Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, whose opening reminded me a bit of Infocom's Border Zone, you play a man who is in a train bathroom when terrorists take over.

The game has you do exciting things like climbing on trains and so on, but the puzzles are pretty nasty, almost impossible without hints. Even with hints, I found it fairly difficult, as a cumbersome inventory system led me to drop some things I later discovered I needed.

Overall, an interesting story, and worth playing for puzzle fiends.

You've crashed your car in a small town, and you have to find your way out.

This game plays on a 3x3 city grid that is minimally described (more areas open up later).

Everything is minimally described. 'There is a swimming pool here. It sparkles' and stuff like that. I had a game-stopping bug early on in Gargoyle, but it looks like others found many bugs as well. Scenery is undersdescribed, and the ADRIFT parser makes playing harder than it should.

This game is extraordinarily hard to run. I ended up poking around in the code and reading past reviews to get an idea of this game.

You are in a future with a robot that is a copy of Floyd from Planetfall. You are investigating an office complex.

A huge part of the code is taken up by a long, involved fight, describing how you or your opponent kick each other's trash.

I downloaded this game and got it to run with the batch file. However, it was buggy; I couldn't figure out how to throw the soup on the fire, one of the earliest commands. The soup kept being an object ON the fire. And examining the hat at the very beginning was supposed to send out a dove, but that never happened.

It seems like a complicated game, but it is just intractable.

This game is part of a peculiar brand of IFComp games that are very large, moderately well-implemented, and deeply underclued. Someone said that such game suffer from Erden-itis, from "Travels in the land of Erden', an exemplar of this class of games. Other such games include Town Dragon, The Sueno, Varkana, and a host of others.

You have a big city here, a castle, and a very large endgame. Most of the puzzles involve things that would never occur for you to do on your own.

(Sort of like if you meet a random person in a game. Are you supposed to attack them? Say 'hi'? Ask them about themself? It turns out you are supposed to 'INSULT PERSON'. Why? It makes sense out of the world, but why would it make sense in the world?)

This game was withdrawn from IFComp 1997 due to bugginess. It is big and enjoyable, but there is a hunger timer that I believe cannot be stopped.

It was large and ambitious but not beta-tested at all, which explains the problems. Marnie Parker later went on to write the graphics-intensive Carma, about punctuation coming to life.

The ghost house here is impressive, and looking at the decompiled text, it had a deep backstory going back hundreds of years.

Plotwise, it seems to deliberately be copying Hollywood Hijinks plus maybe something else (Casper?).

This game uses the relatively unknown JACL engine, but it plays pretty well.

This game is a sleeper hit; I hadn't heard of it, but it's well-put-together. You are on a floating scientific base on a small island that has experienced a recent die-off of fish, and a loss of all juvenile population. You are brought in from the outside to what is essentially a military situation.

The game has espionage, science, etc. Some of the puzzles are unfair a bit, but the game responds well to things you attempt to do, and contains a number of action scenes.

This is a mid-length game that has you trying to find, then deliver, a letter to Dr. Aardvarkbarf.

The game has a fairly large campus. Puzzles mostly focus on examining items, and physical things such as PUSH and PULL.

The game is clever, but the map is large and many things aren't clued to well. Nothing about it really stuck out.

This game has a long prologue as a young woman who dumped her boyfriend. After the prologue, you play the boyfriend.

The boyfriend's game is nonlinear and interesting, as you explore a mad scientist's house. It suffers too much from 'flail about until something interesting happens' syndrome, though. Its hard to know exactly what they want you to do.

But the writing is good and there are several interesting and well-written NPCs.

This is a standard epic fantasy quest exploring a temple, just like a DnD module.

You find a variety of keys and hidden passages, and different pieces of things that look like they go together, and magical clothing.

It's just not clued well, and its tedious. Keys are used multiple times, without much sense to it, so you end up trying every key on every door.

It's pretty long, and could be fun for fantasy fans.