Ratings and Reviews by Joey Jones

The Algophilists' Penury must take the award as the most arcane and prolix of interactive fictions, and I've played a bit of Gamlet. Jon Stall has a vocabulary almost equal to the greatest of verbose authors (Mary Shelley and her perquisitions and purlieues comes to mind) and he employs it in the most prevaricatory of stories. The protagonist of his tale is a strange collective who are looking back (possibly from beyond the grave) on their time when they were woefully poor and engaged in depravities.

For a game ostensibly about masochism, it does a very job of punishing the player. Foremost, there is the viciously opaque language that forces all but the most erudite of players to struggle to put together meaning. And then what little of the scant gameplay there is pushes the player to fully embrace the role of the algophilists. In the end, they are a collective formed by all those that play the game.

Unfortunately, the game as it is is very short with low implementation. It leans heavily on the novel default past tense first person plural responses offered by Ron Newcomb's custom library messages extension. Also, where it says 'soubriquets' in the text (a just about acceptable variant), the game actually only understands 'sobriquets'. Jon has released the game into the public domain along with its source, so perhaps we'll see some Algophilist remixes in the future.

A Minimum Wag Job is charmingly executed for a game probably written in less than two hours. The game sort of presumes that you clear each room in an east to west order- and lays down clues to help you build a picture of what to do at the game's conclusion. As such, given the sparsity of possible successful actions in the game, it does a good job of signalling what sort of thing would be successful.

This is a Speed IF in which you may well die several times before completion, and the nature of the death is such that you have to restart the game each time. This is no great hardship as the successful solution can be achieved in less than a minute.

As a game qua game, I couldn't give it more than 2 stars, but as an example of the Speed IF genre it's a solid 3, especially in its clever integration of the conceits of the Speed IF challenge.

Also, I'm definitely using the word 'flugulate' in my everyday speech!

(''flugulate'' (floo-gyu-layt), v.i.: To run about wildly in an attempt to catch a piece of paper that has been caught up in a breeze)

Fingertips: Fingertips is a first class little multi-layered cryptographical puzzler with a richly evoked science fiction setting that neatly makes the one move requirement make sense.

It's the kind of game that you need to write notes on (or uh, at least I did), and has different solutions such that when you find the better solution, the work involved getting there has made it that much more satisfying.