Ratings and Reviews by Molly

Wisp is basically a maze-that-is-not-a-maze game; the story is you're a traveler very late in getting home and must now deal with a Will-o'-the-wisp on the way back. The solution to this pseudo-maze is logical in the abstract, I suppose, but the actions required for it seem awfully arbitrary to me; if someone hadn't posted the solution on the intfiction.org boards I never would have finished it. As such, it may be considered of a piece with +=3, another game with an "illogical" logical solution.

Still, the game has plenty of atmosphere, and it was made as part of a group activity, in which everyone worked on and entered about one game each to Ectocomp. The author of Wisp didn't finish up in time to polish it, but entered it anyway because she promised she would, and such dedication merits an extra star, at least.

There is not a whole lot to 100,000 Years. It is basically a hypertext adaption of the hoary old SF premise suggested by the title. No, not that one, the other one, with the (Spoiler - click to show)space aliens and (Spoiler - click to show)repeating timelines and junk. It's competently implemented within its very small limits, but unfortunately it shares a problem with lazy SF in that it barely uses its premise, either as a metaphor to tell us something about ourselves or just to entertain. Even a bit of randomness in the text might make 100,000 Years a bit more meaty. Still, it's probably worth a look. Just don't expect too much.

The first thing I noticed about this game was that the description was written in a foreign language that I thought might be Spanish, but I wasn't sure without checking. So I pasted the description into Google Translate, and in addition to discovering that it was actually written in Portuguese, I found the machine translation surprisingly lucid, if still a bit Babelfish-y:

"Based on the philosophy Mokiti Okada enter the adventure of the Book of Truth which will enable learning how to get the balance of the human being, to create for yourself and everyone around you a better world to live."

I figured if I could understand the description enough to get the gist, I could probably play at least a good ways into the game. And sure enough, about twenty minutes later I had won the game. Quest's keyword based interface was a big help, of course; without it, I would have never been able to figure out the verbs. With it the game was so easy I could beat it without actually understanding the language it was written in.

The game is based on the teachings of Mokichi Okada, the founder of the Church of World Messianity. Or at least, so it claims; I'm not familiar with World Messianity so I couldn't tell you how much of the game is accurate to the source, but apart from a scarily large infodump at the end, I couldn't detect much philosophy that wasn't generic New Age "materialism bad, spiritual truth good". (And I mean that "scarily large" about the end; it feels rather paranoid!) You come across a creek (or possibly a river) of gemstones, and if you pick any up you get dinged for your focus on material wealth. Later you come across three doors, one of which promises wealth and prosperity, and if you go through it you get an instant game over. This would seem very unfair were the general point not drummed into your head over and over. And though it's impossible for me to say for certain, the writing feels a little slapdash. There are a couple typos scattered across the game that I had to fix in Google Translate, and examining the titular book gets you the response I used for the title of my review.

Even so, I found this game charming almost in spite of myself. There's an earnestness about the game that helped me ride it through the preachy bits. For example, each gemstone in the creek has a description that details their spiritual use and general history. Some care was put into the presentation of the game as well; nearly every room has an accompanying photo, and there's even a pretty background as well. It's still a pretty bad game, mind, but it verges into self parody so often I can't help but love it. If you like bad games, can speak reasonably good Portuguese or enjoy fiddling with machine translations, and don't mind being preached at, you might want to give this game a try.

Jaws: The Text Adventure is a short game that corresponds roughly to the events of the movie, from the point-of-view of the shark, of course. Most of the game's humor relies on having seen the movie (which is totally awesome and if you haven't seen it before why not?); there's even a last lousy point that's easier to get, both literally and metaphorically, if you're familiar with the scene being parodied. I certainly wouldn't recommend this game if you haven't seen Jaws, the movie, but the game is so short you might as well give it a shot anyway if you're really curious. Gameplay is very simple, with one main verb (EAT), no mapping required, and mostly easy puzzles. It's not hard to get the ending that occurs in the movie, and while I stopped there, I can't imagine getting even the best ending takes much longer. If you're a Jaws fan you'll probably enjoy the fifteen minutes it takes to play; if you're not I'd steer clear.