Ratings and Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

You are a Chef! is solidly within the "look, I have written a really bad game!" school of comedy. We can see this from the very first line: "HELLO CHEF!!!!!1". The string of exclamation marks ends with a '1' because the fictional 'n00b' author put his finger off of the Shift-key a little too early.

The main problem with this approach to comedy is that an intentionally bad game is still a bad game. To take badness and elevate it to another level is possible, but very hard; and I doubt that taking a straightforward approach to it is the way to go. See Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective" for a non-straightforward, and much more successful, example. There, a separate "commentary" track is used to make fun of the source material. In You are a Chef!, we are just playing the very bad game.

Nor is the sheer absurdity of the events enough to make the player chuckle. Absurdity is only funny if there is some method behind it. Random objects falling from the sky simply do not qualify as a good joke.

Perhaps the dreariness of the game is best demonstrated by this exchange:

Iron safe falls from the sky!
It lands on top of clown and breaks open!

>x safe
In the iron safe you see a MYSTERY INGREDIENT.

>take ingredient
Taken.

>x it
I cannot tell you! It is a mystery!!

If you thought that was funny, please play this game.

Imagine a puzzle game making strong use of a set of simulationist rules about materials and sizes. Imagine a game set in the only partly material laboratory of a Renaissance magus. And imagine a game where the player character attempts to escape from bondage through spiritual purification.

If you can imagine all of those together, you have imagined Metamorphoses.

It is not just a strange game, it is also a very good game. The writing is impeccable and Short effectively weaves together the PCs current exploits with a more emotionally gripping backstory. The puzzles mostly aren't too hard, and all seem to have multiple solutions. The atmosphere is simply great. And there is also true progression in the story, as the PC purifies herself and finally chooses her own fate.

It is also a short game, and you'll probably play through it in two hours. That does mean that the backstory remains very sketchy, and the story doesn't get the emotional resonance that it might have gotten in a longer game. (I would have liked to see the Master in-game, for instance.) The multiple endings don't really work, since you choose between in your last move and that means that everyone is going to Undo and try out the other ones immediately (right?). And there were one or two details in the setting which I felt didn't really fit into the Universe of Renaissance Platonism.

But all in all, these are insignificant complaints compared to the virtues of the game. If you like puzzles, Plato and purification, you should not give this piece a miss.

(This game was part of BoucherComp. The premise if the Comp was: "No one has ever escaped from Lowell Prison. Why? Because there's only two ways out of here. One is dead in a pine box, and the other is that big wide-open gate over there, which I ask you seriously to please, please stay away from.")

Okay, so this is a SpeedIF game that is based on the infamous Pick up the Phone Booth and Die. It is, therefore, a very short and very sparsely implemented joke. But it is a joke without a twist. It is just PuTPBad plus the premise of the Comp. As far as I could ascertain, nothing else has been done with it.

This game didn't make me laugh, and that is pretty fatal for a one-joke game.

This game makes a point about interactive fiction design. It makes it well and quickly (one you have figured out the solution, probably by reading the source or the walkthrough). So, although this game is not enjoyable as such, it does the one thing that it attempts to do quite well.

What is the point that it makes? According to Karl Muckenhoupt, the point is that "it is possible for a puzzle to have a completely logical solution, and yet be nearly impossible to solve except by randomly guessing commands". Without disagreeing with that, I would say that the point of +=3 is that "conventions of play are there for a reason". Either way, it's a good point, and +=3 is a name that you might want to drop in a discussion now and then.

Your phone rings. You pick it up, and a voice tells you that "they" are coming to get you, and you'd better leave your apartment if you wish to stay alive. At that point the game starts. You type "look" and get a room description which mentions a "small table with phone". You type "x phone", and the game tells you "You see no such thing.". After examining a couple of more things (some not implemented), the bad guys enter you room and instantly kill you. Need I say more?

What follows--and I had only enough motivation to follow the walk-through--is a convoluted quest that makes little sense, involves mazes, and has you moving from one sparsely implemented location to another in a city that is far too big for the content it contains. I didn't play it to completion because of a guess-the-verb problem that the walkthrough did not solve for me.

Not recommended. It does come with a map, though, which is good. On a numerical scale, this game would get a 3 or 4.

Iraqi Invasion is a piece of interactive fiction based on a fake interactive fiction transcript by Matthew Baldwin, that can be read at http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001561.html. The original, where you supposedly play Bush, is quite funny; but it uses many non-standard commands such as "monger fear" and "railroad congress", and it involves many 'objects' that have not been described by the game.

Consequently, without some heavy changes, you can not make an interactive fiction game out of it. Nobody is possibly going to guess that the command to get out of the Oval Office is "GO PHOTOOP" if the game never actually tells you that you could do this. Or that you have to type things like "MONGER FEAR" in order to invade Iraq.

