Ratings and Reviews by End Master

I played the original game on the C64. Got it from some dude that mentioned it in passing at middle school and he ended up lending it to me along with some other pirated games on disk and I just sort of wound up in permanent possession of it. While the giggles of playing some “dirty” game were there, I was playing a lot of text adventure games by this point anyway, so I was probably more focused on fighting with the parser and trying to figure out the puzzles to win.

The goal of course is obvious. You’re trying to sex up the Farmer’s Daughter, but of course it isn’t as simple as all that. You have to find her and of course a fine lady like this you have to woo properly first, so you have to find out how to do that, gather the appropriate items before you can get to it.

Naturally you have dangers to avoid like her father, the pet guard dog and her two brothers. (You REALLY want to avoid bumping into her brothers.) There’s a few other ways to lose besides these dangers too.

Also there is a timer on this game. You have to achieve your goal in so many turns before the tow truck guy gets to the house or else you lose. There IS a way to get more time which was a nice hidden feature.

The puzzles aren’t really difficult, but as usual with games of this era, sometimes things aren’t readily apparent due to the parser not recognizing some words. Nothing really troublesome though. Descriptions of things range from being amusing to being functional. Usually if something is somehow sex related it tends to be a little more detailed and humorous.

Honestly, the game is really only porn in the Andrew Dice Clay stand up routine sense (An 80s reference for an 80s era game). The game isn’t excessively descriptive with any particular sex act and when it bothers to be, it always goes for the comedic tone more than anything else. Even when you manage to achieve the main goal, you basically just get told “You won!” as opposed to any long drawn out sexual description of intercourse between you and the daughter.

However, there was an alternate winning ending if you were the sort to think outside the “box” a bit. It wasn’t any more descriptive, but you did get a different amusing bit of text before you won. Not sure if this is in the modified version since I didn’t play that one, but it was in the original C64 one.

The game was obviously more designed with the laughs in mind first and foremost rather than a true attempt at porn which was fine by me since that was going to keep my attention longer.

Which brings me to the title of this review. While I hadn’t played this game in years by the time I was actually writing CYOAs, this one probably inspired more than a few of my earlier stories in places at least as far as tone is concerned.

The fact that you play as a traveling lightning rod salesman is perhaps the funniest thing to me in the whole game. So much so that I’ve directly referenced it a few times in my writing.

It’s not the best IF, but it’s definitely one that inspired me more than most.

One of Mindshadow’s major advantages is it had pictures to accompany the text at the time it came out. It probably wouldn’t have gotten as much attention had that not been the case.

Waking up on a deserted island and trying to figure out who you are and how you got there is the main goal of the game. This bit plays out sort of as a normal short wilderness adventure would.

After getting off the island, the game in general is a bit strange. In fact I’m surprised whenever I see write ups of this game, nobody bothers to point out this obvious characteristic of the game, which is the game is a complete anachronistic stew.

Seriously, you’ve got 17th century style pirate ships being chased by the royal navy and modern planes (Or least 80s era planes) right next to each other. There’s a few other examples of this time warp weirdness as well. I really don’t know anything about the novel it was based on, but the game feels like it wasn’t sure which time period it was supposed to be set in. However, this was sort of what made the game stand out a bit more for me.

The game mentions how “Remember” is an important command to help you regain your memory so you have to use it from time to time involving certain items and info you’ve learned. The game sort of assumes that by the time you reach the “end” you will have remembered all the vital information you need save for the last piece, at which point you remember that bit and it leads to the game ending.

This could lead to more weirdness in the game where you might have very well completed everything you needed to do in the game and still not know who you are so you’re just doomed to wander in an amnesiac limbo. The game doesn’t actually end saying this of course, so you could just shrug your shoulders, turn the game off and come back to it later to wander looking to see if you missed something (Like I did initially)

Amusingly you could also win by “remembering” all the info you needed to right at the start of the game on the island. Presumably you might try this after you already beat it and knew what key words to remember. You get the same winning text screen, but oh wait, you’re still stuck on a deserted island! Well I guess the devs didn’t think of everything.

Oh there was also a condor that gave you hints or something. I didn’t like that feature and hated that stupid condor.

Anyway as I said in the title, it was okay.

Tass Times in Tone Town was just one of the many wonderfully weird games from the 80s era. This one just happened to be a graphic text adventure. I can’t really think of another game quite like it in terms of the setting and theme, so it’s pretty unique in that regard and I played it quite a bit back in the day on my Commodore 64.

Like most text adventure based games of that era, they don’t really explain too much directly as far as what you’re exactly supposed to be doing or at least they don’t in the game itself. You sort of get most of the backstory from the instruction booklet or better yet, the Tass Times newspaper that came in the box.

Beside being sort of an enjoyable read, the newspaper provided clues to certain puzzles in the game if you paid attention. I’m reminded of the two point and click adventure games Maniac Mansion and especially Zak Mckraken which did something similar later.

First thing you have to figure out is even getting to Tonetown, but that’s fairly easy enough to figure out, then you NEED to blend in quickly when you get there otherwise it’ll end badly for you. There’s a bit of a timer on this, but more on that later.

Once you’ve blended in, you’ve got a lot more freedom to roam about to look for your lost grandpa, though not everywhere is safe when you leave the actual town and go exploring the wilderness. You’ll also have your dog Spot traveling with you, but he turns into “Ennio the Legend” when he enters Tonetown and he can talk. He can act as a warning in a few places when he says “I smell Snarl Meat!” (You also got a button in the game box with that phrase)

Which brings us to the closest thing to a villain in the game. There is an alligator type creature called Franklin Snarl who runs the pet shop. For whatever reason, he’s the only one of his kind there and nobody seems to question it too much. While a few people will mention him being a jerk, nobody is actively trying to get rid of him, but then the citizens of Town Town are vaguely hippyish and laid back in their personalities despite their punk/new wave appearance.

Since this is an early era game you’ll find the usual odd puzzles that you’ll have to figure out through just messing about with stuff. Due to this being a graphical text game, there are times when things aren’t readily described to you in the text, and you’ll need to pay close attention to what it is you’re actually seeing in the picture provided. Besides the puzzle of blending in, there is at least one other puzzle on a “timer” and the item you need isn’t readily apparent. You also only have a limited amount of time to use that item before you can’t anymore. This can lead to being trapped if you aren’t careful, with death being the only escape.

More than a few opportunities to achieve a “walking dead” situation, but that’s pretty standard for the era it came out.

For whatever reason the way the lay out of the game was set up never really bothered me, though it probably would have been a lot better without the lazy icons you could just click on for various actions and just expanded the picture and had the text at the bottom as normal.

Definitely would have liked a bit more of Tonetown and its general New Wave weirdness actually in the game, but it feels like you get a lot more of that aspect from the newspaper that came with the box. Quite a bit of area in the game is dedicated to the wilderness north of the town, most of which probably wasn’t really needed.

Still, despite all this, it certainly kept me entertained enough to keep going back to it, even after I eventually beat it.