Reviews by Felix Larsson

A pretty faithful IF-remake of Space Invaders: The aliens drop their intergalactic missiles at you; you fire at them with your gun. As a game in it’s own right, I suppose it would be quite a disaster. But, of course, now, it’s not a game in it’s own right: it’s a rendition in text of an old graphics video game. That makes it kind of corny fun—to players who are familiar with the original game, that is.

I don’t think there’s a way actually to win this one (which is quite fair, since there never was a way to win Space Invaders in the first place, was there?), but I didn’t have the superhuman patience nor the subhuman pigheadedness to keep playing long enough to be sure of this.
Also, at a certain point, the author introduces an original element to the game …

You are a paddle. You can move up and down to block the ball.
Making interactive fiction of Pong is a wacky idea that Granade manages to transform into a weird experience, thanks to a writing that is reminiscent, in ways, of the language in For a Change, only more convoluted and presented as a kind of inner monologue of the paddle’s. Some feat, really, since (though there are appropriate responses to other standard commands) the paddle can (did I mention that?) do nothing but move up and down. The novelty of the writing is, however, gone some while before either you or the opponent Non-Player Paddle scores a fifteenth time and the game is at last over.

To anyone who never played or even watched a match of Pong, this game must be terribly confusing; and I suppose it would be quite the worst introduction to interactive fiction that could well be imagined.

This is a hypertext collection of poems demonstrating the basic functionality of the author’s Interactive Poetry Extension to Inform 7. The poems are all single stanza quatrains. The first line of all the poems reads “Arid and pale”. The reader chooses one of the words of this line and the poem is incremented by one line according to that choice.

As a collection of poetry I didn’t find the work very convincing (though it might well be more to somebody else’s taste); anyway, the collection was probably intended more as a demonstration of the extension than as an attempt to achieve literary immortality.