Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

This is a very simple Twine story with a smidgin of interaction. Usually this type of thing gets boring, but I found this excellently written, and an interesting story about two brothers. One uses magic, and magic causes pain. The more powerful the magic, the more chance it can kill the wielder.

The story isn't about this specifically, but it shadows the relationship and the obliquely subtle plot. This feels like a tiny fragment of a much larger world, and I enjoyed the little glimpse of it that this story gives. I hope this writer has more to show us because the story is achingly lovely and melancholic.

This sounds as if it's going to be a lofty and important game. The description on the website is a good column-foot long (see above), and reads as if it were lifted directly from a world history textbook. Sounds like the author did a lot of research. I'm not into historical games, but this sounded like too crazy of a concept not to at least see what it is. There's no way I'll have time to play this kind of deep historical "what if" scenario.

I needn't have worried. I'm presented with the situation of possible nukes in Cuba, and a menu of about five choices. "Nuke Russia" is one of them. I choose "Blockade Cuba". Game ends, and I'm berated for picking the most boring option. "Do Nothing" ends the game also, the nukes are never launched. The other aggressive options aren't much deeper than two clicks, and are pretty much "You get nuked back" with various US regions flattened and different countries emerging victorious…"Break out the tea and crumpets" is displayed when England remains as the only superpower. Is this meant as a joke game?

One of the pictures has a sideways page number on the edge, so I get the feeling this might have been a class assignment where someone lifted pictures and text from a book. None of the outcomes (or any of the original text in the game for that matter) goes into anything like thoughtful speculation or extensive detail about what might have really happened if history played out differently. It's just "CLICK Russia nukes you". This doesn't seem at all like it was meant as parody, unless you take an additional meta-step back and look at it as a humorous example of a highschooler's last minute "what do I submit for this history assignment due tomorrow that I have not done any work on yet??" type of thing.

A several-move CYOA made with Quest. This will take less than five minutes. There are a couple of choices that you, as a door, have to make about who to let pass through and who to disallow. This could be expanded into something really cool (perhaps sort of a reductionist "Papers, Please") if the author chose to do so.

(Spoiler - click to show)Shows promise...for example after letting a child through, and blocking two suspicious men, Michael Jackson comes to the door. My thought was "I'm not letting him through, he's dead!" and I was correct. This is the type of absurdist humor that could be expanded upon. Right now it's if you guess wrong, you die somehow. I'd like to see ways that you could fail and perhaps learn the rules...or maybe in the same fashion of "Papers, Please" you get sets of ever more complicated conflicting and contrasting rules. With some thought and expansion, this would be the kind of cute joke game people might really enjoy along the lines of "The Idiot Test" apps for phones.

This Twine episode lets you manipulate words in a short speech by the author's mother...it sounds a bit like an answering machine message. After you do so, the game generates links to tweets made by the author in which she expresses responses to the words chosen. Kind of an interesting idea. I don't know if this is based on real life, or completely fabricated, but it's a nifty little interaction which reminds the reader how words might be interpreted.

I wish there were more to it. It's almost the same exact mechanic as FIRST DRAFT OF THE REVOLUTION. Conversations... has you changing the words that are said to the PC/author, but this is almost a template for what could be an amazing conversation engine - if you could control the syntax and intention of different parts of the sentence completely by twiddling with them and getting varied reactions from the interlocutor based on *how* you phrased what you said, it could be quite interesting.

Porpentine is one of the most prolific authors in Twine, having won acclaim and awards for Howling Dogs and turning out viscerally surreal avant-garde performance art tone poems on a regular basis. These aren't so much games or stories as they are fever-dreams of imagery and text experimentation filled with gore and alien sexuality that can make the reader feel they are intruding on the secret thoughts and imagery that most people keep locked deep in their heads.

I can't say I really engage with most of these stories. (The exception being CYBERQUEEN, which was fan-fiction of a universe I really like) They are filled with demented imagery and ideas presented in broken phrases that slash across the screen, utilizing HTML and Twine in ways that nobody else does. But there's imagination on display in spades, and even if you have no idea what's going on, and you are revulsed by the imagery, it's difficult not to appreciate these short...ejaculatory rushes of raw feeling and artistic typography.

And the tricks that Porpentine does! Words slide around and move, and on occasion pause coyly, making you wait for them, performing their meanings almost in almost children's book literal fashion. At one point you must click on one of two words that alternate positions rapidly, taunting you (suggesting how a unique combat or spell system could be accomplished in a more mainstream story done in Twine). At one point the same text is displayed, rapidly changing back and forth like lightning flashes between futuristic and rough organic fonts that suggest the same thoughts are being shared by two different personas(Spoiler - click to show) who have just battled, torn each other apart, and copulated with the metal and intestinal wounds to their mutual satisfaction.

It's heady, imaginative stuff, even if it's not your thing. Porpentine will probably go down as a pioneer of ways to break interactive fiction out of the prison of rigid, prosaic paragraphs of standard text and hyperlinks, and inspire new ways to create emotion and poetry through the timing and manipulation of the words themselves. I myself have avoided Twine since the default output is boringly plain. But this type of game inspires the imagination of what might be possible if someone sat down to do a more cohesive narrative with all the tricks and methods Porpentine plays with effortlessly.

I guess the joke is that the Nascar track is an oval, and the race consists of nothing but left turns.

