Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

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.