Ratings and Reviews by Emily Short

Entered in the ifLibrary's competition for 2003, this game bills itself as a work of Adult Interactive Fiction. I don't play many such games, but I thought that I would try this one since it was part of a mainstream competition.

Alas, it suffers from many of the things that put me off of other AIF games: not the presence of sexual content, but the absence of much else. Room descriptions are sparse to the point of non-existence, which is a pity; I've been told to investigate this man's home for evidence of certain shady dealings, but there doesn't seem to be much for me to pick through. Where objects are described, their descriptions are likewise brief: one frequently has exchanges of the type,

On the table is a glass.

>EXAMINE GLASS
It is a very fine glass.

>EXAMINE TABLE.
The table is exceptionally well-made and luxurious.

Everything is given this same gloss of vague luxury, not specific enough for me to envision it. (Which seems odd to me: if this is a game aimed at providing/evoking a, well, sensuous experience, I would expect it to be more vividly descriptive of the sensual enjoyments at my PC's disposal, whether or not they are sexual. But no matter.)

What made me actually quit the game, though -- or rather, fail to restart -- was that I got to a point where I was doing something that I thought was going to get me closer to the revelation of the mystery, and it turned out to result in a total loss of the game. Moreover, it was an action that I thought was one of the main goals of this particular genre. So, as a player, I felt rather cheated; I didn't know what I was supposed to be trying to do if that wasn't it, and I gave up rather than try to guess what was in the author's mind.

My major problem with this game: too much seemed to be going on, and I didn't understand very much of it at all. There is a fantasy setting -- maybe -- except that some of the objects appear to be technological, rather than magical, so perhaps it is really an odd piece of SF, instead. There are peoples and individual persons with strange Fantasy Names, many of them at a time, whizzing past my head in conversations I only nominally exert any control over. There is conspiracy, disguise, revelation, a blatant pass from a serving wench, all crammed into a couple of moves, before I have had a chance to really get my bearings.

Then I wound up locked in a cell and drunk; the hints didn't give me enough information to figure out how to rescue myself from this problem; and after enough turns of swaying to and fro in drunken abandon, I gave up.

Again, the basic problem is that I know too little to be able to guess what my goal in the game is-- even in the short term, I know I want to get out of this cell and rescue my friend/girlfriend/potential lover/whatever, except that I have no clue how to go about this or why I was even locked up in the first place. Character involvement is also not deep enough, because I understand too little of what's going on with my PC to care a great deal about his dilemmas and desires. If I had a sufficient understanding of my goal, I might find it easier to keep playing; if I cared enough about my PC, I might keep going despite the difficulties. The combination of problems is what made me stop.

There might be something interesting going on here, but so far all I can really tell is that things are Weird. More time on the establishing material might have helped.

I wanted to like this one, really I did. It was clearly trying to do some neat things, using the HTML-TADS options, but they didn't work perfectly for me. For instance, there's an option to put a menu in the left as a kind of sidebar, but when I scrolled the menu would vanish from view. It only offered a handful of commands, anyway -- a LOOK command, which I presume is no different from typing LOOK myself, and a COMMANDS that would list all the verbs I could use. The latter might have been useful, since some of the game's commands seemed to be a bit esoteric, except that it happened all at once in a scary single-column infodump to my screen.

There were also some illustrations; I approve of this. On the other hand, some of them reminded me of things I did in Hypercard ca. 1986: dithered black-and-white images of simple objects. Eep.

Another interesting thing the game did was to use an oft-suggested but seldom-implemented approach to conversation. When you spoke to an NPC, certain words were highlighted as links, and clicking on them equated to >ASK NPC ABOUT HIGHLIGHTED TOPIC. This avoids any fishing around for things to talk about, I suppose, without going all the way to having a menu. I thought it was a valuable experiment, though I am not sure I'm totally crazy about the effect.

In atmosphere, the game reminded me a bit of Heroine's Mantle, which I liked despite various drawbacks. Unfortunately, it shared a few of Heroine's problems, as well. The puzzles weren't quite as unfair, but it was still entirely possible -- even easy -- to render the game unwinnable, as far as I could tell. In particular, a certain sequence involving a telescope seemed to give the player too little warning. I did my best with it, but it was this sequence that ultimately caused me to give up on the game without really getting past the prologue: I couldn't figure out how to get past a certain point, I kept ruining my options, and the actions recommended by the hints were not successful. Plotwise, the logic of this sequence also seemed a trifle obscure.

The game otherwise could have used a bit more polish. I noted several places where there were typos or misspellings, or where the author had put in a non-default response but the default response was subsequently printed as well. I would probably have played at least a while longer if I hadn't run into the puzzle difficulties, however.

Considering that the Help text tells you this is a practice game, the various problems with it should not come as a huge surprise. There are several overt programming errors, but a lot more of what's wrong is lack of beta-testing. Many synonyms aren't handled, and obvious actions aren't anticipated. There's a stethoscope you can't wear or listen to, for instance, and stinky items you're not allowed to smell, and containers which do have contents but which describe themselves as empty if you try to LOOK IN them. I liked the solution to the maze, but that's just about the only thing I really liked much -- the game is otherwise pretty uninspiring on the design side, I'm afraid. The game needs a clearer sense of purpose. No, not a goal for my player character -- I think I've figured out what that's supposed to be -- but a sense of what it's trying to do, as a game. Is it supposed to be puzzly and challenging? If so, the descriptions need to be sharper and more evocative. Is it supposed to be creepy? Then there ought to be more effort put into the atmosphere. Heck, maybe it's even supposed to be a parody of bad beginner IF through the ages, but if so, the humor also needs to be more honed. Whatever this is, it doesn't have a very strong sense of itself.

