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.

It's been a very long time since I read Wuthering Heights; I can remember the names Heathcliff and Catherine and little else. So I was worried that my faded memories of the book might limit my enjoyment of the game. They didn't.

That's because there's no game here. There's hardly anything at all, as far as I can tell. No takeable objects, no NPCs, no puzzles, nothing. You can wander through seven rooms, examine the few objects which the author took the time to implement, observe the numerous misspellings, and then quit. There are a half-dozen locked doors, but no keys, and the game does not understand the word "door" at any rate. The only ending appears to be in response to examining the dog (I won't even dignify that with a spoiler tag). The help text encourages the player to "find all of the mansion's hidden secrets!". They must be awfully well-hidden.

I don't understand why the game was posted to IFDB in this state.

The Best Man is a rare example of an action thriller in a medium known mainly for leisurely contemplation. In the game, you are en route to a friend's wedding, to serve as best man (naturally), and deliver the ring for the bride. After a short flashback sequence, you find yourself aboard a train which, within a few moves, will be hijacked by terrorists. If you want to deliver that ring (and survive), you'll need to defeat the terrorists singlehandedly.

The game does a lot of things right. For the most part, it fulfills its action-movie goals. It resembles Die Hard in its one-man-vs.-the-terrorists setup, but there is rather less ass-kicking on the protagonist's part, and rather more chemistry. That's not to say there's less death -- in fact, there's a shocking amount of it, which could just as easily have been written away -- but the dirty work is all handled offscreen and indirectly. The first half of the game is tight, exciting and well-done, and the initial puzzles are at the sweet spot in terms of challenge, even if there's a lot of learning-by-dying, which turns some players off. The story works well enough for the genre it's trying to emulate, even though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense (and there are suggestions that much of it (Spoiler - click to show)might be a dream). It has excellent feelies (good luck trying to fold that spider).

On the other hand, there's not enough characterization of the PC for the transformation from everyman into terrorist-fighting hero to really work. The PC is pretty much a blank slate (as good looking as ever, in fact). There's a brief setup scene where we learn that we're the survivor of a plane crash on a previous attempt to serve as best man for this same couple, but there's nothing which really prepares us in a character sense for what happens later. Terrorists take over the train, and we suddenly become a coolly competent terrorist fighter, because that's what protagonists do.

The game as a whole is on a timer, and there are a few smaller timed puzzles as well. The time limit is more forgiving than the one in say, A Change in the Weather, but it is not exactly slack. I played a pretty taut game, restoring frequently to optimize, and I still finished with only a few moves left on the clock. It's definitely as cruel in the Zarfian sense as A Change in the Weather. It's extremely easy to lock yourself out of victory without knowing it, and by performing actions that look reasonable at the time.

The Best Man is too old-school in its gameplay than it should be given its year of publication. Doors don't open automatically, even those you've opened before, an annoyance felt all the more keenly in a game with a time limit. More disappointing, though, is the inventory management system. There's a very strict inventory limit, and even the "carryall" object has a limited volume. Items which are in the carryall must be brought to hand manually before they're dropped or used. The game tries to juggle some items for you, swapping items into your carryall as needed, but it always managed, seemingly with malice aforethought, to stash the item I actually wanted to keep at hand (or to transfer liquids into the carryall while leaving the containers in hand, breaking the game). Exacerbating matters, there are a number of similarly-named objects, and a great deal of movement that relies on having free hands. The end result is that much of the game is spent laboriously dropping and stashing items, a gameplay style decidedly at odds with the action-movie genre.

The puzzles are mostly fair, but there are a couple of doozies involving the (Spoiler - click to show)bomb. It's very confusingly described and hard to picture. There are components mentioned in its description which can't be examined until the thing is opened, and worse, there are very critical components which are not mentioned at all until you've tripped over them and died. The (Spoiler - click to show)balances puzzle is fiddly to the extreme, with disambiguation issues compounding the overall challenge of solving the puzzle. After looking at it for a few minutes, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do, but I still couldn't do it, because a) I struggled with (Spoiler - click to show)all the various tubes and flasks and bottles to express what I wanted to do; and b) the quantities of liquid involved were too great. The puzzle would have been greatly improved had the beakers contained only 20 or 30 ml of liquid each, so that experimenting produced feedback more quickly and reliably.

