Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

This game starts off promisingly. You're at a kickin' party pulled right out of every teen movie with an improbable theme (space mixed with golf). The author obviously has great ideas from his wry descriptions of some of the costumes. The game links to music (which didn't work for me) and a YouTube video (helpfully, in case I've not heard of Futurama and couldn't picture the costumes) and sets up what might be a sort of rollicking teen movie adventure where I see the girl of my dreams across the room who is participating in the same cosplay that the PC is. I'm supposed to stay out of trouble? Let me at it!

After all this promise, the player is then filtered quickly down a particularly unpleasant path with seemingly no recourse to back out of it or make any kind of responsible choice. The outcome *might* be amusing if the game continued and lived up to the promise that I can "stay out of trouble", but as it stands, it doesn't seem like the author actually intended this. I rewound several times and tried to choose a different path to no avail. You have no choice but to get to the incident and the game ends. I'm not sure if this was intended to prove a point? (Spoiler - click to show)Date rape can circumstantially happen by accident and not actually be the perpetrator's fault? The setup is interesting if only the author had delivered on the promise of giving me a chance to stay out of trouble, or had continued this game after the event to build up a farcical sequence of attempted recoveries similar to comedy movies that begin like this.

(Spoiler - click to show)So did I miss something? You go to the party. You get chances to act like a wallflower, but you're funneled into getting hammered with this girl who seems to be into you. You make out outside the party; she orders you to have sex with her. You get an option for "hey I don't want to take advantage" but a hand down your pants is all it takes to just remove that option. Your next two choices are "Fuck her from behind over the car hood" or "Lift her on the car hood so you can fuck her face to face." The policeman down the road spots you, she's passed out, the cop thinks you're a creep and you're hauled off to jail. THE END.

So I hope this isn't drawn from anyone's real life experience. Either this game is trying to prove a point (in which case I wish some of the responsible options worked so I could learn "a valuable lesson" about making choices while at a space-themed teen party, or this game isn't finished and there's lots more adventure to come(Spoiler - click to show) where you somehow escape the police officer when he stops to grab a donut with you in back the police car and you have to go to great farcical ends to locate the girl of your dreams so she can either prove your innocence and you can live happily ever after, or claim she *really* wasn't that into you and trigger a bittersweet sort of ending.

Two stars for potentially funny writing. The sex scene is bluntly described but not prurient.

This appears to be a web version of what I'm guessing is an actual CYOA book. The presentation is very slick with appropriate images, and clean buttons and borders. The text is offered in Portuguese and English, although it took me a few minutes to guess that a white flag with a red cross is England because I'm a dumb American...(Could I really have gotten through nearly forty years without ever learning the flag of England? Perhaps it's because English people don't shove it in people's faces and have it burned in effigy in other countries and emblazon it across their giant car hoods like we do. My apologies, England: Your flag is understated and stylish, just like your culture...but I digress.) This story was not done with any known development system (it's labelled as "custom")...but I'd love to see a template for Twine that produced something of this quality.

It's one of those where you die with little warning by entering the wrong room, and there's no "rewind" option, so I did not finish in the limited time I took with it. I am impressed though, at the very well-put together package.

I played the two available chapters in about three minutes or less. This is a CYOA built in Quest. It has some nice non-standard formatting as far as text colors and pictures. However, the game consists of about sixty short single lines of back and forth dialogue (preceded by a character icon), and your interaction is to click after each one. Each time, the screen is cleared and replaced with the next line of dialogue. On two or three occasions I had a choice of two things: once I could ask about "a circle?" of some kind...magical fooferaw that I really didn't pay attention to since I had gotten the hang of this by about click thirty-four. In another, it seemed like one of those obviously CYOA choices where it looks like you have a choice but you're saying the same thing with slightly different attitudes and you know it will lead to the same result.

This almost seemed like a simulation of one of those Nintendo RPGs where the dialogue is dribbled out to you, and you have to annoyingly wait for the text to all type out while going "biddabuddabiddabuddabiddabudda..." until you realize that pushing the button will complete the phrase, then you must frustratedly click twice, once to complete the phrase and then again to continue since you can read faster than the stupid biddabudda thing types.

