Ratings and Reviews by Sobol

Currently the biggest, most complex and most polished game by the author, Superluminal Vagrant Twin is a space trading simulator - an old and noble genre including such classics as Elite, but tragically underrepresented in IF until now. There's a huge universe waiting for you to explore with lots of different planets to visit, people to meet, goods to buy and sell, side quests to complete.

You can rush through the main plot fairly quickly, but there are many other things to discover (even after getting all the achievements) - which I naturally won't spoil here. And, of course, rushing through this game would be completely missing the point, because the best part of it is not making the money but savoring the wonderful descriptions - terse and colorful, poetic without being pretentious; closing your eyes and trying to visualize all the various worlds you travel to (Spoiler - click to show) (there were 53 of them in the beta version I played).

My favorite character was the deep space explorer on Splinter. I instantly imagined Ursula K. Le Guin.

Far less known than its namesake from the same SpeedIF competition, this easy one-puzzle game may still prove a pleasant bite-sized diversion. The way the PC moves through the game world is of a particular interest; and "ASCII" of the title plays here a somewhat bigger role than in the game by J. Robinson Wheeler.

After figuring out how to win, for an additional challenge, try to win in as few moves as possible. I managed to find a solution in 42 moves; I wonder if there's a shorter one.