Not at all realistic, nor funny in the least, other than the idea that (Spoiler - click to show)You go straight and turn left a couple of alternating times to win the game.

It took me longer to obtain this file than it did to play it. It's hosted on one of those sites that makes you wait several seconds to download if you don't sign up and pay for a premium account. There are multiple download buttons, and the obvious one I pushed downloaded a setup program for a browser I did not want. Why not host this game on the IF Archive for free like every other game?

This is a Russian speed-IF written TADS for the Vzhzh-Vzhzh! contest, the game explains to me. "Vzhzh" is the sound of moving fast, it also says. The rules require a wet and dry pair of twins, talking inanimate objects, and fourteen syllables in the title.

The title doesn't have fourteen syllables, but perhaps it just may be a translation issue. The other two requirements are met. And...hurray! It's not written in TWINE!

It's not a particularly long game, but the goal is to drink beer. The obstacle to this is comical and it's very well-implemented for a Speed IF. I did notice on a restart that the game won't let you do some things until certain points. For example I couldn't call the books by their nicknames, nor could I interact with the extremely complicated table until it became completely necessary to.

Good effort, I completed the game in about 20 minutes, and I am usually horrible with one-puzzle games.

[Note: At the time of this writing, the download link does not work. I had to obtain it from the IF Archive directly at http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/e14s.gam ]

Perhaps I am too stupid to understand this game. Am I really that old that I can't appreciate a deep character study? I didn't comprehend large parts of Mentula Macanus either, and supposedly that was loaded with witty cultural references. Maybe it's because I've never heard of Slajvi..Slaovo...Who the heck is this guy? <clicketyclickety>

Wiki...pedia...copy...paste...

Slavoj Žižek (Slovene: [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk] ( listen); born 21 March 1949) is a Slovene philosopher and cultural critic. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School.[1] He writes widely on a diverse range of topics, including political theory, film theory, cultural studies, theology and psychoanalysis.

Hanon sits, face propped in hand, wondering if we've finally run out of compelling topics for interactive fiction. Ah, he thinks. Perhaps it's a very meta in-joke.

Hanon moves to the kitchen to refresh his coffee under the watchful iron gaze of Gilligan, the imperious pomeranian. The dog is not happy about his irregular feeding schedule.

Hanon sits back down, coffee steaming, prepared to forcibly absorb the concept or possibly oblique humor this game contains. Just because he has a penchant for AIF doesn't mean he can't be entertained by a Slovenian professor's antics.

(Spoiler - click to show)I did chuckle when Slavij...Zlavis...when he wondered "what the fuck a Porpentine" is. And when he didn't grok variables. I can understand variables. I shouldn't feel so inferior to this piece and it's subject. I'm smart too!!

I liked the background color. And the action photos were a great addition!

Huh. (Spoiler - click to show)Okay, I'm obviously not the audience for this. Why did I review? Catchy title.

This is a beautifully programmed game in Undum that allows you to choose one of four already-dead people who are persecuted minorities in Pakistan and re-live their final days. It's a great idea with lots of potential to educate and inform. I myself know that horrible things happen in the world, but knew nothing of the specifics regarding the details of why and how these specific minorities are targeted.

After playing the game I'm afraid I know not much more than when I started. The scenarios are very short. Essentially you get the story of your happy, smart person who is comfortable and happy with their lot in life. Something happy happens. Something bad happens. Then you are killed or commit suicide. I don't mean to make light of this situation at all - I wanted to know more. It feels as though the stories tell you a bit, then skip forward months to an isolated incident that doesn't give an uninformed Western person like me any more specific detail about *why* this is happening. Essentially you are persecuted for your religious beliefs--as the story says "being born in the wrong country to the wrong family"--but the target audience (assuming me) does not know the difference betweeen these persecuted sects. I would have liked to have some parallel information about all these people: how do they worship, what do they believe, why do the opponents not like this...that would perhaps shed some light about how religious beliefs ultimately shouldn't threaten other believers.

I'm not sure how this would be accomplished, except making the scenarios longer and giving you more actual choices of how to react. The extent of your interaction boils down to "answer the text/don't answer the text" "complain about what this person did/remain silent". And the choices make little difference, since from the outset the story informs you that you are already doomed. Perhaps if these weren't four separate stories - maybe the narrative could jump back and forth between these people at moments of parallel, showing the common threads in all of us, such as during prayer or interaction with their families to prove that they are all the same. I almost thought even allowing the player to jump into the mentality of the *persecutor* and seeing what they believe and how they worship and interact with their families might shed some more light on what these people believe--how they are the same, and how they are different--and possibly illuminate the inherent evil of religious and racial persecution.

I wish these authors success and more opportunities to teach those of us who do not always have the opportunity how to understand.

This is a quick little adventure with some funny writing by the same author as Astro Turf Space Golf which I appreciated for it's writing but didn't appreciate for the fact that it forced you into a bad ending.

Lines like these I love: (Spoiler - click to show)"You couldn't possibly run faster to the garage. Well, maybe you could if Snicker wasn't so fucking fat."

This story is also quite bluntly brutal. I accidentally used my neighbor as a human shield.

I only took one play-through, and seemed to get a good ending. (Spoiler - click to show)I got into the car and ran over both of the intruders, Snicker described as "Chewbacca to my Han Solo." I look forward to this author creating a longer and more involved work.