Reviews by MathBrush

This is how homebrew parsers should be; and it makes sense, coming just 3 years after Inform was created and making new parsers was less intimidating.

This is a compact fantasy world, with only 7 or so locations. It has a gnome, a toadstool garden, and a mad scientist. It has good cluing, and fun, open mechanics including potions/chemicals you can try on things (nothing complicated).

The only thing I found difficult was that one important room exit was only mentioned once, in one event, with no way to read that text again once it scrolled back. So its important to read everything carefully.

This game manages to be offensive on almost every level without being actually obscene. If you want to play a game based on massive diarrhea, being rude to your mother, offensive racial stereotypes (including Injun Jim and Italian and Mexican characters who add 'o' after every word), sexism, entering giant bodily orifices, senseless murder, and random drug use, this is the game for you.

The parser itself does an okay job of recognizing commands, but it has some actually brilliant innovations, like little popup windows that tell you what's going on elsewhere, and a great implementation of hangman. But why its put in as an implementation of an childish and offensive BIG game whose favorite puzzle form is the obscure riddle is beyond me.

This game uses a home-written parser for a story about travelling to work.

Hardly anything is implemented, like X or compass directions or inventory or disambiguation. You travel to work, passing several obstacles in the way.

The writing is really unusual, and I kind of like it and kind of don't. It's really, really overblown, something like "You stand here with your beautiful, gentle wife, basking in the happy glow of home life in your kitchen.."

The game's biggest merit is that must have been hard to program.

This game is a straightforward implementation of Planetfall's sample transcript. A few things are different, since the Inform and Infocom parsers have different responses.

The original transcript ends in a premature death. This game does not; however, the new ending sequence is barely there, a matter of a few moves.

It's well-done, but very small. The smallness is even smaller when the game informs you that portions are blocked off because its not finished by the author.

This game seems somehow unfinished; you are called in as an expert to an old abbey to investigate some pottery. You travel around the house and grounds, gathering various items, and then are thrown into a different kind of story.

The game then ends soon thereafter.

There are some implementation errors. Overall, its fun with a walkthrough if you are a fan of archaeology games.

This is a really creative and original game, with a nuclear apocalypse and a sort of dual-world situation.

Despite its many plot innovations, the implementation itself is sub-par, making it difficult to play without the hints (which are split up into 5 sub-files, and seem intimidating, but which are fairly simple).

Definitely a good play (with hints) for fans of apocalyptic things.

This is a shortish, underclued but interesting surreal game where you explore the inner workings of your own mind. It reminds me of Blue Chairs, but shorter and less humorous.

This game is has elements similar to Mikko's last game. Both games were written in a couple of weeks. It contains some juvenile bot non-explicit references to nudity.

I found it difficult to know what to do next, but the walkthrough was helpful. It has a very clever puzzle involving mutating words that accounts for many false attempts.

There is a dragon in town, and it's your job to rescue the mayor's daughter from them.

This game has more of an open-world feel, with many challenges that can be completed in any order, and a slowly unveiling realization of what's going on.

The problem, though, is that only a small slice of that open world has been implemented, making it very easy to do the wrong thing due to lack of guidance. It also has a really, really big maze that can be hard.

Interesting concept, and fun to play with a walkthrough.

This game is part of a peculiar brand of IFComp games that are very large, moderately well-implemented, and deeply underclued. Someone said that such game suffer from Erden-itis, from "Travels in the land of Erden', an exemplar of this class of games. Other such games include Town Dragon, The Sueno, Varkana, and a host of others.

You have a big city here, a castle, and a very large endgame. Most of the puzzles involve things that would never occur for you to do on your own.

(Sort of like if you meet a random person in a game. Are you supposed to attack them? Say 'hi'? Ask them about themself? It turns out you are supposed to 'INSULT PERSON'. Why? It makes sense out of the world, but why would it make sense in the world?)

This game was withdrawn from IFComp 1997 due to bugginess. It is big and enjoyable, but there is a hunger timer that I believe cannot be stopped.

It was large and ambitious but not beta-tested at all, which explains the problems. Marnie Parker later went on to write the graphics-intensive Carma, about punctuation coming to life.

The ghost house here is impressive, and looking at the decompiled text, it had a deep backstory going back hundreds of years.

Plotwise, it seems to deliberately be copying Hollywood Hijinks plus maybe something else (Casper?).