Reviews by Andy Devil

The Thirty-Nine Steps by Jack Lockerby is a mystery/detective-like game based on the same-titled book by John Buchan. I'm not familiar with the source material, but games based on works of literature, movies, etc. are generally something I would like to see a lot more often.

This is a ZX Spectrum game, which will likely limit your save options to only one save state (ramsave), unless you're an expert with the system, I guess. The slowness of the parser is a huge problem, more often than not letters are swallowed because the software cannot keep up with an average typing speed. After doing some research I assume this to be a problem of the hardware itself.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has some interesting features. The room description is displayed in a separated partition on top of the screen and updated in real time. Likewise, the passage of time moves the game time forward. Time window puzzles combined with the abovementioned typing speed limitation lead to frenzied backspace manias.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an extremely hard game. There is little time for exploration (literally), objects are barely manipulable and usually hidden (sometimes even in plain sight). The inventory management is sluggish and confusing, the size of items seems to matter when putting them in a container, but illogical situations still arise (e.g. placing a table in your coat pocket). Puzzles pretty much require you to know exactly what the author intended you to do. Even when you have stumbled on the solution to a problem, you will be forced to start this game again and again to optimize your path - wasting time will make you miss the time windows and leave you in limbo. In one situation you are required to carry no items in your inventory (except if they are in your container) - you better anticipated this and dropped all items you deemed unnecessary for your progress ON THE DAY BEFORE!

I managed to complete a fifth of the game, based on the score, but got stuck in an illogical situation where a cab driver rats you out to the police even though you have never met him before (or committed a crime, for that matter).

This game is not necessarily bad, but its crazy difficulty ensures that you will not get far without a walkthrough (to my knowledge, none exists) if you're not a text adventure god with a lot of time on your hands.

No rating

CERCLA by Jeffrey P. Robinson is yet another example for a game that never should have been made.

Your valiant search for... documents or something (the introduction is REALLY boring) leads you through a maximum of 169 (!) rooms which are "luckily" mostly empty. What begins in an office environment soon turns into something suffering from "unnecessary-inclusion-of-fantasy syndrome". As soon as I encountered the first dwarf the game was pretty much over for me.

But of course the problems of this game start right away on the first screen. Rather than letting the player carry items in his inventory you have to use a container, which serves no purpose whatsoever other than making things more tedious for the player.

You can barely examine or do anything in this game. "I don't understand x as a verb. You can't see y here. I don't. You can't. Mehmy mehmy meh." It's so much fun playing a colossally huge game with barely anything to look at or do! I swear people just make bad gameplay on purpose!

The writing in this game is not quite as piss-poor as some other atrocities I've encountered, but there are some very weird things happening.

The men's and women's bathroom descriptions, for example, produce the exact same text (including some very specific things that make this completely illogical) other than replacing the words "men" and "women", respectively. On two different floors!!!

Poems (not the author's!) are included randomly. Items are usually "glued down" or can't be taken for other ridiculous reasons. There are weird political undertones. There is no differentiation between entering a room for the first and sequential times, so things happen again and again when you press look or leave and re-enter a room. Even a creature you can kill is resurrected this way! The seriousness of the memos and documents you find and read (all of them boring and uninteresting) is painfully juxtaposed with the silliness of encountering fantasy creatures. In one location you encounter, of all things, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I mean, what did you expect, the Addams Family?!

Documents specifically adressing the player just lie around in the game world. In one instance you find the directions you can go to not in the room description, but in a note you find on the ground!!!

This game is a total mess and probably the result of the usage of some weird drugs. In fact, only that would explain the existence of this abomination perfectly.

1/10

Signos by Mauricio Diaz Garcia is a middle-length, allegorical quest for enlightenment.

On his way to inner peace (and stuff), the traveller is beset by unexpectedly required interactions, perilous spelling errors and vengeful lack of synonyms. You know you have a good game on your hands when the in-game walkthrough doesn´t match up with what you actually have to input to complete the game! On the plus side, the hyperlink-driven interface keeps you focussed on gameplay-relevant items and persons (but don´t expect anything else mentioned in room descriptions to actually be implemented in any way).

The story of Signos takes place in a dreamscape (even though the game keeps reminding you that you are actually "already awake"), requiring interaction with objects that are mostly symbolic and several npcs, themselves representing mainstream religions, annoying the player with quasi-philosophical ramblings amounting to little more than nonsense. Perhaps the author intended to use broken room descriptions, mysteriously undefined items and the lack of any beta testing to allude to a deeper, enlightening purpose, but as the game is, even though enhanced by the praisable inclusion of pictures and sound effects, it fails to draw the player into the game world since one is constantly confronted with its blatant mistakes.

