Ratings and Reviews by namekuseijin

You have until he reaches your apartment.

sorry, I have what?

10 Second Defence

oh, thanks for clearing that up in the title. So far, this looks like a sparsely implemented one-room defense game with bad prose. yes, it indeed is.

The prologue text doesn't really mention what Kiernan is about to do, so I just took 15 turns waiting for him - perhaps he's the PC's boyfriend or boss? He enters the room and I'm blasted away. ah, good, so it really is about defending yourself against some lunatic.

Well, gotta say, it's a finally crafted small situation you've thrown us at here, worthy the few replays it demands. It evidently requires some trial and error before a good ending - which evidently means (Spoiler - click to show)your ex-lover dead while you draw a shaky breath and head off.

It's already 3 stars for being a proper game, but the short length, sparse prose and implementation got the better of me and I took 1 away. :/


Now let's look at some implementation fails:

wow, I have a sensory enhancer implant! Let's try putting it to good use:

>listen
You can't hear anything.

:/

>smell
The air of your apartment is so familiar, you no longer notice it.

>smell Kiernan
You can't see any such thing.

I know I can't see him, but I assumed the implant would give me wolverine-like powers. Perhaps I could smell his stink or fear miles away :/

>throw knife at hitman
You lack the nerve when it comes to the crucial moment.

:/

yet another clickable-static-fiction-passing-for-game. Like many of its brethren, this one too being a political manifest about some poor minority group being morally harassed - in this case, women. Everywhere they go, they are closely followed by those terrible monsters - the men.

anyway, one of the strong points of IF is putting you in the shoes of another self - the Player Character, in this IF, you take the role of one such poor harassed woman. You really feel sorry for being the object of desire of those damn bastards.

this snippet made me smile, so I gave the "game" one more star:

You're eyeing up the chocolate biscuits when a man starts tutting at you. "It would be a shame if a pretty girl like you let herself go."

Surprise! You've been sexually harassed. You feel so embarrassed that you have to go home and cry to your cat.

what game is here? It's nothing but text and links. Is Wikipedia a game too? The tag for this "game" is "Nonfiction". If it's got neither fiction nor it is more interactive than a regular book pageflip or linkclick, what is it doing here? I read in that text something about IF evolving. If this is an example of that, it's actually devolving. Perhaps next people will go back to pen and paper rpgs and then to poetry rapsodhies... Why is it that people these days just refuse to call a story a story rather than a game? Is it to lure youngsters in, so they can think of reading as something more exciting? Whatever it is, IF it's not.

what IF people actually got a clue about IF? Then we'd never have to cope with idiocy like this short static page. Perhaps I should list Wikipedia on ifdb...

I seriously fear twine because by lowering any entry barriers whatsoever it's getting all kind of loonies loose...

this is not fiction, static or otherwise, it's a hyperlinked Q&A thingmajig about the author's particular obssessive view of the universe he wants us to swallow. whatever, I decided to give it a chance after seeing it scored so low on IFComp14, but that's what it deserves...