Reviews by MathBrush

In this Twine game, you play an IFComp author who has to throw together a game in the last minute.

You look around your room for inspiration for a good guy, a bad guy, and a evil plan. Then, you combine them into an action-packed story which you can play and replay.

The game is goofy and fun, and well-put together. It uses out-of-the-box Twine with no special styling (I think the later game Machine of Death by this author did more with styling).

Overall, though, the game felt slight, and not as comedically compelling as it could be.

This game won 3rd place in the IFComp the year it was entered, and is one of the shortest games to ever make the top 3. It has quite a few illustrations in it in a comics style.

As a content warning, this game has 3 parts, and the first part is full of large amounts of strong profanity and a general sort of vague nastiness. It made me put of this game for a long time, and I don't intend to play again.

Besides that, the game is very well written, with strong characterization and clever interaction. You play as 3 distinct PCs whose fates revolve around a small store called Cost Cutters. Each character gets 1 or 2 short scenarios where you are given strong guidance, until the final scenario where you have a tight time schedule (with infinite chances to retry) and a more difficult puzzle.

This game was a CYOA-experiment in 1999's IFComp. You simply choose whether to advance the story or end the game.

You can only advance the story 4-5 times before it ends.

The writing is well-done, although (probably purposely) overblown. The interactivity comes from the fact that each advancing paragraph has a number of variations. If you wish, you can cycle through these variations by typing 'No'.

This was an interesting experiment by Ian Finley, author of many experiments, such as Exhibition, where you just examine paintings.

This game does a good job of recreating the feel of an old Russian folk tale, similar to the feel in Grimm's fairy tales.

You are tasked with finding the mythical Firebird. In your journey, you'll encounter frogs to kiss, princesses to court, series of 3 or 4 objects in a row with increasing magical properties, and so on.

The game was quite enchanting, although it comes from an earlier era of the internet that was somewhat less sensitive to some hot-topic issues today (like culture); however, part of this may just be tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at the same insensitivity in old myths.

A delightful game for fans of fairy tales.

Between the end of Infocom and the beginning of Inform, the biggest news was Unnkulia. This was the first game in the series; it is long, polished, and interesting.

It is also juvenile, with 'cheez' products that are toxic, some sex jokes, names like 'Kuulest' and 'Beegashell' mountains.

As the series progressed, it got better, until The Legend Lives! is actually quite a good game. But this first entry in the series is plagued by unfair puzzles and other features that made more sense when most of its players would be in a small community sharing tips with each other.

Mainly interesting as a historical curiosity. Another good game by the authors, I now remember, is the Horror of Rylvania.

In this game, you play as a young Inuit native (I believe; it never says, but you live on the ice and eat seal meat). You can summon beings from the Stars by placing runes on the ground that describe them, two runes at a time.

This game uses a parser/choice hybrid, by having a variety of nouns at the bottom which, as you click them, provide verbs to act on them with, usually two or three verbs at a time.

This system took me a bit to get used to at first, but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. The runes become an alphabet of sorts that, like the alphabet in Ingold's adaptation of Sorcery!, allows for a great deal of variety and difficulty in a parser hybrid.

The story was slow to start for me, but grew on me. I strongly recommend this game. It took me about 40 minutes to play.

In 2002, there was an author who became angry at the interactive fiction usenet community. They started trolling the forums, and used several fake accounts to pretend they were starting a company called Santoonie, and that they were working on an incredible game called Amissville for TADS.

The game was released, but was buggy. Someone later made this game, which Santoonie denied ownership of. It's just 4 rooms with one instant death and one way to get trapped in a dark room. It is really poorly done but funny at a few points.

This game was entered in IFCOMP in 2005. It's about getting stuck on the highway, and exploring an abandoned motel to get out.

This game has few major flaws; it has a few typos, the puzzles are original, the writing has a lot of clever notes.

But the game never takes off; the descriptions are fairly sparse, and so on.

This is a mid-length ifcomp game about time travel. You go back to your high school so that you can change your boring future.

The game is well-polished, but not very descriptive. You wander about, investigating different rooms. I had some issues with guessing commands.

It lasts about an hour.

This game seems to have been intended as a noke, but it's actually not bad. You are the papa in the poem, and the children, mamma, and stocking are there. And the poem's action just plays out one line at a time.

So, it's not that bad as interactivish poetry.