Despite Signos being, for the most part, an unsalvageable failure, I for one still endorse the intention of the author. The basic idea of creating a symbolic, surreal, metaphysical journey perfectly lends itself to the medium of interactive fiction. While Signos certainly isn´t the "Holy Mountain" or "El Topo" of text adventures, one probably can still play it to experience for himself how NOT to write a game of its genre.

3/10

PS: as usual, if there are any grammar or spelling mistakes in my review, please inform me of it. I´m not a native speaker and thus always happy to learn more about the language I use for my own writings as well. ^_^

Pointless linear-pathed time travel/dinosaur-based, fourth-wall-breaking game that was written and can be played through in 5 minutes, respectively. No attempts were taken to implement anything even remotely out of the ordinary and hence there is very little to say about this dispensable story.

One particular quirk that might mildly hamper your playthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)PULLING a button. Yeah, that makes sense. It´s probably stuck or something.

2/10

Annoyed Undead is a nondescript and very short game in which you guide a vampire's escape from hostile territory.

This game deliberately avoids the inventory mechanic (even providing a reasonable justification for doing so), and unsurprisingly the few puzzles are thus easily solved. There are a few minor typos here and there. Even for a speed-IF title (or at least its equivalent) there's not much to look at or do in this game.

Unfortunately this game is far too bland and short to give it anything more than a

2/10

Episode in the Life of an Artist details the daily routine of the everyman/simpleton protagonist, from getting up and dressing, to preparing breakfast and taking the bus to work.

This game does a good job defining the personality of the protagonist by showing his view of the things he encounters. The mundaneness of his (apparently lonely) working-class existence is juxtaposed with his favourable self-view. The protagonist even considers himself an artist of mechanical genius, when ironically his job is so simple a machine is developed to replace him.

The counterpoint to some very interesting writing is the defectiveness of the programming. While still very playable, there are instances you will curse the author's tendency to require very specific inputs. (The final turn of the game is especially bad with this.) At least one one-time-only event is repeated every time you perform a certain action. The final (of fortunately few) puzzles is pure guesswork. You cannot read the victory message of the game because it is unfortunately automatically skipped. The scoring system was left in the game but is never used.

While, like mentioned above, the writing is interesting and done well, there are some weird instances that jar with the rest of the story. Putting fantasy elements in otherwise realistic settings is something I have a strong dislike of and in this game does not benefit this story in any way. In fact, the author's decision to let this story take place in a Zork-based universe is baffling and serves no obvious purpose.

Episode in the Life of an Artist is an interesting piece of work that is unfortunately hampered by abovementioned flaws but certainly worth being tried out.

4/10

The Onion of Destiny is a four-turn-minimum game set on the top of the Eiffel Tower. The sole puzzle is quickly figured out and the game over in a matter of minutes. You can also (Spoiler - click to show)just wait for a number of turns to get the alternative ending.

There is really nothing noteworthy or special about this game, there is no humour or twist that would make it stand out even a little.

The only thing of interest I've noticed was a sentence missing a word ("The fistfight is far too complicated to possible"), but that's it. :-)

2/10

The Streets of London, originally released on the Commodore 64, seems to be a great grand uncle of the 2002 disasterpiece Underground Compound, because it is equally unplayable and disgustingly bad.

In this "game" your protagonist, named Marvin K Molestrangler, is on a quest to find the Holy Grail of all things. The Streets of London's Wikipedia article (!) claims that the game's humour was based on Monty Python, which is more than an insult to the legendary comedy troupe. I could spot only one or two references during the time I wasted on this garbage, the main one of course being the Holy Grail.

Nothing in this game makes the slightest sense. The map is confusing, rooms completely undetailed. The player is moved around randomly. You are given no indication of what to do. The parser... don't even ask. Interactive fiction sure has come a long way, but this parser is atrocious even for 1982. Your enemies in this game (there is a real-time fighting minigame that is impenetrable and probably completely broken) consist of "nasty old ladies" and "antepodians" (misspelt). The game's complete lack of any coherence and reason was maybe be intended to be amusing, but in reality it only manages to annoy and induce anger.

