Reviews by MathBrush

Hollywood Hijinx is long and complex, more so than Zork. You play the nephew of a famous movie producing couple who have died and left you their fortune, on the condition that you are smart enough to find all ten of their movie treasures.

The premise didn't really excite me, but as I read the feelies, I began to be more interested. Also, I had heard many people mention this as a favorite Infocom game. Later, during the game, I began to really get into it, especially with the (Spoiler - click to show)remote controlled model of the Atomic Chihuahua set in Tokyo.

The game is hard. I literally couldn't solve the first problem: getting into the house. I had to look up the invisiclues. The game in general was complex, and I honestly just explored the house once, then relied on the walkthrough to see the rest of the game.

Only a few puzzles seemed really unfair, especially the 'last' big puzzle. But the creativity of this game is outstanding. If I had been looking for a long game to play over a month, this would have been it.

This Infocom game nails the pacing. The game always felt exciting. You play a young woman searching for her father who is abducted by pirates. You carry out increasingly bold tasks throughout the game, and, as a player, I felt excited at my ability to be part of the action instead of being helpless on the side.

The game has two main areas: a ship, and a house. Events are tightly scripted and well-thought-out to keep the action flowing. The tight pacing may require frequent saving.

I found the game slightly easier than usual for Infocom; however, I was stumped twice in the middle (around points 16-19). It took about a week or a bit less of playing on and off to finish it (total time around 4-5 hours).

Be warned that this game uses Infocom's piracy protection, so you need access to the 'feelies' to solve key puzzles in the game. I used the Lost Treasures of Infocom app, which has the feelies included as images.

The romance novel aspects were infrequent, mostly resorting to ardent glasses, although right around the 16-19 point range where I got stuck, things got a bit heated as I was losing, but the game avoids anything explicit.

Overall, one of my favorite Infocom games, probably due to the great writing and simpler (but rewarding) puzzles.

This is a Twiny Jam game, requiring that the game be 300 words or less.

It uses the limited space effectively to comment on social injustice and the blindness of public media.

It' shard to discuss the game more without spoilers:

(Spoiler - click to show)You watch a show about water struggles in faraway places, but you have troubles of your own. With a child at home, you have no water, but you can get a small trickle whenever your neighbor uses their shower. I ended up collecting it in a bucket and dumping it over me, fully clothed.

It made me think about the problems that still exist in developed countries due to income inequality.

This is a mid-length creepy Twine game about someone returning to the scene of a childhood tragedy. The mild horror which slowly builds up is one of my favorite genres, and the writing was well-paced.

I reached two bad endings by reversing all significant choices. I wonder if the good ending (if any) is hidden in some way. Also, there were some changes between versions that I didn't quite understand, specifically in the occupation of the main NPC.

Fun for fans of creepy stories.

1893 is a game set entirely in the real world. The map is based on the actual layout of the 1893 world's fair, and has hundreds of locations. The game includes 500 historical photographs used to illustrate these locations. Your enemies are counterfeiters, thieves and murderers. There is no magic or advanced technology (except in a hidden easter egg).

But at it's heart, this is a fantasy game. If the game said at the beginning 'You are at a bustling magical metropolis on the world called blah blah blah' and assigned random names to the buildings, this game would make an excellent fantasy game.

Explore bizarre cultures and exotic locations. Walk on an enormous cheese, witness arcane rituals, use devilishly complicated machines, and, most importantly, deal with a madman leaving a trail of dead bodies and missing diamonds.

The game asks you to find 2 persons of interest and 8 diamonds. These quests are almost entirely independent of each other, which is good, because this game is so huge and non-linear that it would be a great challenge to complete a linear sequence of events. After finding the 2 people of interest, you have the opportunity to complete a final quest.

I could not complete the final quest, because the event that triggers to find one of the people (Greenback Bob) never happened for me, even though I was following the walkthrough. However, I completed the rest of the game, and found it enjoyable.

There are many, many NPC's, some implemented well and others just sketched in.

The game includes in-game hints; the person who stole the diamonds WANTS to be found, and will give you hints if you call him.

Overall, an under-appreciated game. Few will be able to complete it on their own, but it is worthwhile to try. Try exploring the fair, picking up everything you can, and investigating everything. The 7 days that you have are very, very long, so you can afford to look around a while first.

I'm sure this review will drive some people to see if the game is as bad as I say it is; these people will then post, too and say "He was right! Don't play this game, it's awful!"

This game just tries to describe rape, murder, body horror, butchery, etc in as explicit terms as possible, with no capitalization and rushed spelling. It ends up not being frightening because it is so over the top, but it is gross. Perhaps I am feeding into the author's wishes too much by doing a review, but I think it's useful to record what the game is about.

