Reviews by Wade Clarke

Captain Lighthouse is a Nova Scotian superhero who fights pollution and tells Nova Scotian kids about the virtues of reading local newspapers. He is a multimedia figure for our times, appearing variously in his own comic book, in the form of a huge inflatable doll, and in this adventure game, Captain Lighthouse's Museum Mystery. The interview I read with the captain on his website painted a portrait of a well-meaning but verbose and kind of dull guy, which, excepting the verbosity, is also how I would describe this game.

Playing the good captain, you are called to the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenberg, where some villain has stolen the plans for the Bluenose, a historic fishing schooner. Handily, all five suspects are standing around in the next room. Your job is to identify the guilty party – not by such exciting means as using ESP or asking questions about the crime itself, but by submitting the suspects to a comprehension test. And in truth, the party being subjected to the comprehension test is yourself, because you have to read the fact sheet about the Bluefin before you can grill the bad guys to find out which one of them knows the least about this jewel of history. For surely that ignoramus is the committer of the crime!

The bad guys have cute names like Kaiser von Thefz, and the game's atmosphere, buoyed by the presence of photoshopped portraits of characters and a few simple pieces of music, is generally one of endearment. But in the end, you're a superhero who displays no evidence of having superpowers, does not get to use any superpowers, and instead administers a comprehension test. I confess I wanted more from the character who earned local rag SouthshoreNow the Best In-house Promotion Award from the Canadian Community Newspapers Association.

(Also, the villain's identity does not change from one game to the next.)

This is a one-way trip through an eventually male student's day at what seems to be a parodic version of the author's high school. That is to say, Klein Collins High School attended by Hugh Jass (heh) in Texas. The game displays an accompanying photo or picture with most of its locations and objects, making it visually busy, and is controlled by a mixture of the parser and hyperlinks. In each class there tends to be a notable object or student that you can try to interact with, but these actions don't have any mechanical game value and the objects are pretty dull, so you'll want to click on the 'out' button to leave each class sooner rather than later.

The purpose of the game is to share the author's witty observations of school life. I didn't find the written material all that funny, though some of the juxtapositions of text and picture are amusing. The implementation of the parser is so basic that straying away from the point-and-click controls tends to be a mistake. On the whole, the game gives the impression of being an experiment for the purposes of learning Quest, using an environment familiar to the author. I admit I was disturbed by its vision of students slyly watching Avengers on their laptops during class. Oh well, better that than Iron Man 2.

The author shows a viable hypertext style in this game, which may lead to something in the future, but for strangers, this one isn't worth playing.

A couple of folks at textadventures.co.uk made some neat observations about Klein Collins High School than I've decided to reproduce here, since I failed to make them. The first happens to tell you how to win, which isn't much of a spoiler in a game with no puzzles, but I've still hidden it to avoid outrage:

(Spoiler - click to show)"You can win the game if you keep saying "out"... lol." - Gabe Lance

"Another thing that kind of irritates me but I don't know if others care about it: In some games you're told in the beginning who you are, but in games like this you're supposed to be yourself, since there is no character in it. I don't really like it when a game has me be myself in it, then about halfway through tell me I'm a guy. But that's just me." - Azura Davis

Murder!

The author's name is :3 so I wasn't expecting this game to be the last word on the subject, though it may be one of the first few.

In this teeny CYOA, you're a girl who goes to school one day and hears that another girl has been murdered, and that no one knows whodunnit or why. This situation is all the talk amongst the kids, especially the few you might interact with in the course of Murder. These kids have a good way with the breathlessness and exclamation marks, and are the kind who will start screaming out "I DIDN'T DO IT!" with little prompting. The feel of the dialogue and character behaviour reminds me of that of the hot and cold bobble-headed folk in the MySims console games.

Unfortunately, I have probably already given the false impression that there is way more content in Murder than there is. Its choice structure for the duration of its handful of scenes consist entirely of: "Will you A or B?" You can play the whole game to its bizarrely abrupt finale in two minutes or less, then click through all the choices you missed the first time for a second play of about one minute in length.

Murder (the game) is cute and actually got me involved in spite of its tiny size, but it's also typo-filled and super simple, and its story stops just when it was getting started.

The Library is too elementary and underdeveloped to be able to interest anyone looking for a complete game to play. It's clear that the author is in the very early learning stages of how to program these games and is still grappling with the basics. The PC is stuck in a library for reasons which aren't clear, leaving the player to try to fiddle with all of the available objects in a handful of rooms. Some objects are gettable or have descriptions, but too many don't. Nearly all of them have the wrong indefinite articles, and the coding omissions are in significant areas. EG You can pick up A Christmas Carol but you can't READ it.

Playing this game online, I did notice that Quest's habit of making any and all interactive objects clickable can prove to be a distraction in a game when most of them are really just unimportant scenery. When I see the glowing blue links, I tend to compulsively check each object, but I realised I should have been relying more on my adventure game instincts and not investigating every chair, table and lounge (of which there are plenty in this game). I suppose this is a mental shift you may need to make when Questing.

I can't verify how large The Library is because I was unable to interact in any way with the code reader securing the door which blocked further progress, but many aspects of it are obviously not up to standards that will satisfy strange players. I wish the author the best in her progress; my one star rating for this game reflects that I can't recommend it to anyone as is. Apart from the wealth of technical problems, players need a motivation to play. The mystery of the situation should be played up. Without that element present in the writing, the player is really just randomly searching a bunch of samey furniture for no apparent reason, which is boring.

Based on the title of this game and its synopsis, I was expecting to play a badass jungle cat in an adventure of comedic nature. It turns out that the PC is actually a rap music braggart named Tiger. This was disappointing, at least in light of my expectations, and I don't think they were insane expectations because it feels kind of clumsy to both suggest that a character called Tiger is also a 'tiger' (metaphorically speaking) and then to dwell on this point in the title of the game.

Anyway, having shifted my existential gearstick from 'great cat' to 'rapper', I got a smile or two out of this game which sees you rising as Tiger after a night of rap star partying. Tiger is a dim, spoiled fool with a Titanic sized ego, and the game was clearly going to be at his expense. I say 'going to be' because it turns out that this is just a one room demo, but it must be said that it definitely feels like the start of an actual game rather than just a mechanical test. Various story points are set up, like the fact that you have a piece of music overdue for delivery and that various family members and girlfriends are angry with you. There are a bunch of stats ready to go, too, like 'Booze Level' and 'Oontz Completion'. But the first room is already underimplemented and there is no second room or continuation. So probably the only reason to try this is if you suspect that you might like the material enough to go and browbeat the author into expanding it. I wasn't as motivated as that.