The Streets of London is a remnant of the dark age of interactive fiction, and even in this category failed to produce any legacy other than being one of the frustratingly worst disgraces to videogaming ever produced. Truly, it baffles my mind what the authors ever intended to accomplish with this... but then again you would have to share their insanity to be able to enjoy The Streets of London...

1/10

Some games put you in the role of a shining knight, rescuing princesses and kingdoms, defeating evil forces and powerful monsters. And in some games you're just a dirty, smelling rat. The latter is the case in You've got a Stew going by Ryan Veeder.

On your quest for ingredients to put in the namesake stew, you explore a small set of tunnels and openings to the surface. There are a few NPCs that can be interacted with, but conversation isn't too important or interesting. (Spoiler - click to show)I was trying my best to woo Fran, the female rat, but to no avail. There are some funny custom responses, but also some meta-references I could have done without. Puzzles are solvable though I would have wished for a less mono-dimensional way of solving some of them. (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. the one with the girl.) Even after trying quite a few things I couldn't get the optional sixth point.

I like happy little games like this one, motivating the player by being humourous and giving him a concrete goal and solveable, logical puzzles.
In the case of You've got a Stew going, the game is very playable though on the short side and amongst aforementioned details lacking some more items to use, so I give it a pretty good

5/10

Last Resort by Jim Aikin is a large, ambitious mystery/fantasy game.

The player controls a teenage girl (unfortunately we don't learn much about her other than she's rather superficial and shallow) who, as we soon learn, is heading towards a rather grim destiny in the course of the day. To escape your predicament you have to perfectly solve a large number of puzzles which I would easily label INSANELY DIFFICULT. Herein lies the main problem of this game.

The player's puzzle-solving ambitions are hampered both by invisible timers and dead ends, which is an absolute no-go in a game of Last Resort's magnitude! The inclusion of puzzles which can only be solved in a short window of time completely contradicts with the game's non-linear approach to gameplay. Twice I progressed through a larger part of the game, only to be stumped with finding me in an unwinnable situation. (I gave up afterwards, as would most people.)

It is really a shame this game is held back by this ball and chain, because the writing and general approach are quite good. The game's events are somewhat unrealistic, but to a degree that can easily be forgiven. (Spoiler - click to show)An example: Would you really let the girl you are going to sacrifice later in the day wander around freely? On the other hand a more interesting main character would likely put the player over the edge of trying to complete the frustrating puzzles. (In such situations, the game Portal always comes to my mind.)

To summarize, brave players might find quite some fun in this monstrous game. It's a trip best aided by the complex hint system. (I asked the permission of the author to post the password - the usage of one should never be necessary in the first place! - here.) (Spoiler - click to show)Password: Gertrude Stein

4/10

Gardening for Beginners by Juhana Leinonen is a short speed-IF game describing the misadventures of a budding gardener.

What is supposed to be a peaceful and upbeat day of work quickly turns into a nightmare as the player is beset by the horrors of nature.

I can recommend this game as a choice to suggest to text adventure newbies, as it is uncomplicated, easy to play and funny to boot.

Personally I would add an option to name your fish to add some more personal involvement to the game. In fact the enclosed framework of the game world even would allow for a game allowing the player whatever he wants to do (e.g. drink the poison, or eat the fish).

Anyway, quite a fun little title to play.

5/10

Conrad Knopf's South America Trek is an educational game from the dark ages of interactive fiction. Originally published as shareware in a series of similar titles, the author expected you to dish out 30$ for the registered version.

I pity you if you did.

South America Trek sends the player (who is sometimes adressed directly by the impersonal "narrator" for some reason) on a whacky journey through South America to learn geography and stuff.

The first major problem of this game that meets the player's eye is the size of this game. South America is a terrifyingly huge game environment with confusing (and sometimes illogical) path structure, yet manages to be undetailed and plain boring. Drawing a map, whether you use your computer or go old-school with pen & paper, is both a must and a chore. Items must be gathered (they happen to be just lying around, of course) and exchanged in illogical trades (e.g. bauxite for a torch) in order to be able to progress to new areas, which, of course, are just as boring and unimaginative (not to mention unimaginable - by the way, don't plan on "examining" anything in this game, it's not implemented) as the previous ones.

