months after playing it on ClubFloyd. While I haven't played nearly as many text adventures as I want to, I can't imagine too many stronger first efforts than this, and I can't imagine many stronger speed-IFs, either. TMV seems easy to enjoy whether or not you've read Dickens's original. So I don't know if anyone has any holiday text adventure traditions, but TMV could be a very nice one to start.

There isn't really one room to escape--there are five, but hey, that leaves a bit more to do, and the room would be pretty crowded otherwise. Maybe it needs extra walls to deal with all the fourth wall stuff you have to deal with--after all, the author is one of the writers for Kingdom of Loathing, an absurdist heavy-texted MMORPG that relies on that sort of thing. People who like that will probably like this. People who like this game will probably like KoL a bit better, since it's more polished over the years--it's the author's job, and this game was not. Still, it was fun enough.

There's a lot of annoying stuff like eating the bottle and not the pills, the right verb for the safe, and a terrible muddle climbing on things (Spoiler - click to show)you need to stack.

Overall, I think this sort of puzzle works well with an existing fanbase and with discretely labeled choices, because a player base can team up and decide what to do (or how to do it most quickly,) and the next person through can just get the benefit of the humor or maybe polish the solution. With just one player, though, it really bogs down, and there's too much to guess at--I found that to be the case on replaying. There was a lot I remembered and couldn't guess the right verb on.

This is a flawed game that people who're willing to sacrifice a bit of play for humor will nonetheless enjoy because it does enough to get laughs. Unfortunately, it falls into different traps than the ones it bemoans in the funny little introduction. Still, I'm glad it's there. Kingdom of Loathing fans will probably enjoy this when they've used up their moves for the day, though. They might want to have a walkthrough handy, too.