Unfortunately, Iraqi Invasion does not involve any significant changes at all, and consequently, the only way to play it is by typing, one-by-one, the commands from the fake transcript. But that means that you could just read the transcript instead of playing the game.

As far as I could tell, there are not even many alternate responses incorporated (which could have made the game an interesting addition to the transcript). There is almost nothing you can examine, for instance--which is a pity, since, as a non-American, I would have like to be able to examine Jesse Helms and John Ashcroft and find out who these people are and what they were saying about Iraq.

The conclusion, then, is that a funny IF transcript cannot necessarily be turned into a successful IF game, at least not without some major work being done that has not been done here.

Connect is a solid game, if rather short. There are a couple of fine puzzles, which are mostly quite easy, although one of them was (both from my own experience and from what I read on the newsgroup) somewhat underclued. The writing is okay, and the setting might be interesting if it had been worked out a little bit more. But what is certainly most interesting about Connect is, not quite unexpectedly, the special connect ability.

This ability allows the PC to read the thoughts both of those who are spatially separated from him, and from those who used to be in the location he is in now. The connect mode can be turned on and off throughout play, basically giving you two different sets of 'examine' messages.

I found the result quite interesting: you have both the all-too-standard 'physical' description of objects, and another, more 'mental' description. I would love to see a larger game where the possibilities of this command are really explored (with due consideration of the pitfalls, of course: just having two modes of examine might get old quick). In Connect, this is never really done: you use the special command to find out how you might get past the guards, and that is more or less it.

Still, the idea is good, and worth a look.

Except for one bug in the competition release that allows you to bypass a puzzle, the implementation is well done.

The great bane of IF is games that are too short. This, too, is a game that is too short. A couple of puzzles, the first vague ideas about a setting, an exploration of just the first possibilities of the connect ability, and then the game is finished. The end result is certainly not bad, but it is too forgettable.

If there ever was a game with an original premise, Slap that Fish is that game. You are standing in an alley, and have to defeat, one-by-one, a bunch of malicious fish. If you fail, the fish will take over the city! If you succeed, you can finally avenge the death of your father, who fell in the fight against the fish.

The mechanics of the game are a mix of (non-random) combat involving hit points and several combat actions, and classic IF-puzzles. It turns out, however, that the combat is only another puzzle: since the optimal strategy changes from encounter to encounter and cannot be predicted in advance, this is not a tactical game. It is partly trial and error, partly solving puzzles, as you attempt to get the highest possible score for each of the twelve fish.

It is in the puzzles themselves that Slap that Fish has not been sufficiently tested and polished. Some of the puzzles are badly clued and rather obscure; and there are some errors as well, including TADS-warnings. This detracts from the gameplay in an otherwise very smooth game. I personally used a walkthrough for those parts of the game that I could not quickly solve on my own, and this added to my enjoyment.

In conclusion, Slap that Fish is not a brilliant game. With a bit more polish, it could be a good game. In its current state, it is still a fun game, well worth playing, though you might want to consult the walkthrough when you get stuck.

The City by Sam Barlow is a short, bleak game. You start out in a bland room, with only a video recorder, a tape, and a remote control. So what do you do? You watch the tape. On it, you see a person just like you, in a bland room.

It won't take you long to realise that this person is you. And then the very boredom of your situation (which is equal for the character and the player) will make you want to break out of the situation that has been set up for you.

The first time I played it, I concluded that this was impossible. It is not--or at least not as impossible as it may seem at first glance. You should persevere: there is more to the story than just the first two location.

But even if you manage to reach the rest of the game and play it through completely, it will not leave you satisfied. There are a number of problems with The City, some of which could have been easily solved, and some of which couldn't. Solving the easy problems would push the game to a 3-star rating, but getting a 4-star rating would involve major extensions.

The easy problems all have to do with guess-the-verb situations, unimplemented objects, and stuff like that. The game was not beta-tested, and it shows. I didn't find any outright bugs, but lack of synonyms and guidance makes the game feel a little rough, and makes some of the puzzles far too difficult. I needed a walkthrough, and I won't be the only one.

The hard problem is that as it is, The City is only a fragment of a successful story. It could be the beginning, it could be the middle, it could even be the end, but we need more background, more action, more identification with the main character, before the situation presented gets the emotional power that Barlow is presumably striving for.

As it is, the game is too inconsequential. Still, it is an interesting experiment, and it could be used to great effect within a more substantial piece.

I don't like formalised rating systems. How many stars do you give a fun SpeedIF game? Do you compare it to other SpeedIF, or do you compare it to all other interactive fiction? Neither seems a very desirable choice, and that leaves me in an unsolvable dilemma.

Anyway, that's why I don't give rating without writing a corresponding review. Forget about the number of stars: A Day for Fresh Sushi is a very short and ridiculously easy game, but it has a nice atmosphere, more polish and backstory than you may expect from SpeedIF, and an NPC that I would love to see in a longer and more sustained game.