Reviews by Bernie

This is an adrift game written for a comp in 2003. You play an apprentice demon hunter sent to a village to rid it of its demons and thereby earn the title of "demonhunter". The game is a simple one composed of 7 rooms. Puzzles are very easy and the game is very short. During my quick play, the game did seem to be well-implemented. All the objects in the description can be examined and there were no major flaws with the exception that I managed to finish the game with a score of 6 out of 5 possible points. Granted, that might be my fault: I'm always striving to be an overachiever.

The opening description is: "U R N THE FR0NT YARD 0F A LARGE ABAND0NED VICTR0N H0USE. ST0NE STEPS LEAD UP 2 A W1DE PR0CH"

Sadly, I played a few turns anyway. Might as well give the game a fair shot, right? Besides, I've never seen a "Pr0ch" before. I walked through a few rooms and found a few dead bodies outside. When I typed "look", I got the response "THERE IS N0THING KEWL". Yup, that sums it up perfectly. Nothing 'Kewl' in this game at all. I marked it as "I've played it" and now wish I could add "and I want those wasted 10 minutes of my life back."

I haven't played many speed-if games, so they might all be a bit strange. This one suffers from the problems I'd expect from speed-if: there are few locations and the NPC responds to very few conversation topics.

At the outset you arrive in a strange room with an odd old lady who is described as being stuck to the sofa singing show tunes. (Thankfully, no show tunes are sung.) The writing in the game hints at a war between the penguins and the dinosaurs, but there is little elaboration. There is little obvious motivation in the beginning of the game, but there are so few rooms and objects that your strange task becomes obvious within a few turns.

Other than a few amusing lines of description, the game holds little value as a game. The overall theme is bizarre without being intriguing and the only puzzle in the game is solved fairly quickly.

Really, I'd like to give this game 1.5 stars. It has more charm than the Eureka C64 games that I played, and I appreciated the attempt at humor, even if many of the in-jokes are too dated to be understood.

Like many other C64 games, the text is accompanied by pixilated graphics that you must wait to load before typing the next command. (This is no more than 1 second, but will get annoying quickly, especially with the very large number of empty locations you must traverse.) The game features instant death at some locations, a primitive parser, and a dearth of room names. Handily, the game does list the objects and exits at each location, bringing the frustration factor down a bit.

Overall, it's not a game to bother playing. But if you feel the urge, I managed to play it using a C64 interpreter I found at http://www.ccs64.com/ I can't vouch for it being virus-free or safe to download, but it did run the games.

There are two "Eureka" games in the file, both by Ian Livingstone. In one, you wander about a dinosaur infested landscape, attempting to avoid getting eaten. In the other, you attempt to escape from a POW camp in Germany. Both come complete with C64 pixilated graphics and cheezy music, which will make you giggle. The fun ends there, though, since you need to wait for the pictures to render every time you move (only about 1 second, but enough to get annoying as you attempt to move about quickly) and the music will make you hit the mute button after about 40 seconds.

Neither Eureka game contains anything worth working through. The descriptions are sparse, the parser is limited, and the map is large and bare. The dinosaur game ends abruptly in instant death in several places.

For those who are technologically challenged like myself, I found a C64 emulator at http://www.ccs64.com/ I can't vouch for it being virus-free or safe to download, but it did run the games.

After reading a review on here, I popped open Violet to read a few quick sentences. Unfortunately, I had to surrender my computer to my husband for an appointment 10 minutes later. Violet was so well-written and interesting that I ended up co-opting my husband's computer and downloading an interpreter so I could keep playing. The game was just too much fun to put down.

The narration in the game is entirely from the point-of-view of a girlfriend, and it sparkles. Almost every command you type evokes a witty response. As I played, I found myself falling in love with the girlfriend behind the keyboard who makes clever artwork and calls me cute pet names.

The puzzle behind the game is deceptively straightforward: you need to write. There are many highly entertaining distractions and the puzzles center around masking them. The solutions to the puzzles are logical and a built-in hint system helps keep you from getting stuck.

