Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

As a big fan of absurdist sports writing from the likes of Every Day Should Be Saturday, Fire Joe Morgan, Blackheartgoldpants.com and PFT Commenter, I'm always on the lookout for the next funny and surreal thing. BBOS is it. Whether you like Bill Belichick or hate him, this game transcends mere sports loyalty without resorting to the usual stuffy literary devices that critics say transcends this, that or the other. And I bet even if you hate American football, you'll like this, too.

For those not aware, Bill Belichick coaches the New England Patriots, and he's won quite a bit with them, all the while being kind of crotchety to the media and having his own fashion sense. He has an ability to take players nobody else thought was all that good and turn them into superstars. And so BBOS is, superficially, about his uncanny ability to do that, and his day-to-day operations as he looks for that next hidden superstar or designs that killer offensive play.

If you've read the introduction, though, you probably figure it's not going to try to be very realistic. At every stage it's largely unclear what is the best option, because the game puzzles purposely make as little sense as possible, except when the answer is obvious on purpose. And even if you guess wrong, you get a funny ending to back-arrow out of, complete with nonsense final score.

Your first big decision is whether to sleep in or get to work, and navigating the game's navel-gazing successfully gets you 1/7 of a code to put into a computer to design the ultimate offensive play. It's a purposefully annoying end sequence that still manages to block anyone wanting to cheat their way through, but there are spoilers on the 'net if you just want to win and see Pixel Bill Belichick earn even more atrociously practical gear to wear when he paces the sideline.

Still, sifting through Bill Belichick's other "boring" tasks to get all the codes is worth it, and it goes pretty quickly because the game doesn't pull that 5 second delay some needier twine games like to. You'll find codes in an impossibly huge hardware store where you click through about 40 aisles to find a doorknob, behind a rock band you need to "fight" (anybody having fun is a distraction, you see,) set a clock radio correctly, or win some weird board game. You get another piece for (Spoiler - click to show)assembling a superstar wide receiver from spare parts, which is a superior option to trading for one, drafting one or signing one in free agency. The game's rather rough, there. There's only one choice that's right. I picked it, but then I made sure the others did something cool when you made the wrong choice. They did.

The bad-good graphics and captions had me laughing, from the ways you swim through a pile of clothes to the various aisles in the hardware store, and really, it's just a pleasure to mess around and say, wait, I didn't poke that yet?

I'd really like to see more Twine games like this. It's about as inexcusable as you can get without resorting to profanity, and that suits me fine. It shouldn't take more than an hour, and maybe you won't think of it at all when it's done, but in an ideal world, we'd have a string of games like this we could just play and enjoy, so that doesn't really matter.

Wait, no. That's not quite true. When watching highlights this fall, I fully expect to remember some random stupid part of this game I didn't think I would when I see Belichick grouching on the sidelines, and that will be awesone.

Endless Sands scared me off with the title: were the sands endless? Algorithmically generated? Thankfully not. But it feels that way at first. You've been bitten by a vampire queen and need to find your way inside before light. You have about four hours of game time, or 240 moves. TLDR: it's a funny small-to-medium game with lots of nice big ideas that feels a bit loose, but there's no shame for a first time effort.

There are four possible endings, each with its own series of mildly annoying hijinks. When I say mildly annoying, I mean that they were just the right silliness to get under your skin without pushing you away. It was a good idea for the author to implement all four, though, as different players appear to have gotten stuck on different ones. And this provides a depth that so many other silly games don't have.

As you'd expect there's not a lot of NPC interaction, and what there is is a bit guess-the-subject. I maybe should've thought of (Spoiler - click to show)giving the werewolf something to chew. But the dialogue didn't point there, even though I found an actual subject that worked, I laughed. I think the puzzle for escaping below the surface was much fairer, and it had wacky humor and even a clever bit of programming where a radio gives static half the time. It was a nice little wait-nag as you had (Spoiler - click to show)seven colors to put in order, so when each had a 1/2 chance of appearing in a message, missing one wasn't critical. Or you could just brute-force.

This review is for version 1 of the game. The author, a first-time writer, showed interest in a post-comp release. So a lot of the cluing that's off (I assumed certain places were off-limits,) or the slapstick that misfires (though you see what the author's trying to do) or the technical stuff (command rejects can waste a minute) is forgiveable and easy to fix.

I had fun with the game, warts and all, and I hope the author writes a post-comp release. Even if they only have time to fix some of the bugs, I bet people will replay it gladly, if only to see the endings they missed.

EXTERMINATE! is a speed-IF that focuses really well on its concept. I saw the idea on move 2, but I didn't see the command to list everything you could do. But the game was nice and hinted me on move 6. This is an extra meta-puzzle, if you are curious, but only if you want to feel extra smug and brainy. I'm slightly sad I didn't, but I enjoyed the game well enough.

I was also highly amused that the game responded to a hidden command not listed. It was a juvenile try at profanity, and I'm impressed the author thought of a funny riff on the standard reject. It was also in good taste (Spoiler - click to show)the fella excluded another).

This is one game where I'd welcome an update version very much just because I bet it's hard to find everything in 3 hours, even if you (Spoiler - click to show)grep -i "ate$" complete-word-list.txt. Still, the game had more than enough. It's well planned, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and it has a few time-paradox jokes and alternate endings.

But this is enough. I shouldn't (Spoiler - click to show)Bloviate.