Ratings and Reviews by Andrew Schultz

When I saw the name of this game, I was pleased it came up early in my IFComp 2011 random play list, whatever it was about. It turned out to be the sort of thing I like. The puzzles made me laugh, even when I felt they didn't quite work. Most do. And this uses some of what makes text adventures unique.

The only plot in the game is to figure how it's messing with you. There's some back-story about the house getting steamrolled to make way for a mall, but that's mostly for expedience. When faced with the actual first room description, I was immediately jolted. It works.

Another room contains a color-related puzzles with potentially dated, but likeable, puzzles, and the final one--where you have to open a door to leave--may have had opportunities for a few more items, or a more complex interaction. Describing what happens would be a spoiler, but once I learned the rules I was slightly disappointed to learn "is this it?"

These are a lot more complaints than I really voiced playing the game. My emotional reactions were "Oh, neat, you do this--or maybe you do this or that--and I see how this clue should've fit in if I were paying attention." Plot may've gotten in the way of the puzzles, here.

I have to admit, I'd be very glad to write a word-puzzle game this good. And I'm doubly impressed someone wrote it in what is not their native language--and wrote it with very few grammatical errors. I hope Ted Paladin is called into action to navigate a maze or somewhere else that's been "done already," in the future. It'll likely be done differently enough to enjoy.

Slightly above the average 3 stars here. With a hat-tip to the cover art for possibly being stairs that go up or down. It's a cool illusion and captures the ambiguity you need to resolve in the first and last puzzle rooms quite well.

I've suffered through a few Ayn Rand books. This game's better than they are, and not just because it's a lot shorter. It makes Stalin a more fun person than the people he repressed, which is rather clever, but unfortunately it stacks the deck.

Gigantomania's broken into four parts. Three require repetition and fawning to the local bureaucrat, and the fourth pretty much ignores what you try to say. It's the best one. There's always a trick to books showing people's lives are tedious without bringing the reader in, and in the case of a game, having to repeat actions to get to the next bit is just crushing.

That's the first half of the game. But then it turns toward being able to sneak around as you get more power--the (Spoiler - click to show)interrogation scene offering some wonderful, revealing ways to lose. But unfortunately anyone who has read why Communism failed will probably know this. And anyone who hasn't may wonder if all this repetition's necessary.

But the final scene is quite simply very clever. It's a chess game, and it's worth playing for that alone. I'd always interpeted "Communist style" chess as something different--the art of only allowing small advantages nobody enjoyed, more like a typical Karpov-style win where you mess up your opponents' pawns and win a tedious eighty-move rook and pawn endgame.

Here the author made the right decision. The interpretation (Spoiler - click to show)of killing all your allies to bring the enemy king near yours for the final evil laugh is wonderful and expedient. I didn't see it right away. It's the best anachronism I've seen in IF (Stalin died in '53, but the game occurred 40 years later.)

If the game could have a running side-story as clever as the last bit for each of its four parts, it would feel a lot less like Kentucky Fried Anti-Communist Tract and more like something special. I'd replay it for sure.

EGH is about a shooting during one advanced student's oral presentation for an Advanced Placement class. And I suppose that if a bunch of AP students also wrote an IF game, they'd probably have ones that get more stars and flow more coherently with this, and have more interesting branches, too. Having been in this sort of high-pressure class, it's hard to forget the concern trolls and gaslighters saying "I thought you were smart, but you couldn't even..." to various people at risk of being demoted to mere honors classes.

They'd probably be factually right, not that it makes them better people--the game manages to be badly formatted, disjointed, and crunchingly linear at the same time. You often have just one direction to move. Menu-based conversations make it hard to ask what you want, especially when the "say nothing" option refuses to vanish, and it gets troubling when you have options to be rude to friends with little cause. What seems to be the "best" one discusses (Spoiler - click to show)starting a society of people who dislike being stressed out. Though I did find the school assembly to be good, wicked, frustrated satire. Everyone in high school "knows" those are useless.

But there's too much melodrama, though--the game didn't really need a shooting to discuss the issues of emotion and connection the author really seems to want to deal with. It's all a lot like stories I remember from creative writing periodicals in college where people either drop out and work at McDonald's, write a letter for five pages before junking it, or grow up exactly as unhappy as their parents.

So EGH is about people having to get everything right to get very good grades, and if not, many people will be disappointed. But conversely, EGH got a whole lot wrong, and that's no reason to look down on the writer, who failed to separate the main character's confusion from his own. He said a lot that needed to be said, and was important for him to say. And say badly. I have no idea how much the author suspects or knows this. Hopefully in a few years he can resolve his problems and not be ashamed of what he's written and recognizing that maturing and understanding doesn't have the high stakes and time pressure of an AP class.

I didn't know what teachers were saying when they gave me a B or C and said I really had something and should keep working. I understand they were not giving the same backhanded compliments and encouragement some more competitive students did, but they had to evaluate work objectively, too.

I have to say the same to this game. I can picture the author/narrator being alternately worried he would wind up saying something too stupid or maddening or disjointed to put things together--imagining more "with-it" people holding it up as proof that person was crazy--before just typing something up a few nights before the contest.

I've read that many other Panks games were real messes. I've even seen people refusing to play his games because they're, well, his. But Ninja's Fate made me curious enough to give the game another look. Based on ratings and comments, this seemed like the safest one, and while it has few positively memorable moments, it's playable, mostly coherent and straightforward. The in-game help is useful and direct. This is no small personal accomplishment in a game built from scratch.

