Reviews by MathBrush

Pick up the Phone Booth and Aisle is mildly better than Pick up the Phone Booth and Die and not quite as good as Aisle. It is a parody game. Every action you perform results in some sort of ending.

Most of the endings are pretty funny. Some, though, like 'waylay', have some wildly inappropriate touches. This varied feel comes from the fact that it is a huge collaboration.

Only recommended if you enjoy parody games, such as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 games.

Original review:
This game is just a short story with about 10 pages of screenshots from Street Fighter, where a couple of women comment on your (a man's) playing abilities, with some lewd references thrown in.

Not much to see here.

Edit:Christina Nordlander pointed out that this game actually reverses the the roles of male and female gamers, where female gamers experience criticism and harassment. The game works much better with this interpretation, but it's still short and childish (although the subject matter is childish people, so is this genius on the author's part? It's hard to know with Soda51.)

Whom the Telling Changed consists of numerous choices. The game frequently asks you to do something, but the order is ambiguous, with two or more meanings. The way you interpret it changes the game. You also listen to a storyteller to whom you can ask questions,

This game uses the same keyword system Aaron Reed later used in Blue Lacuna, his ultra-massive epic. Fans of one game will likely be fans of the other.

I didn't really enjoy this game. I felt that it resisted me trying to play myself. One might say that the author merely wanted to add surprises, however Glasser's Creatures Such as We used a similar moral choice system where playing as myself led to both big surprises and a feeling that the game understood me.

A fairly well-known game. I pushed through it to the end, and was glad I did. There are many endings.

I enjoyed Scavenger, and will probably revisit it. You play a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic society who has a lead on a big find. You have to find and search a base. There are no big surprises here, but plenty of fun puzzles.

Some of the puzzles, though fun, were a bit under clued. At least four puzzles depend on you searching or moving objects that are not obviously searchable, or that are similar to earlier immobile/unsearchable objects, or which you are explicitly told have nothing in them. This draws back from the fun.

The games NPCs have a lot of character, especially in their descriptions and responses.

It may seem as if I didn't like this game, but it has that elusive 'it'-ness that makes a game enjoyable and with it. Perhaps this is the reason it was nominated for a Best Game XYZZY.

This is a very large game that you could spend a long time playing. It is slightly shorter than Curses!, and about half as long as Muldoon Legacy.

You play a college student who is immediately sucked into another world, where a renegade befuddled wizard is asking for your help.

The game has a tower that gets bigger and bigger and more complicated as you discover a huge number of chemical ingredients. Then you realize you have only seen less than half of the game. The game is so big, there are 65 AMUSING options at the end.

It has copious hints, and great world details. But it was too hard for me; I just went through the walkthrough. You could play it for a long, long time without hints and still have fun.

If you liked Mulldoon Legacy, you will like this.

My Father's Long, Long Legs is essentially a publishable short story, as good as Stephen King or Dean Koontz.

This doesn't mean that the Twine format feels too confining. The story branches and recombines at various points, and the illusion of choice increases the feeling of powerlessness.

Also, some of the more advanced techniques of Twine are used in the last scene to improve play experience.

I recommend it strongly to subtle horror fans.

Slouching towards Bedlam is one of the most popular IF games of all time. You play in a steampunk world followed by your faithful clockwork cubical robotic assistant to help you analyze various materials and ideas.

You work in an old and decaying asylum, and you are investigating some recent occurrences.

This game is notable for two innovations; one, it plays with If conventions in amazing ways. Two, it does a wonderful job at writing some odd text (such as the robot's output, restricted to an 8x8 grid).

The game has multiple endings, with room for big moral choices (more than one). It's hard to say what's right and what's wrong in the game.

The main thrust of the story turned out to be fun, but was hard for me to grasp at first. Perhaps because of exposure to cheap sci fi, I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)the Logos was a horde of nanobots. This made understanding the game much harder.

The game feels incomplete, like other great games such as Theatre. Some of the later locations seem a bit sparse, as well. It says a lot about the game that the worst I can call it is too short. Great game.

I loved Infidel. You play a jerk adventurer who has alienated everyone he knows as he searches for a hidden pyramid. The game has a long intro sequence in your camp before reaching the actual pyramid.

The game is very Indiana-Jonesish, although there are no NPC's. Every few rooms, there is a death trap waiting to destroy you. Hieroglyphics on the wall tell you how to avoid some traps, but they sometimes describe things far away, and you have to puzzle out the meaning of the hieroglyphics yourself.

This game is advanced, but I got much further between hints than I usually do in an Infocom game (although Emily Short mentioned two guess-the-verb problems in her review that I found helpful before I even played the game).

This game has a great flavor and style, similar to Ballyhoo's dark circus theme. I strongly recommend this game.

The majority of this game consists of delivering newspapers. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

That said, the game is enjoyable. There are somewhere around 8 or 9 NPC's of wildly different personalities, some of which don't pop up until later. You converse with everyone while delivering the newspapers.

There is a villain, but it's hard to know their plan. In fact, it's hard to know anything in the game, until the end.

I had trouble reading the newspapers when I played on Frotz on the iPad. The formatting was off. But most people shouldn't have that issue.

Note that the game lasts about a week in-game.

I don't strongly recommend the game, but it's interesting enough that you should check it out.

This is a mid-to-long game that follows long after the events in Spellbreaker, an Infocom game.

Graham Nelson is my favorite author, because of Curses! and Jigsaw, and for inventing Inform 7. However, I never really liked this game, partially because it takes so long to set it up. The first scene is totally linear, and the next takes a while to get going.

This is a fantasy game, and includes many Infocom themes, such as spell scrolls, complicated devices, etc. Most if not all the spells are spells mentioned in Infocom games.

The game is intricate and has well-developed puzzles, but it doesn't feel like a cohesive whole.

I haven't played this game for a few years, and I hadn't played any Infocom games when I did. If I replay it and enjoy it more with the references, I'll come back and revise my review.