Reviews by <blank>

Please make the game available for download and offline playing. Not everyone likes playing on the web browser, and iFrotz is MUCH better suited to playing .gblorb files than any web browser can be on an iPod.

I mean, I was able to open the .js file, and decode it from base64, and I was able to get the game that way... but it's not really fair to ask people to do that.

(this "non-review" to be deleted if a downloadable version of the game is released)

EDIT - And, as with most Quixe games I've played (all of them yours, actually), there's a one- or two-second delay after every command I enter. This has a cumulative effect, and if I had to play a game like that all the way it wouldn't be long before I was frustrated into quitting. This is a non-issue with offline, terp-based playing.

EDIT - Whoever decided it was worth spending a few seconds of their life saying this review wasn't helpful... it's not a review, it's the one method of reaching the author I haven't tried yet, and I didn't rate the game. So your gesture is pointless. But thanks for playing. Next contestant!

FWIW, this game seems to be gone - but it has been uploaded into the archive, so it's currently in the UNPROCESSED directory, for anyone interested.

I'm sorry to say that if you point the game file to your hard drive, no one else will be able to access it. ;) You have to upload it somewhere. Do you have twitter? Check out philome.la. If not, maybe itch.io.

Please provide a link for your game.

Note to the author: you can't link a game directly from your hard drive. You'll have to upload it somwehere and link it from there.

If you have twitter, look up philome.la, it's probably the easiest way.

Right, it appears that no one will come out and say it, so I will.

"IF Classics" is the label under which many "IF versions" of various literary classics have been released lately, mostly with Ren'Py or Quest. It's a nice idea - "Manalive" and "Tempest" immediately come to mind as other attempts, with mixed degrees of success. This because adapting a linear work into IF is very hard and has been the subject of various discussions.

How do "IF Classics" tackle this difficulty? They don't. Their works are nothing more, nothing less, than the complete verbatim text of the Public Domain work they've selected. Progressing in some Quest games means selecting the correct next sequence of the story. You know which one is correct because the game tells you so. This should not be mistaken with CYOA.

Progressing in this one is even more laughable. You click the mouse to get the next line of the play. This is not IF, nor anything remotely resembling it - this is a powerpoint presentation done in Ren'Py where you click the mouse to read the next line.

If you feel charitable, you can look at the effort "IF Classics" has made in making this visually more appealing. The multimedia has become integral to these "adaptations" (maybe "port" would be a better word?). They are trying to get more people to read good stuff.

This is all well and good. However: "Classics" they may be, but "IF" they certainly aren't.

This should be tbe bit in the review where the reviewer explains what it really means to adapt static fiction into IF, but too much has been said about it, too much has been discussed. I suggest the people behind "IF Classics" re-evaluate what they're doing. If they want to continue the way they are, that is perfectly fine, but it's not IF any more than the original books/stories are IF.

PS - I have just remembered the perfect example of a game that does this sort of adaptation right: Inklestudio's "Frankenstein" is an example of a successful adaptation, for my money. "IF Classics" would do well to study it.