Ratings and Reviews by cgasquid

Pokey the Penguin is/was a webcomic so bizarre that it may well be outsider art.
Various identical-looking characters and their weirdo friends do nonsensical things. Entire sections of the comic are clumsily crossed out. The comic is either ironically or bizarrely bigoted against Italians. It makes absolutely no sense.

Prodly the Puffin is another webcomic that is either a parody or an homage to Pokey. It makes slightly more sense than Pokey, but the characters are even worse people; Prodly is kind of like the Family Guy to Pokey's Liquid Television.

This is a game based on Prodly. It fully displays the crudity, pointlessness, and idiocy of the comic ... which in this case is a good thing. This is one of the few IF games worth playing that allows you to play as a vicious, murderous piece of garbage who torments and tortures his friends.

Whether you find it funny is up to you. There's a strong early-2000s "humor is cruel" vibe to it, and I mean, when it was the early 2000s, that kind of humor had a cruel audience. Does Prodly the Puffin have a place in this more-enlightened-until-it-abruptly-all-went-septic age? I think so, even if only as a time capsule.

For the record, I played this on a real Apple ][+ in the 1980s. It was my second text adventure ever, after Scott Adams' Adventureland and before Zork II.

An asteroid is speeding towards Earth on a collision course. (Never mind that in the 1980s our first warning of an approaching asteroid would be its impact.) Your goal is to qualify as an astronaut, fly your shuttle out to the asteroid, set charges to blow it up, and return safely to Earth.

No, Bruce Willis is not included. And this game came out 18 years before Armageddon anyway.

Despite how it might sound, this is actually a fairly simple task. There are a handful of puzzles with self-evident answers, mostly consisting of getting information in one place and using it in another. You'll probably want to take some notes.

The game's difficulty -- ALL of its difficulty -- comes from the tight time limit. Every action you take uses up a certain amount of time, so there is no time for any distractions or any mistakes. The "puzzle" is therefore to write a walkthrough so efficient that not even one move is missed.

This, I am afraid to tell you, is NOT FUN.

It's not even like this is an efficiency puzzle. Mission: Asteroid is ludicrously linear -- there are no alternate solutions to puzzles, no multiple routes, no optional areas, nothing. You're more likely to die from a typo or because you accidentally used a synonym than anything else.

Oh, and if you DO die, the game simply continues like it didn't happen. You can "win" just by ignoring it and continuing to play.

Compared to Mystery House, this isn't that significant a piece of IF history, and it's buggy, poorly designed, and hopelessly linear. I've played better adventure games programmed by fourteen-year-olds.