Ratings and Reviews by Marius Müller

Das höchste Lob das ich "Klub Karisma" geben kann ist, das es an vielen Stellen unübersetzbar, da "typisch deutsch" ist. Der Handlungsort ist die Hamburger Reeperbahn, wo man verzweifelt versucht, seine Freundin zurückzugewinnen, die mit einem Stripper durchgebrannt ist. Natürlich ist das nicht so einfach, wenn im titelgebenden Klub nur Frauen erlaubt sind.
Das Spiel atmet viel Hamburger Atmosphäre, (vielleicht erkennt man als Einheimischer einige Ort wieder?) und geht liebevoll und humorvoll mit den Charakteren und ihren Geschichten um.
Das Spiel ist ein Puzzler im besten Sinne - man weiß immer was zu tun ist, und hat zumeist eine grobe Idee wie. Viele der Lösungen sind lustig, und das Wichtigste, originell. Selten hat man das Gefühl ein typisches Puzzle zu lösen (Spoiler - click to show) -In wievielen Spielen muss man sich schon in einen Stripclub einschleichen und dann auch noch strippen? und es gibt nur hier und da einige Parserprobleme. Womit wir zum zweiten wichtigen Punkt kommen. Das Spiel ist technisch ausgereift und gründlich getestet.
Fazit: Ein gutes, lustiges, kleines Spiel. Wahrscheinlich der meiste Spaß, den man allein auf der Reeperbahn haben kann.


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The highest praise I have for "Klub Karisma" is that it is in parts intranslatabely german. It takes place on the Hamburg Reeperbahn, a famous nightclub district. You're despereately trying to win back your girlfriend, who has run off with a stripper. Ofg course this ain't as easy as it sound, the main hurdle being that the titular club is women only.
The game breathes a lot of Hamburgian Atmosphere (maybe some of the places are even familiar to locals?) and treats its characters and their backstory with care and humor.
This is a puzzle game in the best sense of the word - you always ghave a clear sense of what you have to do and why, which some inkling of how. Many of the solutions are funny as hell, and, even more important, original (Spoiler - click to show) -How many games have you sneak into stripclubs and then get on stage? . There are very few parser problems, and the game is thoroughly tested and coded.
Bottom line: A funny little game, and the most fun one can have at the Reeperbahn on his own.

An Indonesian island. 3 contestant. Your goal for today: Make a tuna melt sandwich. Easier said than done, of course. So starts Krakatoa, a game vibrant with Speed-IF wackiness: Time-travellers, magic crystals, sheep and cows on a meadow in the Carribean. What is also has is a gentleness of spirit that I like, for example (Spoiler - click to show) you can make cheese in the time machine, and then you share it with the time traveller for no in-game purpose. The PC is just a nice person, I guess.
That said, it has the usual implementation issues of Speed-IFs, guess the verb, missing actions, etc. I feel that Speed-IFs are often fun because authors don't have to worry about things like that and code away, so to speak. And that really makes for some nice, if somewhat rough games, like this one.


P.S. Oh, I almost forgot it has the MOST EVIL RED HERRING EVER. Just saying. Be warned.

The AIF and the "normal" IF community are seperated for obvious reasons. I've learnt that they have their pretty own space on the net, with their own set of extensions and so forth.
Now In Darkness strikes me as a somewhat interesting mash-up of IF clichés and the failings of AIF. You wake up in a dark room full of bodybags, with no memory of how...You get the idea. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, telling of your encounters with a girl and your best friend. The solution to the story is obvious pretty quick, but still nicely done - if not the sex was intruding. It feels out-of-place, tagged on, as if GoblinBoy had an idea for a game, saw the AIF mini-comp, and decided to add some naughty bits just for the comp's sake. It's a shame. I think GoblinBoy could write a game where the girl (Spoiler - click to show) you're about to kill didn't have supple curves and firm breasts.

Macrocosm is one of the games where you just wish for several things. First, you wish it would've gotten more attention. It has terrific graphics and sounds. Mr. Donaldson has poured an immense amount of work it in (he said 4 years somewhere) and responses have been less than luckluster. I couldn't find a single review, and, matter of fact, I only looked at it because someone said they felt this game deserves some attention.
*sigh*
That said, I feel a bit bad for saying Macrocosm is not the "ground breaking work of IF" it's labeled as at the homepage. I'm a huge fan of graphics in IF, and the sound adds to it, too, but the game itself well...
That's my second wish. I wish people would look at typical newbie faults. (I can say that, because I didn't either.)
You are a nameless crewman working on a spaceship and then it's attacked and you take an espace pod and land on an alien pla - Hey, come back here!
It has some flaws that are pointed out in almost every Newbie advice document on IF I've read : The whole attack and space battle is nicely done text-,graphics and soundwise. But it's an interactive cutsecene. The interaction is that you press "z" a lot.
Once you've landed on the planet, you're in a desert which is some sort of maze. I really lost interest at this point. I guess I could've taken a look at the walkthrough, but what's the point? I think I got a really good look at what the game is like.

So, my bottom line: The graphics and sounds really make this game special, and with the right kind of setting, plot, pacing and characters behind it, this could be a sight to behold. As it is, it's a generic game that's nice to look at and listen to.

I thought that a game opening with a William Gibson quote would be something to look at. Hm. The problem was that I never quite understood the game's mechanics. So it was a bit of looking around and trying. And failing. I didn't get what anything was supposed to represent in computer terms, the time limits are evil, and well, I couldn't bring myself to care about the story that much thanks to all this.
(It's a bad thing when puzzles don't make sense even after looking at the walkthrough.)
But I have to say that all this is in a large part due to personal taste in IF - while I'm not completely averse to puzzles, I'm averse to these (leaps of logic, a lot of trial and error), and the Tron-like VR environment didn't immerse me at all.