Reviews by MathBrush

Choice of Robots is a game that has received high accolades, such as an XYZZY nomination for Best Game, and very favorable reviews from the general video game community.

I loved it. A very long game, perhaps of novella or screenplay length, and that is just in one playthrough. You can take wildly different paths, from prison to riches to love to all sorts of things. You keep track of 10 relationships, 4 robot stats, personal stats and political stats.

You are a young robot researcher, developing robot technology, and you have the chance to guide the development of robots toward autonomy, acting like humans, giant tank missiles, or advanced surgeons.

The gameplay can either be free-flowing, answering each question as it comes, or you can develop intricate plans to minimax your characters stats.

Well worth the money; this was the first commercial game that I bought since I purchased the complete Infocom collection.

This is just as good as Creatures Such As We and Choice of the Dragon, but longer. The only hiccups I found were inconsistent branches; when someone I married quit my company, the game said I wouldn't see them for a long time, for instance, without mentioning our relationship.

Thanksgiving was my first Hannah Powell-Smith game, but I'm going to play her other games now. Before I talk about the story, I have to mention my favorite part of this game: the use of color on links. I think everyone should copy this: cycling text is one color, expanding text is another, and branching text is a third. This makes it so much easier to know how to explore. I really support this.

As for the story, it was one I haven't seen done before. As you go to Thanksgiving with your boyfriend, you come under pressure due to your hidden past. It's hard to say more without spoilers, but this game made me nervous in a good way.

I've recently discovered Kathleen Fischer's games, after playing Masquerade and trying Cove a bit, and I love her writing. This is a short game about a prisoner confessing to a friar. The game is primarily conversation-based, although some non-conversation actions are required to win.

The game is a conversational maze. Most conversation options lead to bad endings. The good ending requires some very specific and perhaps non-intuitive choices (being a good boy and a yes-man don't help).

The story was a bit hard to piece together, but it really looked good overall. Recommended for fans of conversation games.

This is a shortish parser game that has a main game and three subgames. You are the help system for several interactive fiction games, but something keeps malfunctioning.

I tried this game with and without the walkthrough, and it was honestly bewildering. You can spend a long time on things that turn out to be completely unimportant. You frequently have to repeat commands multiple times without feedback that you are on the right track. Several areas require you to wait and wait and wait and wait.

The three minigames are interesting; I believe they represent games that you could give help for.

One is a Geisha simulator, where you don't have the regular verbs, and you can only schedule clients and reserve rooms while training for your Geisha exam. This is randomized and hard.

Another is a Lovecraftian western. This one was confusing, but fun.

The last game was really very creative and fun. You are playing Dungeons and Dragons one-on-one with a Dungeon Master, and he becomes the parser. You have a character sheet, and quests, and so on. It was really fun, especially because the Dungeon Master is purposely bad.

Overall, a mixed bag. I feel like others would be less confused than me, but I found this game very confusing. The minigames were fun, though.

Augustine was nominated for an XYZZY for best story and best setting. It shows; the story is really intriguing, about two figures who battle each other in different guises throughout the ages.

You and a warlock from the 1300s are doomed to live until one defeats the other. You pass back and forth between modern times and ancient times through flashbacks, learning much about St. Augustine's history (I don't know how much was real, and how much made up for this game).

The writing is iffy and the implementation is definitely buggy, playing cutscenes in the wrong rooms or order. I didn't really like this game at first, but two things made me end up liking it: the story really is compelling, going in unexpected directions; and the combat system is really fun (although I had to UNDO a lot the first time). The final fight in particular was very exciting.

Recommended for those who can excuse spotty implementation/writing for the sake of a good tale.

This was a short-to-mid-length enjoyable parser game. You awake from your slumber, buried in the egyptian way, and must progress into the afterlife.

The games takes the form of an escape game. You are given a spellbook of sorts, which you must use, but then you must solve a sequence of puzzles. Many of the puzzles seemed unintuitive to me, but because the game is short, it may be possible to just keep plugging away until you get it.

The atmosphere is very good. This game was recommended to me based on its characterization of Egyptian mythology, and this was the most entertaining aspect of the game.

Recommended for fans of mythology or escape games.

Voices is a strong, story-driven parser game told from the perspective of a mysterious invisible figure, whom we learn more about throughout the game. The narrator is the figure, while the PC is a young girl they speak to.

This is a strong story, and most of the game is designed to funnel you through the story. This would easily make a good Twine game; this is in fact the kind of game Twine was designed for. However, the author has done a great job of changing default messages and adding extra surprises, making it worthwhile to have it in a parser.

Much of the game progresses by repeatedly using "TALK TO", and by making a few decisions.

A great choice for fans of story telling. No puzzles to speak of. I had a lot of fun with this.

Vicious Cycles is a complex game. It contains two interwoven narratives; it deals with complex issues in real life; it has puzzles requiring many replays to solve.

The game has a few early surprise which I won't mention here, but I can say that the atmosphere is a sort of dogged determination to overcome despite discouraging odds. The gritty feel reminded me of Cape by Bruno Dias, although the stories themselves are very different.

Overall, I highly recommend this game. It is fairly short, about 100-400 moves for a typical playthrough, although a perfect playthrough is probably 50 or less.

This game was nominated for an xyzzy award for Best Story when it came out, and I agree that the story is excellent.

You are an independent young woman trying to run a business but running into trouble due to the male-dominated society. You encounter a few suitors while trying to save your business.

The puzzles are fairly light, until the ending. Then it branches into a lot of endings. I found 6 endings and it was hard to tell what made me get them.

Also, the game is pretty short, about 20 to 30 minutes.

Overall, a pleasant game, especially for those interested in romance games.

Like the more recent experimental work Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory, My Angel strives to make a transcript of the game read like a book. Error messages are turned off, diddling around too long makes the story progress by itself, room descriptions are varied so they don't repeat enough, and it is written in first person present tense.

When I first played this game a year or more ago, I lost interest and stopped because I couldn't tell how well I was doing or know what to do next. This time, I just went with instinct and tried obvious commands and I beat the game without hints. The author's notes are very interesting, as much or more than the game itself.

The story is about a couple with unusual abilities running away from a group, and then later exploring ruins.

Jon Ingold is really a master of innovation. Looking over his career, it seems he was really trying over and over to find something that could draw in people outside of traditional IF, and he finally succeeded with the wildly popular 80 Days. This game is interesting in light of that history as well.