This appears to be largely a parody/expansion/fanfic/something based on The Legend of Zelda. As I never played the original, it didn't mean much to me. There were a number of rooms where there was nothing to do, and the initial several moves of plot were of the variety where X tells you to go somewhere and see Y, and then Y tells you to go and see Z, and Z tells you to visit X again. So I wasn't terribly enthralled, and quit. Someone with nostalgic feelings towards Zelda might have a different experience. Or not.

This is interesting. To the best of my knowledge, the author didn't announce this game on the newsgroups; I hadn't heard of it at all until a friend and I looking for something to play stumbled across it on Baf's.

As you might guess from the title, it's a game about the quest for your next bong hit. With a premise like that I expected a rather half-baked short comedy game, but in fact it's an old-school puzzle-fest with a spacious map. We ran into some weird moments in the coding, but it showed a reasonable amount of work.

The puzzles themselves are very old-fashioned in character: a lot of them (at least in the portion I saw) seemed to entail finding the right object to give to the NPC to get another object to use to get a key... [etc], often through fairly long and convoluted chains. There is what appeared to be a genuine maze, though we didn't persist long enough to get it fully mapped. There are improbable leaps of logic and NPCs who seem able to teleport across the map just in order to prevent you from doing things. It's that sort of game, and you either get into the mood and enjoy it, or you don't.

I mostly did, actually, and we might have finished it, or at least gone further, if it weren't for the bewildering openness of the game. Many many locations and puzzles are simultaneously accessible from the outset, so we wandered around for a long time before deciding that we were either stuck or insufficiently directed. And the game has both hunger and sleep timers turned on, as well as the occasional message about how long it's been since you last had any marijuana. It's very easy to die before you've really gotten your bearings or figured out how to get your food source. When this happened to us, we became discouraged and gave up. I could easily see someone enjoying this piece if they were on an old-school nostalgia kick (and not too hung up about the drug-use messages). The writing is good-spirited. There are monkeys.

Mike Gentry is a terrific writer, and specifically a terrific writer for IF: his descriptions are evocative without being longwinded, and his viewpoint character gets plenty of attitude. He is also good at getting the player go to along with actions that seem more and more likely to lead to bad places, just because the curiosity to find out what is going on is so strong.

Little Blue Men shows off all these things to advantage. Unfortunately, it also has a couple of things going against it. One is the puzzle design: this game is genuinely cruel on the zarfian scale, and I had to restart three or four times in order to make sure I had everything I turned out to need in the end game. A few actions aren't clued as well as they could be, either. There are some hints, but they don't go all the way to providing specific instructions if you get stuck, and they're not enough to save you from losing objects you're going to turn out to need. In some games this might not matter so much, but I found the disruptions and replaying annoying precisely because I was so interested to find out what was going to happen next. But then, I tend to think that making the player replay from scratch (except in games specifically designed to be understood this way, such as Varicella or Rematch) is a great way to screw up the pacing of an otherwise gripping piece of IF.

My other complaint is a little more subjective: there's lots of creepiness going on here, and sometimes I start to think that I understand the intended reality, only to have that understanding ripple and become mysterious again. I do not absolutely demand that my stories tie everything up with a nice neat bow, but LBM leaves things a bit more confused than I would have liked.

For all that, though, it's definitely worth playing, especially for horror fans.

This is one of those games, like YOU HAVE TO BURN THE ROPE or Pick up the Phone Booth and Die, where the title could double as the walkthrough. Killing everything does entail a few very minor puzzles, but essentially you just do what it says on the box. Thoroughness is rewarded.

So it's not very ambitious. Is it fun? Yeah, more or less, but I found that the implementation wasn't quite smooth enough and I actually got hung up on stupid things midway through the game. You have to kill things in a specific order, and if you try to deviate from this order, the game won't let you go forward; since I had completely the wrong idea about how to solve one of the puzzles, this left me stuck for longer than the game really deserved.

Then, too, the humor wasn't quite to my taste. It's supposed to be broad, I realize, but the one-note joke had worn out well before the game ended.

The first scene of this game is a favorite of mine: the player is called on to do a magic trick in front of an audience, though (of course) as player he does not know how the trick is done. But there's more to the scene than simply getting the trick right and solving the puzzle: on a replay, it's possible to turn the scene into a real performance, by hamming things up, tantalizing the audience, and making the most out of each stage. This allows for expressive play -- getting into the character of the PC and making the most of it -- to a degree I have seen in few other games.

When I first played, I found the pacing broke down a bit in the later scenes, and the writing became more overwrought. Replaying later, I found the later pieces of the game much more successful. I'm not sure whether this is because I was playing a later version of the game (these notes are based on version 6) or whether I was just luckier with my subsequent play-through. But on review, this piece impressed me quite a bit more than it did the first time around.