Ratings and Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

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 ]

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.

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.