I'm often frustrated by lack of choice in CYOA versus a parser adventure, but this hacked a tree down to just a woody stump. Luckily it's not long, because reading a linear story through a one-line-high slit that has to be inched down the page would get very old very fast. Come on, I can handle several paragraphs at a time! Give me some narrative flow and writing and not just lines of dialogue I must click through laboriously! Hopefully chapter 3 will introduce some more legitimate interaction.

I was just poking through this a bit. I've not been enamored with Quest games, but I was watching a TV program at the same time and Quest with its all-clickable interface was a conducive multitask. I got distracted and suddenly BOOM the game ended! There's a real time timer! Well then!

I'm going to give this another play. The bit of prose I encountered at the beginning was amusing. The opening seems beat-for-beat SPACE QUEST, but there's a companion! This intrigued me enough to want to play again when I have time to concentrate on it, and I'll try to come up with a rating.

Only nitpicks - Quite a few spelling errors for the few minutes I played (rogue "ailens", "refreash"). The game kind of drops you in cold with no intro - although that may be Quest as it told me my surroundings before displaying the first passage of text.

I wish I knew how to program in Undum, because the default format is so beautiful to read, and is richly textured like a fine parchment map in a leather library of some sea-captain's abandoned manor.

Sam Kabo Ashwell adds to the legacy of Stiffy Makane in the CYOA format that he (I can only assume from his exhaustive analysis of classic works) is very fond of. I played this some time ago and I must have taken a short branch, because I didn't get to any of the major story parts I recognized from Stiffy Makane. The other day I tried again, reveling in Undum's beauty and Mr. Ashwell's unique and intriguing illustrations, and I found the longer path, which got me to my favorite part.

(Spoiler - click to show)When you get inside Pamela's abode, the FUCKHERFUCKHERFUCKHERFUCKHER! suggestion is repeated and spills outside the bounding box on the page. That made me giggle.

It's categorized as AIF, but the high-minded parodic style verges more on tidy suggestiveness rather than explicit perversion, which is well-done. This is the SM story told the way it needs to be if it's appearing on unfurling aged parchment in a library with brass fixtures and a butler that serves brandy.

Enjoyed.

(Spoiler - click to show)Why don't more people write in Undum? My excuse is the documentation is a bit thin and assumes you are completely conversant in html and CSS. If this thing had a Twine front-end, I'd be all up in that like Stiffy Makane with a doughnut.

I understand what this game is trying to get across, and I genuinely sympathize with anyone who is exploited or harassed.

My only wish is that the game went another step and offered some actual sensible advice on how to maturely deal with sexual harassment instead of automatically assuming that the only option someone has is to retreat to their home and despair in solitude. Perhaps it's a limitation of Twine which can only offer the reader options that the author includes.

(Spoiler - click to show)Your Workplace

At the office one of your male co-workers keeps finding excuses to come over and stand near your desk. You realise it's because he's trying to see down your top.

>STAND UP

You get out of your chair. Your annoying co-worker Dexter is here.
>DEXTER, HELLO

"Good Afternoon, Dexter," you say, now at conversational height with him, breaking his direct view down your cleavage.

"Oh, hi," he replies, looking around at the attention this is attracting from the other cubicles. "No need to stand up on my account."

>ASK DEXTER ABOUT WHAT HE WANTS

"Did you need something? I noticed you hovering, and I'm certain you're not just standing over my desk to ogle me, because that would be quite embarrassing for the both of us."

Dexter glances around, tugging at his collar. "Oh, no," he says. "I was going to ask about the TPS report..."

>TELL DEXTER ABOUT GROIN PUNCHING

"Oh, good," you reply. "You might want to be careful sneaking up on me like that, though. Last guy who startled me got socked right in the goodies. Didn't mean to. Pure reflex, on accident. Can't control it..." you say, flailing your arms out in several jerky random directions.

"Oh right." he says, stepping back. "Hey, do you want to get coffee over lunch?"

>DEXTER, NO

"No, I have lunch all planned out. But thanks for the offer!"

