Reviews by cgasquid

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.

At the age I was, I got hours and hours of fun out of Adventureland ... 's demo. As sparse as the text was, as weird as the puzzles were, and as unsolvable as many of them proved to be in the demo, it still felt like I was being drawn into a vibrant world of the imagination. I loved it. I loved the things that I imagined happening off the edges of the map, and I loved the idea of a world where dragons take their sleep of ages in random meadows and jewels and objets d'art could be found hiding everywhere you look.

There are lots of things in Adventureland you wouldn't see much after the ascendance of Infocom. Ridiculously varied landscapes where the entire biome changes each time you take a short jog. Treasures lying out in the open, marked so you can tell them from dross items. Single-move puzzles where you just had to bring the right item. And absolutely bizarre moments like dealing with the bear.

In 1980, Zork would hit the commercial markets and instantly become a "killer app." But Adventure International would keep publishing games until 1984, because there was still a market for this kind of minimalist, constrained narrative experience. And, looking back on it, I can see why; it's like comparing the experience of an Atari 2600 game and a Playstation 4 game. It's not that the modern game is "better" because it's more sophisticated; the two are just different.

Unlike most adult IF, Softporn Adventure has actual puzzles and gameplay outside of simple seduction. Given the era, it's not surprising that the puzzles are simple and shallow and the prose is flat.

But no one talks about this game to talk about it. There's the sleazy and unpleasant story behind the game's cover. There are the bizarre and illogical puzzles. And, of course, this game would later be reworked into Leisure Suit Larry, and the irony that there's actually a worse version of Leisure Suit Larry.

In a strange way I kind of wish this had been a Hi-Res Adventure like The Wizard and the Princess or Mission Asteroid. Not because it would be hotter with pictures (nothing could make this material erotic) but because I have a morbid interest in seeing how this game would look in that "crude even for the Apple ][+" style.

Anyway, as a game, Softporn Adventure alternates between simple, boring puzzles and parser-wrestling nightmares. It doesn't have much to offer even for its era.

Zork Zero, I hate you.

I hate your massively overblown size, mostly full of empty rooms with no purpose. I hate the excessive copy protection, with many promising puzzles (including the game's central puzzle) turning out to be "do you have the documentation" checks.

But the reason why Zork Zero feels like such a cop-out, such a zero-effort mess?

Towers of Hanoi!
Fox, chicken, and grain!
Hi-Q!
Nim!
Measuring liquid using two vessels!
True and false statements written on doors!
The executioner's paradox!
A freaking rebus!

What in the heck are all of these ancient bewhiskered cliches -- many of them extremely belabored and move-intensive -- doing in a game produced in the twentieth century? Let alone in a Zork game, a series known for the cleverness and wry sense of humor in its puzzles?

The worst part is that these old chestnuts make up the game's better puzzles. The original ones, like catching the flies, breaking the couple's curse, and the fungus puzzle, are utterly half-hearted. There's no depth to them; frequently you just haul the right objects across the bloated map.

About the only puzzle in this game that felt truly satisfying and Zorkian was breaking the hunger curse. I had to use a variety of objects in weird ways to achieve a completely loopy goal.

But everything else ... just a miserable slog of busywork and cliche. I understand making a game this huge is difficult, so there's a temptation to just fill it up with junk so you can boast about the number of puzzles ... but you know, you could just have made the game smaller and actually good.

generally, there are two types of hard games. in a game with fake difficulty, the problem is conveying to the story exactly what you're trying to do because you can't seem to figure out how to phrase it so the game will understand you. in a game with real difficulty, you have a wide variety of tools to tackle the situations you encounter, but each puzzle will require a different sort of lateral thinking and creativity.

a game with fake difficulty breeds frustration. a game with real difficulty induces obsession until you finally crack it.

Spellbreaker is absolutely a game with real difficulty. despite the surreal, disjointed landscape you're exploring, it's totally immersive. i never ran into the kind of blank incomprehension you see in a bad game; it was always just a matter of thinking harder about the puzzle and persevering.

this would be a five-star game, but i'm deducting a full star for the bank puzzle. it's derivative, uncreative, has iffy implementation, and even following the best-written walkthroughs i've never gotten better than a 50% chance of getting it right. (unfortunately, the use of stock puzzles would only get worse over time, hitting its nadir in Zork Zero.)

Wordplay games have always been a tough genre to get right. On the one hand, you want to have consistent rules for word manipulation, so the player isn't just sitting there guessing words. You want to have the puzzles actually fit together into a larger picture, whether that's a treasure hunt (Letters from Home) or a detailed plot (Counterfeit Monkey). You need to make sure the game is tuned to the language, not to pop culture references, to ensure the game doesn't become incomprehensible five years from now.

Out of the short stories that make up Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It ... one, perhaps two, fit any of these criteria.

The general pattern of these stories is to recognize the kind of "wordplay" at work in the story, then just examine items and type every example of that wordplay you can think of. In "Playing Jacks," you have to know a lot of words that have "jack" in them. In "Shopping Bizarre," if you see an item, you type its homophone. The biggest offender here is probably "Eat Your Words," which is just see object, type cliche naming object, continue.

There is a single highlight here: "Manor of Speaking." It's a haunted house game where each ghost has a different obsession, and you play them off against each other and solve actual puzzles riffing off wordplay. It's brief but delightful.

By contrast, the worst of the lot is "Act the Part," which requires the player to be familiar not only with unfunny gags from downmarket 1950s sitcoms, but also to recognize a phrase that is as opaque to me now as it was back then ((Spoiler - click to show)"better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"). This stuff was dated when it came out. (Ironically, the opening-move puzzle in "Act," despite being incredibly difficult, is one of the few that's stood the test of time.)

Similarly culture-specific and extremely difficult are "Buy the Farm" and "Shake a Tower." "Farm" is at least well-written (most of Nord and Bert has nothing but short, terse responses) but some of the expressions in it are already passing out of English parlance. "Tower" uses spoonerisms, and it's very cruel, utterly nonsensical, and nearly impossible to get a perfect score on.

People talk about the Oddly Angled Rooms from Zork II being too culture-specific. At least there are at least three countries whose inhabitants would get the joke.

If all of this were beautifully written, or tied together in a coherent fashion, it might be another story, but it's just checking off disparate scenarios until you're allowed to go on to the last one. "Meet the Mayor" is basically the same as "Buy the Farm" but with much more obscure language.

Most of the games that Nord and Bert inspired did the job better. I was a huge Infocom fan, to the point of a fault, but there are still a couple of their games that I just can't defend. This is one of them.