South America Trek is a game you don't want to play. Reading random facts (and sometimes blatant lies - sloths are NOT dangerous, for one) about places and countries in South America in interactive fiction form while having to navigate through an atrocious and insanely huge maze path system, constantly going in circles from orientation loss and backtracking to trade items, is as far removed from having fun as I can possibly imagine. To top it off, there's pretentious in-game advertising for the author's other works. I hope there's a video game designer hell somewhere...

The best thing about this game: The word "fuck" was implemented. In an educational game for children. LOL

On a personal note, writing this review has been dragging on for quite some time because the game was just so unplayable, and then I found out the hard way you can die with no undo option, so just this once, I didn't finish this game 100% (but I got close enough).

Oh, and it's a DOS game. Good luck if you want to save your game, I couldn't...

1/10, absolute atrocity

Tears of a Tough Man by Bruce Humphrey is a short mystery murder memento game in which you are meant to restore your main characters's memory by wandering around and triggering his recollection by doing various things. What might sound interesting is held back dramatically by writer's inexperience and ineptitude.

In a forum post, the author stated that he planned to implement multiple features missing from the final version but couldn't (for some reason) - it shows. (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. multiple endings) Grammar and spelling errors, whilst not overabundant, distract. Some of the puzzles are made unneededly tedious by poor syntax and logic. The in-game environment feels unnaturally constructed to the point of being ridiculous. Likewise, quest-important items just happen to be lying around in your path. The ending (Spoiler - click to show)(if you'd like to try this out, the point you're likely to miss is "x stains") does not really reveal or conclude anything.

To sum things up, Tears of a Tough Man is an author's debut work that does show some promise but in its ineptness cannot be salvaged even by mending and polishing.

2/10

PS: like I mentioned in a comment on my last review (that probably didn't get read too much) comments on my reviewing style would be much appreciated.

George is an extremely short game set in a zoo. Apparently it was part of a hoax, which explains its duration and abrubt, unfinished end.

The plot involves two friends (or lovers), who appear to be drugged up and ready to embark on a dangerous mission (which is a combination always good for netting one a Darwin award). The game text breaks the fourth wall in one or two places, referring to the non-existent full version.

If this was but the beginning of an author's debut game, George would be a promising venture, but in its existing form this game is not worth the time it takes to download it.

2/10

Delightful Wallpaper by Andrew Plotkin is a fantasy/mystery puzzle game that is as much removed from being fun as possible. The minimalist, fragmental story does not provide much of an incentive to figure out maze puzzles so hard they put diamond (which is as we all know the hardest metal known the man!) to shame.

The interactivity is very limited in this game. I found myself trying to pick up objects time and again, only to be foiled by the protagonist's (who initially comes across as some kind of gentleman burglar) smug unwillingness to "manipulate gross material substance". Using your inventory in this game is mostly limited to your trusty (telepathically controlled, then?) notepad, which, of course, only serves you baffle you even more how to progress in the ever-changing maze scenery. Moving around your protagonist opens and closes pathways and doors (generously, no map is provided. Hint system? Nope.), inevitably sending you around in circles and engendering frustration-induced headaches. The difficulty in wrapping your mind around a multitude of sometimes-connected rooms is painfully juxtaposed with how utterly uninteresting it is being a nameless character exploring an empty house of immovable objects with no real goal or mission in the first place!

In fact, there is really not much needed to be said about Delightful Wallpaper. (Spoiler - click to show)By the way, the wallpaper - you guessed it - serves no purpose in the story whatsoever. The ending is brief and does not reveal any additional information that would justify wasting your time on a game that should be used only for testing interactive fiction auto-solving programmes.

Good coding? Definitely.
Fun to play? Not at all. Not at all.

No rating due to the fact that after one third of the game I got helplessly stuck, but couldn't be bothered to put too much effort into progressing on my own and instead finished the game by following the walkthrough.

Version 1 of the review that used the wrong interpreter (only play this with Adrift 4):
(Spoiler - click to show)You know you have a good game on your hands when you can't solve it following a walkthrough word by word.

This is exactly the case with Robert Street's "adventure" game Take One, clearly the work of someone who didn't even try to make a playable game.

The basic idea of directing an actress on a movie set, while not an uninteresting idea, is implemented absolutely poorly. Take One is not even able to keep the perspective straight! Whilst the protagonist of the game is "Indianette Jones" (a stereotypical dumb blonde, by the way), described in the third person, commands like "inventory" result in a confusing "Myself is carrying..." output. So who are you actually playing?!

