Ratings and Reviews by jcompton

Neither this game nor the game it roasts (Malinche's Endgame) are readily available today. So it is a hidden memorial to a specific strain of designer-on-designer criticism extinguished a while ago.

What it does have is a consistent voice that finds every opportunity to portray the protagonist as a powerful, sweaty, and sweatily powerful man, with a side dish of awkward exit descriptions. There is no real goal or end. There are plenty of rooms to visit that repeat the same jokes about naval stereotypes, shareware-preview marketing, and acts of personal violence.

The meta-puzzle for today's player is deciding if the quest to find the story file is worth the reward. It made me blurt-laugh several times, which doesn't make it a good game or art, but does give it the rank of Weirdly Amusing Artifact.

It's a generous two star review for this easily forgotten, heavily flawed treasure hunt. It commits a lot of the usual sins of this period of text/graphics games: disk swapping, difficult mapping (including the old "you're looking in a different direction" gag), opaque puzzles poorly clued by blurry/chunky/unclear graphics, and lots of things which are very unfair. But there's a weird style to the game and some clever lateral thinking puzzles which, in the hands of better designers, could and would (and probably have) gone down a lot better. Difficult to justify tackling in earnest, but worth exploring with a ready dose of nearby hints.

This is a trope-heavy choicer which feels most like an exercise in writing a range of standard-issue conclusions to a stock "isolated farmer alien abduction" scenario. It does have distinct voice and style, occasionally marred by imperfections in formatting and language.

Your first choice is to be either Roger or Ellie. Although both are described (before the choice, that is) as loner, isolated Wyoming cattle farmers, "alone so often these days that sometimes you have to remind yourself of your own name", the choice quickly has more than a cosmetic impact. Roger is terse, gruff, and wholly go-it-alone. Ellie at least is on a first-name basis with a barn cat named Milo and has the option of calling a veterinarian for assistance. And the circumstances that spark their alien encounter relate to their herds but are very different challenges.

The two character branches have multiple distinct limbs with a relatively small number of choices. The situations and the outcomes are strictly mainstream/pulp sci-fi writing.

Where the game distinguishes itself is in the different voice given to the two characters. Not simply Roger's point of view but his plotlines tend to be rougher, more direct, more abrupt, and less florid than Ellie's. Her tales frequently have longer, more elaborate prose even for some of the less-than-ideal outcomes. (Arguably Roger's overall "happiest" ending is probably the most abrupt non-death ending, (Spoiler - click to show)when his indefinite alien confinement is relieved by the arrival of his half-alien son.)

Indeed, the characters seem to get generally better outcomes when they make different types of choices, (Spoiler - click to show)Roger doing best when he plays a confident, strong, but not-reckless brand of masculinity, Ellie doing best when she demonstrates compassion and patience.

The storylines of Stars Above are easily digested because chances are you already know them on some level. But it's a fun diversion.

It is the bleak allegorical near future. Downtrodden everypeople must sell the only thing they have of value--IP addresses--to moneyed interests, in order to support their vices.

That's a story that could go somewhere! And the format initially suggests that it will, telling you that you have three addresses to sell. However, nothing that qualifies as a "game" actually seems to have been implemented. There is only one path to an abrupt end, and you can see all of the content in a brisk 90 seconds.

The post-game "synopsis" and "extra notes" reveal the author's broader and bolder ambitions (one plot point is labeled (METAPHOR FOR MYSELF, THE AUTHOR)) but something apparently went awry before the decision to publish was made.

Truly fantastic things can be done, in earnest or in parody, with the voice of Holden Caulfield. This not-remotely-finished game doesn't do them.

You wander into cutscenes from the book with no particular object. No documentation or in-game explanation is provided for parenthetical numbers which look like they might be footnotes, but the FOOTNOTE command is not implemented. Nor is much of anything else, including at least one room which lacks any description whatsoever.

Maybe it escaped.

Autocomplete in 1984? Not too shabby.

Swiss Family Robinson is an odd entry in the bookware wave, a parser game clearly aimed at a younger playing audience. (That doesn't mean you don't get 1984-style instadeaths, but they do feel a bit more like learning opportunities.) But the parser works with you, saving you from wasting time on impossible or unparseable commands by basically forcing everything to conform to an autocomplete algorithm.

And out of the shortlist of commercial titles that expressly targeted a younger audience (Seastalker and... a few others, give me a minute) SFR seems to have dialed in on its target much more effectively. You may be at a loss for things to do (or animals to butcher into steaks) but it never feels like the game is abandoning you.

It's possible to be rescued without doing all of the interesting things in the game, making the game replayable. And today it feels ahead of its time by gently putting the player on rails without being too patronizing.

This is not a great game but it is one of the best of its genre, the split-screen graphics/text adventure of the 1980s. The story unfolds with actual beats and although it's possible to miss the choice you're asked to make, the story does branch in a meaningful way that's unusual for the period.

The graphics, while imperfect, are evocative and have a sense of style to them, and have at least surpassed the extraordinarily low bar set by some of Sierra's worst abuses. Similarly, although the game can be laughably small in scope if you're uncharitable (you hop from planet to planet, but each "planet" is really just a modest-sized map near a spaceport), there isn't a ton of padding masquerading as game content.

Mindshadow is routinely hailed by everyone up to and including Interplay itself as the better game. Interplay always passed this game up in favor of Mindshadow in its retrospectives. I am here to stridently disagree. On a five-star scale I only put one star between them, but it's the difference between "I never need to play Mindshadow again" and "a pleasant afternoon revisiting The Tracer Sanction sounds nice."

Unfortunately, from here Interplay (and others) started making bad and misguided choices, including the totally mistaken idea that what 8-bit text/graphic adventures needed most was a GUI. That was the last thing they needed, and subsequent games like Borrowed Time and Tass Times In Tonetown would have benefited if they had simply stuck with the formula and focused on using more of that precious real estate for art.

Jimmy Maher argues that this adaptation of the first two novels of what is now known as the Chronicles of Amber wants to be a choice-based game. It's a compelling argument.

But there's more going on here than that, because they really committed to a high concept for a sprawling wide-open parser experience. There's an elaborate fencing system in the parser which ends up being entirely unnecessary. There's a clunky-but-engaging life-or-death map-building minigame (used for "walking the Pattern", a rite of passage for Amberites such as your character) which can be entirely avoided with a single clever verb. There are all sorts of twists and turns that make a rote recreation of the novels not-quite-right, or actually just plain boring compared to the game's unique alternate path through Prince Corwin's top priorities ((Spoiler - click to show)recovering his identity, revenge on chief rival Eric, and ruling over Amber.)

Even for the mid-1980s, there's a lot of parser fighting here as you struggle to reconcile your ideas for how to advance the plot, the opaque cues and clues being given by the other characters in the game, and the seeds planted by the original Zelazny text. Even more than I'd enjoy seeing a supercut of the satisfactory paths through the game (and there are at least two "good" endings, plus others which are "complete but less than perfect") I'd like to see a documentary about the process this game's large team went through to put it together.