>GIVE TPS REPORTS TO DEXTER
(first taking some TPS reports)
You hand a half-inch thick stack of TPS reports to Dexter. "Let me know if you need any more."

Dexter goes west.

The Coffeeshop

It's busy in the coffee shop today. While you're standing at the counter a man tries to squeeze past behind you. He puts his hands on either side of your waist and brushes the full length of his body up against you.

>DROP COFFEE

You release the hold on your latte, and the pasteboard cup explodes on the floor, splashing still-pretty-hot liquid on the creep's shiny shoes and the hem of his trousers.

"Whoopsie," you say cheerfully. "Oh, sorry about that, you startled me! Might want to be careful rubbing your junk on against a stranger while she's holding hot liquids!"

"It was an accident," he says, staring at his shoes. "You ruined my Italian-"

>TELL HIM ABOUT COFFEE

"And you wasted a four-dollar cup of coffee! I think we'll call it even."

>ORDER COFFEE

"Can I have another one please?" You turn back to the guy, handing him a stack of napkins. "Good thing this one didn't go higher, they do serve their coffee hot!"

Castle of the Red Prince is a short puzzle-box game. Your goal is to kill the Red Prince. He knows you have studied the arcane arts, but he's not particularly worried about your ability. Your ability is that you don't have to trudge N, S, E, W, U, DOWN. The player simply imagines where they want to go (by examining a location you can see or know about) and -zap= there you are. The entire game world is in scope for you to discover and peel away.

It's a very simple, not particularly complicated plot, but this game mechanic places your focus on examining everything. The prose is simple, direct, and well-written without florid verbosity. This gives CASTLE OF THE RED PRINCE's player and PC a refreshingly objective perspective on the actual goings-on. Who cares about directions when you needn't even bother with walls? You can go right to the Red Prince and stab him in the face. It won't work...but that's the game.

I find myself sometimes with very little patience for some IF. This one was direct enough to grab and hold me to completion. I did cheat by sleeping a lot, which essentially hands you as many next steps as you need to get you back on the right path. It took me about a half an hour, but it can be played longer (perhaps like a crossword puzzle for very experienced if-readers) if you avoid sleeping and figure it all out yourself.

I encountered only one place where I struggled with the parser and implementation: (Spoiler - click to show)In my dream I knew I had to place dynamite in the cave at the castle's weak foundation point. I was skimming the list of steps provided in the dreams perfunctorily, and I spent a while trying to PUT DYNAMITE ON FOUNDATION. The foundation is a container, not a supporter. True, the hint steps spelled this out, but I thought "on" was reasonable for placing dynamite on what I pictured as a timber beam.

Yes, it's short and yes, it has all kinds of potential in a larger game. I could see this approach being taken to tell an epic with the breadth of ZORK or STAR WARS or A GAME OF THRONES within the manageable size of a Infocom-ish length work.

This story reads like a prologue to the original System Shock from the point of view of one of the doomed colonists aboard Citadel station. If you've played SS, you remember the absolute unreal amount of gore and viscera and fragments of bodies that litter the hallways, all examples of the experimentation that the mad AI Shodan wrought upon the crew as she created her army of cyborg warriors that were your enemies in the game. This gives you a first person perspective of what that was like. Very gory, very visceral, very adult and would almost qualify as good enough to be one of the original computer logs in that game.

This story succeeds as an example of otherworld dystopian Science Fiction. Horses are not horses, but weird creatures with a carapace and tentacles. The protagonist is obsessive to the point of self-ruin to win what comes off as a parody of animal-judging competitions. You groom your horse as you like, enter the competition, and win (or lose I suppose - I did not play a second time). A neat read, but I'm not sure I care to play again and do things wrong to lose...as I'm not sure I could make the story turn out better.

I actually turned on the music as the game said to, and the game lasted exactly as long as the song. At the beginning the lyrics onscreen went right along with the audio. This was a neat little sort of textual music-video experience of a game, though ultimately forgettable unless you are a huge Ke$ha fan.

I actually like the idea of using Twine and screen effects as a parallel experience/multimedia to a song. There might even be somewhat of a gameplay element/rhythm game in keeping up with the lyrics. Interesting idea.