Let's talk about the biggest failure of Take One, the parser. There are bad parsers, there are really bad parsers, and then there's this game. I don't want to "spoil" your "fun" (in case you decide to subjugate yourself to the torture of trying out this piece of fiction yourself), but let me just say that if a million monkeys on a million typewriters were forced to write a playable interactive fiction game, it wouldn't take them all eternity to come up with a much better result than Robert Street. Even the basic fundamentals of internal logic are broken (the game "magically" forgetting about the direction you came from and therefore trapping you, needing to refer to unseen objects in order to progress, etc...). One might theorize that like Nintendo Hard old-school video games the broken controls attempt to make the game (rather unfairly) harder, but it's much more probable the author just didn't have a clue what he was doing.

To cut a long story short, don't play it. Don't touch it. Don't even point at it.

1/10

PS: I have a bit of a problem with reviewing a game I couldn't play to the end. In this case even the walkthrough didn't help me, but of course if anybody knows how to get to the end I will revise my review.

Version 2:

Take One by Robert Street is a very short, very linear game. In fact, even with the walkthrough, you will likely have a hard time beating it if you don't follow it to the word. A pretty unrealistic time counter (even trivialities and failed actions use up time, for example) limits the exploring you will do in this game and pretty much ensures you have to play it again and again to figure it out. Aside from this bad design decision, the syntax is quite picky, which is guaranteed to hamper your abilities of puzzle-solving. Due to its short length, with some patience the game should be beatable though.

Compared even to the bad gameplay, the story of Take One isn't a beautiful and unique snowflake either. The premise tells you that you are a film director in command of a Indiana Jones-referencing character, yet the perspective is just like in any other interactive fiction game. Crystals, supernatural beings and the likes are used in pretty stereotypical manner and there isn't even an attempt to make the story or setting different from something that was thought up in five minutes. A particular odd writing quirk is that the stereotypical dumb blonde protagonist is insulted by the movie director (which is you!) in both the very beginning and end of the game, yet there isn't the slightest justification for it anywhere in the game text!

Bottom line: Another "play and forget" game. 2/10

Playing Games is a short fantasy game about an trial of initiation in a semi-secret club. Not much information about the setting is revealed, which is a shame since the writing is quite competent.

There are few puzzles (one of them a little harder - it got me stuck - though in hindsight it was rather obvious), mostly searching the areas carefully does the trick of progressing you further into the game. One puzzle is optional, though its content left me quite baffled. (Spoiler - click to show)(the holly wreath which makes you disappear for completely unknown reasons) In fact, some events that happen in the game are of magical nature, which is one point the description of the setting is unfortunately lacking. In a lesser game, I wouldn't mind, but here I was wishing for greater enlightenment. (Spoiler - click to show)An interesting point is that the initiation ritual was designed to be unsolvable by its in-game creators, but a mysterious NPC helps the player - this is something I really wanted to be explained more.

One thing that makes Playing Games special is the implementation of a "Meong"-like maze minigame (without the "dying" part), which is fortunately auto-solvable (I didn't have the patience to finish the final stage).

In conclusion, Playing Games is a quite playable effort, I would have wished for a bigger, less streamlined game and especially a more detailed setting.

4/10

Two-turn (minimum) speed IF game based on the theme "chicken". Some bad coding and grammar mistakes, but it seems a little bit more effort was devoted to this very short game than usual for speed IF standards, e.g. it is possible to ask the chicken about relevant topics, also endings are randomized.

Not much to see here, as is to be expected. Play and forget...

2/10 (which converts to 1/5)

(RR stands for random review. (as in the game for reviewing was chosen randomly))

This survival horror (?) speed-IF game is an interactive fiction game in the way movies mocked on MST3K are movies. Chaos and non-sequiturs permeate this attempt at writing. Palindrome-creating monkeys, David Letterman and sphincter-like floors are just some of the madness that awaits you in this game. (but really there isn't much more, don't expect to be able to examine anything, or heavens forbid even pick anything up!)

The game ends only in defeat and explosive death, a fate that in my humble opinion also should foreshadow the author's own.

I like the fact that you can always go up, but never down. Feels like a certain M.C. Escher painting.

some of my favourite quotes from "Underground compound":

-) Six minutes later, everything everywhere blows up. (lol)

-) They play billiards here. (and no, we never learn who "they" are, this is literally the beginning of a room description!)

-) Little Billy just vomited ketchup all over the place. (bleh)

Interactive fiction really doesn't get any worse than "Underground compound".

1/10