Everything about the game shines, from the well-implemented commands and descriptions to the strong and well-developed characters that kept me glued to the game until the finish. The writing is so good that you will want to play it again, just to see more of the fun distractions and hear more cute pet names.

It's been a very long time since I've played any of these old dungeon-crawl games. I was tickled to discover that they still held quite a bit of entertainment value. You play the part of an adventurer who must gather treasure while exploring a rather vast cave.

Like any older game, this one held numerous parser frustrations. The game recognizes few verbs, and "examine" "search" and "i" are notably missing (you must type 'inventory' instead). To further complicate things, there are no room names, there is no 'undo' command, and there is at least one object that is easy to lose irretrievably if it is used at the wrong time. There is also no 'save' or 'restore'. The game instead uses 'suspend' and 'resume', but this seems to allow only one saved game at a time. Further saves overwrite the previous save. (Spoiler - click to show)It took me several deaths before I discovered that "swing knife" would allow me to attack the monsters, since the game doesn't seem to recognize them as nouns. Also, at some point I got very frustrated over a puzzle until I realized that by dropping the rope then typing "climb down" allowed me to use the rope even though "use rope" didn't work.

Nevertheless, as I worked my way through the caverns and discovered a series of twisty little passages, all alike, and worked to free myself before my brass lantern ran out of batteries, I found myself grinning. I still haven't succeeded in solving all the puzzles, and I suspect that this game will replace solitaire for a few weeks as my favorite 'bored at work' diversion.

You have been selected by your village to go to the oracle for advice. Your journey begins in a cave and you must solve a handful of puzzles before you arrive at your destination.

The puzzles in this game are generally logical. (Spoiler - click to show) I did manage to light a fire without any matches, which baffled me a bit. The game will take under two hours to play for anyone familiar with IF. The author seems to have done a good job of keeping the game from becoming unwinnable. After playing it once through, I attempted to leave key objects in inaccessible places, but the game managed to throw me back. The puzzles in the game were unique enough to hold interest, but straightforward enough to prevent any frustration. At any given time, the player is holding only a small number of objects, and a general 'try object from inventory with object in room' approach will serve to solve most puzzles.

Ad Verbum is solely a puzzle game (no story or plot). Unlike traditional IF puzzles, the puzzles in Ad Verbum are word puzzles, mostly of 'guess the verb' form. In general, I detest 'guess the verb' puzzles, but this game succeeds beautifully by creating logical constraints for the verbs. While playing it, I found myself happily mulling over synonyms for 'take' and 'exit'. The writing in the game is very clever, and the author does an exceptional job of following the rules presented in the game, managing to give entire room and object descriptions using only, for example, words that begin with 'w'.

The game is relatively short. Most of the time you spend playing it will be spent thinking over puzzles. Ad Verbum is great for delivering the 'ah hah!' moment of a cleverly solved puzzle. It's also a terrific game for involving others in the puzzles. Normal IF puzzles are difficult to share with others, but it was simple to turn to my husband and say "I need a word that means 'exit' that begins with 's'." Indeed, my husband provided the necessary solutions for at least two of the puzzles.

This game is highly recommended as a diversion from more traditional IF, and is a must-play for any puzzle-lover.

The tag "primitive parser" says it all. This game is from the early days, and the parser supports almost none of the usual commands. You can't "examine", "look", or even "go". Instead, you type in the name of the room you would like to move to.

The premise is simple: you are solving a murder on a ship. The suspects are in different rooms and they say something to you when you enter. The game is a simple type of deductive logic game. As the opening paragraph states, NOBODY suspects the real murderer. So when a suspect accuses another suspect, you cross the accused off the list, eventually deducing the killer through process of elimination. The killer, location of the body, location of the suspects, and suspect accusations change each time you replay the game.

This game can be called "interactive fiction" only inasmuch as it has typed commands. There is no real interaction; it's only a simple deductive game, the type that I enjoyed when I was 8 and computers didn't have graphics. It's not worth playing unless you want a very brief and bugless trip down memory lane. It's about a 5 minute diversion that will remind you of your childhood in front of your Commodore 64.