Ratings and Reviews by Mr. Patient

In Emerald Isle, you play a pilot who's had to bail out in the Bermuda Triangle. The back-of-the-box blurb promises a man vs. nature fight for survival: "You escape by parachute, floating downwards to the lonely atoll, the 'Emerald Isle,' from which few escape. The only way out is to solve its challenges...".

It turns out not to be a man vs. nature fight for survival. After extricating yourself from a tree, you...hunt for treasures, in a part-fantasy part-modern world. And then you put the treasures in a room to score points. Huzzah. It's exactly like Zork or Adventure, but inferior in nearly every respect. There are no room descriptions, only room titles. Objects are described with three or four words apiece. The parser is two-word, and not overly robust even in comparison with others of its kind. The puzzles offer no surface area for experimentation and feedback. You either guess the right action, or get an unhelpful default response. And several of the actions are simply unguessable.

What the game does have is a lot of empty space. There are at least 200 rooms, and maybe 1/4 of those have an object or something to interact with. It also has illustrations for every one of those rooms. I would have gladly traded half the rooms and all of the illustrations for a description of the train-ticket machine that went beyond "Looks dented."

Level 9 did some fine work, not least of which is 1987's Knight Orc, which had an excellent parser and a highly original story. Emerald Isle has to be one of their worst. In his indispensable walkthrough, Jacob Gunness had this to say: "Credits must go to Level 9 for producing one of the largest, dullest and most plot-less adventures in a long while."

I'll co-sign that.

Note: the following review is for an AIF game. There is some spicy talk in the spoiler space below.

(Spoiler - click to show)SD3 is AIF set in and around a British secondary school. Fresh off the events of the previous installments (which I haven't played), you are urged by your best friend to score with his younger sister. Whether or not you choose to accept this particular mission, you'll have sex with a wide array of basically similar and remarkably forgiving girls, the least of which is your ostensible girlfriend. And they are all girls. There are a few adult women in the game about whom you can DAYDREAM, but the focus is squarely on the underage set. The PC is presumably 16 or thereabouts, so the partners might be narratively appropriate, but the player is very probably a balding middle-aged nerd, which makes the whole thing a little unsavory.

There are some suggestions that the game is set a couple of decades ago. There are VCRs, but no cellphones; David Hasselhoff, but no Bieber. However, the girls all have modern hairstyles and clothes, and, perhaps more to the point, Brazilians and landing strips and the like. I have no idea if these were à la mode among British schoolgirls circa 1994, but I am skeptical.

The big draw of SD3, and I'm guessing the reason it's so highly-rated (with 11 Erin awards, and a bunch of five-star ratings here), is that it's lavishly illustrated, with dozens of images ranging from the suggestive to the hardcore. The original illustrations all have that polygonish, alien computer art look, but a few of them are pretty hot. There are some real photos as well, including the aforementioned Mr. Hasselhoff in full Baywatch gear (surely the hottest of all). I found that the images overwhelmed the text -- blah blah creamy globes, blah blah moist treasures, let's move on to the next picture -- which is probably not a bad thing.

Although it's parser-based, the gameplay is CYOA-style. Do you ask your friend's sister on a date, or your own girlfriend, or someone else? How much money do you want to spend? And what to do about that other girl, vigorously masturbating just around the corner? The game tracks the various girls' attitudes towards you, and opens and closes certain paths accordingly. The paths mostly lead to similar places, of course. And that's literally: many of the locations you can visit are homes, and they all have exactly the same floorplan.

The parser provides bare-minimum functionality for the parts that don't involve sexytime. Even the sexytime parts are sort of minimal. Sure, all the basics are covered, but the game doesn't appear interested in implementing very much beyond thrusting and groping. (That said, it is almost adorable that it understands HOLD HANDS). It also nods a little too much towards realism, so to speak. I wanted to just throw down Stiffy-style wherever and whenever it seemed like it would be entertaining, but the game insisted on privacy and propriety, except at the very end.

So SD3 is not very good IF. Is it good porn? Sometimes. Like porn generally, it's exciting at first, turns repetitive and boring after a little while, and occasionally veers into gross. The younger sister storyline leads at the end to what must be the single most appalling sentence I've ever seen in IF:

(Spoiler - click to show)"Fuck yes, sis!" Mike crows. "Nice cunt!"

The sex scenes can last as long as you like, and a great deal longer. After the fourteenth orgasm or so, you might want to leave the room, but the game will insist that you WITHDRAW first. (It's an oversight we're all guilty of from time to time). SCORE keeps track of your scoring, naturally, but I found it a source of humiliation. Having combined every verb and noun I could think of, I managed to bring my virtual girlfriend to orgasm in only 6 of 26 ways before giving up.

Speculative Fiction is an extremely sharp, witty game. I'm glad the authors completed it, after placing second in 2011's IntroComp.

At its core, the game is just a straightforward puzzler, but it handles the player/PC/parser divide in very entertaining fashion. You are a wizard whose mind is trapped in the body of his familiar: W.D., an uncompromisingly gluttonous raven who's not entirely thrilled to be sharing his body. You command W.D., and he describes the world and performs actions in a more-or-less ravenly way; the parser's voice is (almost) entirely his. In that sense, the game's structure bears a small resemblance to Suspended, I suppose. However, unlike the robots, W.D. has his own will, and can thwart you from time to time. He's also hilarious from start to finish.

Your wizard has recently looted the kingdom's treasury and replaced the gold therein with an illusion. Acting through W.D., you must find a way to replace all the stolen money before the treasurer gets hold of the king and you are executed. Replacing the money involves committing many more crimes. Some of these are sly, subtle jabs at recent financial industry malfeasance, like one involving a robo-signer. Others are a bit blunter and crueler.

W.D. is the game's great creation. Calling him a wisecracking bird would reduce him to an animated Disney sidekick; he's much better than that. It's tempting to list out dozens of great lines, but I'll restrict myself to just a couple:

>x signature
A poorly-executed forgery of the treasurer's signature. I suspect his name is not actually "The Treasurer." I also suspect he knows how to spell "treasurer." I wish your Spelling Wasp had caught on, boss. That one should have made us millionaires. Anaphylactic shock is a small price to pay for proper spelling.

>x beggar
He's got no eyeballs. Man, that's the best part of the human.