Reviews by MathBrush

This game is similar to Dinner Bell, and appear in the same collection. You have to gather 14 kinds of mammal dna (like Dinner Bell, the list comes from a They Might Be Giants song).

You have to do this because your lizard-people overlords are forcing you to. So there is a genocidal aspect to the game.

I found this game to be somewhat difficult near the end because I didn't realize how many items had additional uses.

I used the Club Floyd transcript for the last two puzzles.

I found it enjoyable, but sometimes wonky (hidden items aren't listed in the room description even after you discover them, you can wind things you really oughtn't be able to wind, and so on).

This my second Muckenhoupt game after Gostak, and I found it compelling. You have an evil twin who is always out to get you, and you him. You go out to try and stop him from hurting others.

There is another world out there, his world, a mirror world of evil. The main mechanic of the game is travelling between the worlds and using their transformative properties.

The plot has a few surprises to pull out, and their are some tricky (but no too tricky) puzzles.

I love this game, but I'm a big fan of dual-world games.

In this game, you play a young man with a huge crush on a girl. You clean up your room to make it ready for when she comes over. You frequently try think about a dream you had about her.

Then you play the girl, who is mysteriously huge. Somehow, your actions in the first half affect what happens to you in the second, and you have to figure out how.

The pattern took me a while, but then the game tries to point it out to you in multiple ways.

I found the story amusing. There was strong profanity on the first page, but not after.

This game reminds me of Taco Fiction, if the protagonist passed away. You are with a corpse and have to bury it, but the corpse has something to say.

This game plays around with the format and packaging of IF games, especially standard Inform library messages.

It is quite short, but funny. I had trouble figuring out what to do for 30 seconds in Part ii, but figured it out soon enough.

From the Apollo 18 tribute album, this is a brief web-based game by Nick Montfort.

The game is all in palindromic sentences, so the words themselves aren't palindromes, but the sentences remain the same if you reverse the word order.

I tried several ideas, and got stuck, lost interest, and looked up the solution online. If you work at it, you can figure it out. I tried (Spoiler - click to show)VIEW CANYON VIEW, X ME X,<\spoiler> and stuff like that. It turns out I was close.

In the Apollo 18 Album, this game has you play as a teenage boy working as a store clerk. A lot happens around you, and you can look and examine, but you can't do much.

Or can you? On my second play through, armed with knowledge from the mini-sequel Fingertips: All Alone, I tried something else. And this is where the game shines; your attempts to do something unlock a lot of your real feelings.

I felt like this game captured a lot of the feeling of a teenager. Although it is short, it managed to meet my criteria of being polished, descriptive, having interactivity that draws you in, and affecting me emotionally.

This game was entered in chicken comp, where all chickens had to cross the road.

It is just a parody of Spider and Web, with some spoilers. You have a menu of topics to say, displayed in the status line, and you pick them.

Overall, it was mildly amusing, but seemed to have been put together in a hurry.

There's not that much more to say about the game.

I mainly played this game for historical interest, so I just played it straight through with the walkthrough.

It is a classic 'my crappy university' game, which probably started with The Lurking Horror and has been perpetuated over the years (Christminster was probably the most successful university game, along with Return to Ditch Day). This game resembles the original Ditch Day Drifter, but larger, and with a large number of insufferable in jokes (the game is full of the authors' friends, and talks about how they feel about appearing in the game). Everything is based off of real Princeton locations, and follows the real map fairly accurately.

This game made a relatively large splash in the community at the time (thought not as big as the Unnkulia games), as there were not that many games at all, and this one was large and polished.

And it is polished. I used the walkthrough, but the game seems fair. I can only recommend it to fans of big old school games without much plot.

This game by the great author C.E.J. Pacian follows two airplane pilots in an alternate world who have been shot down and must spend time together before rescue.

You play Lucas Thane, who is the main opponent of the beautiful Scarlet Baroness.

This game has 8 decision points, according to its author, and many topics. It can be quite difficult at times to know what to do, a situation that is very common with conversation games.

Overall, the writing was good, and the game was emotionally satisfying, but the pacing was a bit off.

Still, I recommend it for fans of conversation or romance games.

In this game from an early IFComp, you have to earn the right to become a journeyman wizard when a fearsome dragon appears and attacks the town.

Things aren't how they seem, and soon you are playing ambassador to an alien. In the tradition of Infocom and Douglas Adams, you have to assemble a machine out of bizarre parts.

The game focuses on a polymorph spell that takes you from place to place. People have mentioned how this can lock you out of victory; however, the part where you need it is so small that you can just undo a few turns and try again.

Near the end, though, the game got really hard. I accidentally combined two ingredients too early, which basically meant I had a bomb that would go off all the time and end the game. Then, the final portion of the game can be tricky.

Has an almanac with a ton of information in it that you can carry around.