Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, like other Scott Adams games, you have a minimal 2-word parser, with spare rooms with a few objects.

Also like the other games, every inch of the game is used for something good. This game is also really, really funny. An opening joke made me laugh out loud.

This has been one of my favorite scott adam adventures so far.

This game is adapted from an old novella, so it has a bunch of textdumps; however, I really enjoy the writing of the novella, so I didn't mind.

There were some pretty hard puzzles, some that were good, and some that were 'guess the verb'.

Worthwhile to play if you like Dunsany/Chambers/Lovecraft's writing.

This game is famous as a cooperation between 7 authors at a time when e-mail was new and difficult to use.

The real story of the game isn't even actually apparent until almost the end. The middle parts have quite a variety, from Robin Hood to an urban setting to McCarthyism to vampires.

The game took me over 1200 moves to finish. There are 1001 points you can obtain.

The AGT parser is old and bad. I'd rather even have a Scott Adams parser, because those games have a true simplicity; but in this game KNOCK DOOR and KNOCK ON DOOR give different responses, with only one working; TIE ROPE and TIE ROPE TO TREE give different responses, one working and one giving you a generic message. And so on... I only discovered later that you can type LIST EXITS, which would have been very useful.

The ending has a moral choice that many have described as seeming ambiguous, but with only one leading to a successful ending.

One of the best games available pre-Curses!

In this game, you have a phaser (initially set to stun) and you are on an alien planet, so the parallels with star trek are obvious.

The game has you work out an ingenious method of transportation, and then visit a number of alien locales, gathering strange and alien objects.

I found the initial part of this game absolutely fascinating, but by the end the transportation method became a bit annoying.

Having played through the first 3 Scott Adams games, I didn't like this one as much. What's the point of everything? Why do you do what you do with the Ju-Ju bag? What's with the statue?

In the other games, I feel like my imagination could fill in a lot of the details. In this one, I just couldn't piece it together.

The atmosphere was good, though, and the non-Ju-Ju puzzles were clever. I still recommend it.

This Scott Adams game is not as good as the first two, but still good.

You have to race through a small nuclear complex to find a saboteur, and to discover two different keys, some color-coded passwords, and a lot of pictures of yourself.

There are a few puzzles that are really hard; with no hints and no internet back in the day, this would have taken forever to solve. Overalll, though it was an enjoyable experience.

Is this the first example of color-coded keys in a lab? It's certainly an early example.

This game is a tribute to Paul Allen Panks, deceased, famous for submitting numerous games to the IFComp which were generally not well received.

I never played a Panks game myself, but I've read a lot about them. This game includes an actual museum to Panks that is quite detailed.

The main game seems to reference Panks' 2 Ninja games, and also the fact that much of his work was unfinished.

This game came out the same year as Curses!, back before Inform was a thing. It's one of the very few games on ifdb written in adsys, and doesn't support undo.

You start the game near a fountain hub with paths leading in every direction. There are six dragons that you interact with to gain six coins.

Many of the puzzles are unfair in a sense, and the game feels like it could be polished more. But it's long and complex, and has a really likable fire iguana helper. The hints file on IFDB is annoying, but I was able to finish the game using it, after about 447 moves.

This is Scott Adam's second game, and fits into just a few kB of data; it's really miraculous how well it works, and I liked it better than Adventureland.

This game forces you to conjure up your own explanations of things; a hidden passage, a bloody book, black mamba snakes, etc. are described only once. There is no desire for mimesis, just for game.

Having played these games has given me much more respect for Scott Adams' work.

This was, I believe, the first commercial text adventure. Certainly the first successful one; although Adventure and Dungeon were much more descriptive, this game fit on everyone's systems.

Gargoyle can play this game if you change .dat files to .saga. Scott Adams' website has an interpreter for these games as of 2017.

This game is ultra-minimalistic, with room descriptions often empty or as short as possible. The parser takes only two words at a time; only the first three letters of each word are read.

The game is actually quite fun, especially if you're willing to spend a long time playing around with it. It achieves the 'long time'-ness by having several situations that lock you out of victory without you realizing it, and by requiring a lot of combinations of items.

Before I played it, I thought it was an Adventure rip off, but they are very, very dissimilar. It's like the way that Antz and A Bug's Life are similar, or Monster's Inc and Shrek. They are vaguely similar, but not really.