Reviews by MathBrush

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.

In this game, you put on one of three different disguises at the beginning of the game, and then go through a James Bond-esque adventure where you act against a shady organization.

The game is spottily implemented and has some pretty big typos (like 'I want you to kill me' instead of 'I want you to kill him'). Overall, it's a fun concept that could use more polish.

This is a web-based game tracking several stats. You play as the AI in a seedship set to deliver colonists to a planet.

You visit many planets, hoping to find ones that are breathable, have water, are friendly, etc.

All sorts of events happen on your trip, but the game is mostly linear with mostly binary choices. There are some (fun) exceptions.

Overall, an enjoyable small game with great depth.

Blink is an odd game with good concepts; you play and old man talking to his grandson about war, havi g several flashbacks to your past. There is brief strong language.

The game has several good points, with a pretty good conversation system, some nice uses of different viewpoints on the same locations, etc.

But the locations don't seem fleshed out, synonyms aren't all the way there, it's short, and it just seems unfinished in a way.

This game was short and sketchy, as is usual for ectocomp games.

You drive down a dark and spooky road at night, and various cinematic effects happen. There's some implied backstory and multiple endings.

But it's short enough that the time you spend wondering whether to play it would be better spent just playing it.

This game makes excellent use of different text and background colors and fonts to provide an intriguing and creepy atmosphere.

You play as a groundskeeper for the queen who has been dismissed. You take a short tour through a fantastic and frightening landscape. The background darkens as the game progresses.

Overall, a great short gane.

This game is named appropriately, for two reasons.

First, it's about a series of unfortunate events. After a bright opening, the game quickly devolves into tragedy after tragedy. The writing is funny and fresh, and the situations made me laugh.

Second, though, the biggest section of the game is incredibly frustrating, with inventory limits, hunger puzzle, liquid measuring problems, etc.

I recommend playing through the first part, then using a walkthrough or the club floyd transcript.

You are a director filming the Marx brothers, and you have to herd all of them together before you can film them.

There are tons of independent NPCs, all doing all sorts of things, running from each other, fighting each other, etc.

As a technical piece, it's brilliant; as a game, it's less than enjoyable. Even playing with the walkthrough is hard; I recommend dowloading the zip containing the source and transcript, reading the transcripts, and just playing around with the actual game.

This game is all about punk rock; you are at the HeBGB, based on the actual birthplace of punk the CBGB.

The game is underclued in many ways, but with the walkthrough, it was fun.

You have to learn about an old punk band, become a punk, and find a mystic lost chord. The map is pretty simple, but the puzzles can be pretty hard.