This game needs to be downloaded from dropbox before being played, and won't let you save. However, saving is not necessary for this game, because it's a relatively short demo of a Twine game, with many endings, all reachable in 2-5 choices.

The story is set in an alternate world, where the biggest change from our world is a kind of fire-knife thing carried by the protagonist. The main story is only a bit sketched in, but it's a kind of dystopian world like the beginning of Cape.

The author has done extensive styling of the game. There is a textured grayish-black background, as well as light gray text. When you run the cursor over a letter, it gets bright white, then slowly dims.

For me, the gray-on-gray was a bit difficult to read. It might work better to brighten up the text while preserving the hover-over-makes-a-halo effect.

This is a Sub-Q magazine game, and the high production values show. Excellent use of images and imagery abound.

The setting is unique among IF that I have played: a west african city, where legends still exist.

Your character (written in the first person) is a person of unknown abilities whose job is to 'fix' cheating husbands.

It was an interesting story. I'm not a big fan of explicit content, and there were some fairly explicit sexual references, but violence and profanity were low.

The culture was very interesting.

D.B.T has written 42 games since August of 2014; only one of these has a real review on IFDB, and most have one or fewer ratings. They are written in QBasic, I believe, although some are available as downloadable executable files.

I decided to try one of these games. When I started up the game, I was entertained to see two skulls made with ascii art. The game has a countdown timer of 8 or 9 minutes, and I finished it in 5 or 6.

The game is a maze with two items you can pick up. HELP lists all verbs that you need.

The one real review of a DBT game is pretty harsh; and I have to admit, by the standards of the type of parser games most popular right now, it is not well put together.

However, the game isn't TRYING to be a current, modern parser game or even a throwback to classic games. It is trying to be it's own thing. The game cites Maniac Mansion, Darkseed (which I haven't played), and Scott Adams. In a way that I really can't explain, it reminded me of early versions of Oregon Trail.

Most of the game consists of just wandering around an easily navigable maze absorbing atmospheric room descriptions in green text on black background. The material is over the top, but it's meant to be that way. You are exploring a dreamscape, and trying to find the source of the evil in the dreamscape. Note that you have to refer to items by their full name to use them or pick them up.

All in all, it reminded me of my creepypasta reading phase. Stuff like Jeff the Killer or anything involving Herobrine. Or like Sci-Fi channel movies. I can see how someone could get into D.B.T.'s games and look forward to each release.

So, for standard IF games, this is not that great. But in it's own category, it is enjoyable.

Here is some of the pop culture referenced in this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Song of the South, Peter Pan, Waiting For Godot, the play Rhinoceros, a knot theory joke, the ten-inch pianist joke, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek: Voyager, Zen koans (is that pop culture)?, famous mathematicians like Archimedes and Fibonacci, Duck Tales, etc.

And that's just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!

This game joins the list of ultra-long games such as Blue Lacuna, King of Shreds and Patches, Mulldoon Legacy, and Time: All Things Come to an End.

In gameplay, it resembles Mulldoon Legacy a lot; both are supersized versions of Curses!. You explore a huge structure, manipulating a variety of magical or technological systems, with a variety of hint systems.

Finding Martin has smooth implementation, including several very long time travel sequences interacting with multiple copies of yourself. This forms the last third of the game, and is the most technically competent time travel I have seen. Imagine All Things Devours as a subgame, 4 times.

Finding Martin has a tendency for very long text dumps. As I enjoy reading, this wasn't an issue, but there are probably 20+ cutscenes of 2-4 pages of text each.

As others have noted, Finding Martin is spottiest when it comes to hints. Some things are hinted well; in particular, there are several systems of providing hints, and if you get further in some puzzles, you'll unlock long cutscenes containing hints for other puzzles.

However, so many puzzles require leaps of intuition that you are bound to fail multiple times. For this, a walkthrough is essential. I've tried to upload a walkthrough to IFWiki that I found on web.archive.org, but it didn't seem to go through. The link is https://web.archive.org/web/20080516223332/http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/fm_walk.txt

This game, as with Mulldoon Legacy, should be more played and more discussed. However, both games suffer from information overload. I get stressed playing Blue Lacuna, which can be played puzzlelessly, and even Counterfeit Monkey, where puzzles are well-clued. These games (Mulldoon and Martin) are just too darn hard to be solved by anyone without clues.

However, my strategy for such games is to play through with a walkthrough, then come back months or years later and try to play without a walkthrough. I've done Curses! 3 times now this way, and I hope to do it without a walkthrough. I hope to replay Finding Martin one day.