The only problem is that this doesn't translate into much fun for the player. People tell you, as Jesus, what to get, and you get it. JoN is nothing more than a fetch-quest with some RPG elements. You must convert four of six possible disciples(Spoiler - click to show), though you can convert three of them with one fish, and satisfying each one feels like bribery. You start out with a dagger and tunic, then you move up to a spear and helmet and shield. Once you start a fight, it is to the death. Each side has hit points. Hit messages can be grossly inappropriate: "Sweet mercy! You crucified him!" Yet winning is not hard, though you do some iffy things (Spoiler - click to show)like killing Harod and a few centurions--though all those weapons are probably a clue.

JoN shows a certain attention to detail, or a wish to attend to detail. The room and item descriptions show imagination. But then Mary Magdalene is described as a small town and doesn't even take the item she asks for. Also, drop in fig and olive trees you can't climb or examine, or leave a sick boy none of the in-game verbs did much to help. Scattered scrolls, if read, have bible passages galore which are too long to really be interested in, and converted disciples blather interminable platitudes.

It's unfortunate Panks isolated himself and was never really able to ask for or use other people's criticisms by the time he wrote something like this. JoN obviously needs help, but it equally obviously would be worthwhile. Perhaps using an established language, he'd have had time or energy to iron things out better. With a tester or two, he'd have had something more polished.

I know what it feels like to realize I've passed on asking for creative or technical help--especially when learning programming early, by not using or asking for help on a script from someone I disliked--and I remember the reasons I gave to pass it up, and hopefully I've learned somewhat to change course if I get in that trap. It's sadly but memorably ironic that in a game ostensibly about one of the great forgivers, the author did not take advantage of much more earthly graces.

Maybe I'm just rounding up to two stars as a sort of respect for the dead, or for someone more diligent in rejecting criticism than I could be. Or maybe it's a harsh learning experience to see my own mistakes magnified, or it's humbling to see I can empathize or vaguely identify with someone who made such big mistakes, and seeing an honest effort from someone who never really put it together has helps me move on from my own mistakes in the way that a perfect game or even a great tutorial never can.

Some smart-aleck was eventually going to riff on the IF trope in the title name, and I'm glad it was someone clever. GtV isn't a long game--the central joke would grow old--and it's not tough, but you can extend the experience by examining everything and rifling through hints of problems you've solved. I haven't seen anything this odd that actually worked in text adventures since _Nord and Bert_.

As an 11-year-old lost at a fair, you find a robot named Lalrry who will let you Guess the Verb for a shiny quarter. You have a dull one, and there's a useless quarter-shining machine nearby. Cue the twisted meta-humor to manipulate the genuinely creepy, though harmless, Lalrry. Each verb you guess sends you to a scenarios featuring an evil wizard, a mad scientist, a dwarf, a spaceship and the author himself, in a particularly metafictional computer lab. The last one actually works.

You're not really guessing the verb in these. You just need to find where to use it. You even help some poor souls who can't quite guess their own verbs or solve a puzzle while your nemeses guess theirs.

Given how small the areas are, the puzzles can only have so many solutions, so there's a ceiling to trial and error, unlike true verb-guessing. Still, GtV's effortless surrealism makes the game feel much bigger than its solution, and it may help you laugh off stress in the next game that requires actual verb-guessing.

So on the surface this game is a 9-question interview where you are graded on your answers. Survive, and you're graded on teamwork, leadership and technical skills, and you get a salary, too.

It's not entirely that simple, though. XYZZY gives background--too much--and gives pages of ideas what the author was trying to do.

While (Spoiler - click to show)one easy "win" is >3's all the way through, the game gets interesting when you twiddle one answer to see what happens. And it's pretty clear that if you're too lousy in one area, they'll thank you for an excellent interview and "the phone never ring."

Unfortunately there's no cluing from the interviewers if you're in trouble or doing well. You're left reverse engineering the answers. Change one and see what happens with your grades, and soon you can figure which answer doesn't just trade one grade for another. It's a cute learning exercise but, like crazy IF mazes, more technical than imaginative. Some answer swaps show scorched-earth approaches are penalized, and computer industry people who look into it may find heart and a touch of irony.

They won't find a good game, though. It could be an interesting side puzzle, and if he had put some of the energy from the XYZZY response into describing the interviewers and cluing when you are in trouble, it would be more than an elimination puzzle. As it is, I got all A's and $100k a year after spending two five-minute sessions that felt much longer.

This game may have inspired me to write my own multiple-choice vignette as a sort of therapy. Perhaps I will suggest such an activity to the next ranting co-worker. But the playing experience also made clear that something like this is not seriously publishable as a stand-alone work.

The idea behind the game is wonderful--the President escapes from his boring job in the White House and visits various countries. Only the big ones, plus Finland and Sweden, get a room. The puzzles are apolitical and silly, and they are generally funny once you figure them out. APUS also gives many funny default responses and "You can't go that way" replacements.

Unfortunately, it's not big enough ("South America's not interesting,") and it neve builds on the gags. The few puzzles that veer from recognizing gently amusing stereotypes are poorly cued. While there's no guess-the-verb, there's plenty of trivial commands semi-logically changing the environment, or the effect of other trivial commands.

There's such a contrast between what you do to leave the White House (nothing unclean, but imagining ANY recent President doing this makes me giggle) and explaining that the White House is pretty boring, and you're bored, except for some generic details, that the game feels grossly unpolished.

This is too bad, because I don't think an American could make a game like this, with such a neat title, and stay apolitical. And yet, the author couldn't be expected to know that a West Wing would make the opening puzzle a lot better.

So, more countries and better descriptions--the potential's there, as I enjoyed many quips and default command responses--would've made this game memorable for more than the title and opportunities missed. Not that I regret playing it. I enjoyed filling in the details I wished the game had, but others may just get exasperated.