Reviews by MathBrush

This game is split into two parts. The second part is pretty cool; you are a power-ranger sort of person who gets a robot and can form a Zord type of thing.

The first part, however, is incredibly dull, having you trudge through swamps requiring 15 or 20 movement commands in a single direction (like n.n.n.n.n.n.n....)

If the first half were shorter, this would be pretty fun.

This game has an interesting setup where you wake up, with amnesia, in a forest, wearing a tunic with a skull embroidered on it.

You have to fight your way past beetles to get upgrades to fight more beetles to leave a tutorial area which ends the game.

The problem with the combat system here is that small steps take a lot of effort. Typing takes much more effort than clicks; either typing needs to be reduced to superfast shortcuts, or each command typed needs to have significant effect. This game strugles to find that balance.

This is an old game that was released in IFComp purporting to be from 1981, complete with an old manual.

It was, rather, a new (for 2000) homebrew parser game about being a spy. I found the parser difficult to wrangle with and the story hard to piece together.

This game has you play an autistic elf in the US called Delvyn, who eats pancakes and adventures into a spooky house.

I found this game fairly entertaining though buggy at first, but then I got stuck in the second pit, and reading on RGIF made me uncertain whether the game was even finishable, as Santoonie are notable trolls.

This TADS game has you play as a janitor in a lab where all the scientists are gone for the day. It's up to you to stop the terrorists.

The setting is pretty bland for a lab, and the room descriptions are minimal, but I didn't find any bugs.

There is an independent NPC and an animal that are fairly fun.

This is an AGT game, a sort of parser used before TADS and Inform.

AGT games can be very good; however, this one has many issues, including grammar and spelling. Random text prints at the beginning of every verb, often instead of error messages.

I followed the walkthrough, but eventually found myself unable to complete it.

This game is just terrible. In it, you are a misognyistic, sadistic, horrible man, whose goal is to make everyone's life worse.

The game jumps from genre to genre, and in my version, was unfinishable due to a bug near the end, but I wasn't interested in finishing it anyway.

This game placed near the bottom of the 2002 comp, and it's not hard to see why.

The game opens with an error message; typing 'walkthru' says 'insert walkthru here'. it says it was written for a 7 year old later, which could make sense, but it seems like the authors knew it wasn't anywhere near done, and gave up.

It has a huge, mazelike map with empty rooms all over. You are given goals, but the winning walkthru ignores all of those goals.

A truly bizarre game.

This game has a good mix of red herrings and regular puzzle items.

You are wandering around a house, looking for your auntie. Magic intervenes.

This game has a fairly large map, but because it's organized so well, it feels compact.

A couple of the puzzle solutions surprised me, and I feel they could have been clued better.

In this game, you commit a series of unwitting (or sometimes witting) crimes, ending in worse and worse prison-related situations.

The story-telling uses really effective techniques, but the writing and puzzles aren't up to the challenge. By techniques, I mean cuts between scenes, timed events, actions with delayed effects, etc.