The hints, as other reviewers have noted, are not as useful as they could be. You generally can't access a hint for a given puzzle until you've died failing to solve it. In general, I find adaptive hinting pretty annoying; very rarely does a game seem to know what I actually need or want. There are no hints at all for the endgame (a three-move timed puzzle with no slack, and with at least three nonobvious prerequisites), even after you've died. There really aren't very many clues, either. I always find that rereading feelies is helpful in these sorts of situations.

I've dwelled on the negative too much. The game really is very exciting, and handles the action genre better than any other IF I can think of, except perhaps Border Zone and the endgame of Spider and Web. If it had a more forgiving and convenient inventory system, I'd give it an easy four stars. If the (Spoiler - click to show)bomb puzzles were made a little more sensible and the PC given a little more characterization, I'd have no trouble listing it among the best games I've ever played.

This is pretty well-polished for being Speed IF. The amount of text and depth of implementation makes me wonder if it was actually completed in only three hours.

In the game, you play a monster hunter of sorts. To say much more would give away the game's central joke, but it's suggested in the title. There's a very long prologue -- too long, really -- but it's pretty funny. The gameplay then consists of three rooms and three small puzzles, none of which are terribly taxing. The last of them, however, is extremely finicky about wording. I referred to an object using the name I saw in my inventory (and the name suggested in disambiguation messages), but the game resolutely refused to perform the right action with it until I used different phrasing. This is the sort of thing which happens in Speed IF, I suppose.

On the other hand, it's rare in Speed IF for virtually all the described objects to be implemented, but they are here, so kudos to the author for that. There are even built-in hints, but I didn't find them especially useful, since I knew exactly what I wanted to do; I just couldn't phrase it properly. I was amused by a number of the descriptions, especially Dracula's. I do wonder how anyone could possibly (Spoiler - click to show)dance to Rush's Tom Sawyer.

I would enjoy seeing this expanded to a full-sized game.

After a few minutes of playing One Eye Open, I thought to myself, "I remember playing this game when it was called Babel." But after playing it for a good bit longer (much longer than the two-hour judging period), I decided that I liked it quite a lot on its own terms.

The similarities with Babel are legion. In both games, you play the subject of nefarious mind- and body-altering experiments performed upon you by uncaring corporate overlords. You're alone in a research facility in the aftermath of those failed experiments. You gather up the history of the experiments and the facility, piece by piece, (Spoiler - click to show)often by touching objects (although Babel's methodology for this is more organically tied to the story). In both games, you (Spoiler - click to show)fashion an antidote -- tragically never completed by the experimenters -- and have to safely enter a tainted airlocked lab in the northeast corner of the facility. So things may seem awfully familiar.

The primary difference is in tone. Babel is a science fiction/mystery story, with an emphasis on uncovering the truth of what happened at the station. One Eye Open is a horror story. There's a mystery here, but what you really need to know is: the experiment is really, really bad. Your job is to undo it as completely as possible.

There's no build up to the horror. It's all right there in front of you, almost from the first move, which runs counter to the usual horror imperatives of suspense and dread. What it lacks in those areas, though, One Eye Open makes up for in ickiness. The style is early David Cronenberg with the gore turned way up: meat and organs and orifices everywhere, pulsating behind everyday objects. It's agreeably revolting.

The game is a bit too long for the Comp. After two hours, most players will not have completed it (or at least they won't have gotten a good ending, I don't think), and the story is slow to unravel. When it finally does, though, it is very compelling. It's a testament to the storytelling skills of the authors that I persisted long past the judging to get a pretty good ending, and then finally found the best ending days later. Like with certain Cronenberg pictures (I'm thinking here of Videodrome or eXistenZ), I'm not entirely sure what it was I just saw, but I know that I couldn't take my eyes off it.

The coding was mostly solid, with a few minor bugs and annoyances. I wrestled with the parser to get past a certain locked door, had trouble (Spoiler - click to show)putting a vaccine in a syringe, and found myself stymied by files in cabinets. There were some walls of text that could perhaps have been trimmed down as well. But these are insignificant issues that can easily be addressed in a post-Comp release. Familiar as it was, One Eye Open stuck with me, long after Babel did.

The Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7 must have produced a lot of very good games if this one finished eighth. (I've also played Party Foul by Brooks Reeves, and really enjoyed that; it came in fourth).

As the blurb says, you're buried alive with your dead queen. It's your job to perform some rituals to lead the queen to the afterlife, and then kill yourself as well. From this premise and the cover art, you might expect this to be meditative and brooding, but no, the setting is pure gonzo fantasy, and silliness abounds: the king is Stanley, his pet is called Bobo, and there's a god named Larry. It's ostensibly a one-room escape game, but there are actually two rooms. Maybe that's why it finished eighth. The puzzles are fair and solvable (if sometimes a bit uninspired or baffling), everything is implemented, it is polite and forgiving, and the writing nicely evokes the combination of absurdity and dread that the PC is experiencing. It's a solid first effort from the two authors.

I had a few minor problems. The puzzles, as mentioned, were all very reasonable, but none stood out as particularly clever. The (Spoiler - click to show)potion-making puzzle was reminiscent of the sorts of problems you solve in the analytical portion of the GRE, only simpler. From an in-game standpoint, the puzzle makes little sense; its only real purpose is to add a couple of minutes to the play experience.

I didn't really understand the mechanics of the (Spoiler - click to show)climbing puzzle. I have to drop everything before climbing a railing, and then from there I can climb onto a lintel; that much makes sense. But how has my rope magically made its way up to the lintel with me?

Finally, I must say I was confused by the ending. I honestly can't tell you what happened, or how it relates to the goal I thought I was pursuing. But it seemed to be a winning ending, and I couldn't find another one other than dying (and reading the walkthrough, it seems like I did what was intended).

That said, I enjoyed it, and I'd definitely play the authors' next game.

FLOOBY (love the acronym) is an unreconstructed old-school treasure hunt. The author explains in the ABOUT text that he and a friend began work on it in 1983, but never managed to get it done. As of this writing, it's still not finished: this is a 2010 IntroComp entry.

The gameplay is pretty much what you'd expect: enter the house, find the secret passage to the Zork-like fantasy setting, outwit or overcome some mythical creatures, and take their stuff. Most of the puzzles are straightforward and some are familiar from literature and other games. Indeed, there's one ported wholly (every detail intact) from the original Adventure. It's probably meant as a good-faith homage, but without any sort of original spin or subversion, treads over into aping territory. I was able to get all 60 points, but couldn't get a final reply (To be continued, Thanks for playing, etc.). I'm not sure if there is one.

The author acknowledges that the appeal of this sort of game has diminished over the years, and he's not wrong, but I think he's selling the potential of his game short. I still enjoy old-school treasure hunts from time to time, and I imagine a lot of people do, provided that they're innovative and well-written. As tight as the memory requirements were back in the day, Crowther and Woods and Blank and Lebling managed to draw some pretty evocative scenes. FLOOBY doesn't, at least not yet. An old-school game can also be done with a modern sensibility, without being tongue-in-cheek and without losing any of the appeal of the classics. (See Emily Short's flawless Savoir-Faire). We've had 35 years now to learn what players find entertaining and what they don't (mazes!). There's no reason the author can't make a version of FLOOBY that stays true to his teenaged vision, while still benefiting from decades of progress in the form. My advice to him: don't just finish the game you were making in 1983. Make the 2010 version of the game you wanted to write in 1983.

I hadn't played any Scott Adams games before encountering Buckaroo Banzai, but I did recently read Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages, so I had a rough idea of what to expect. It's probably unfair to dwell on the game's technical limitations, as it's an old game made under tight memory constraints. I'll just note that even though I was prepared for a two-word parser and small vocabulary, I was still amazed at how primitive the gameplay was, given the year of publication. I was exhausted after an hour, and tracked down a walkthrough. It didn't improve matters.

The real crime here is that the game has virtually nothing to do with Buckaroo Banzai. I love the film; I can quote it chapter and verse. It's got a richly detailed world (almost impenetrable, really, on first viewing), terrific heroes and villains, and it's howlingly funny. It deserves a good IF adaptation.

This is a miserable one. There are no Hong Kong Cavaliers, no Lectroids (red or black), no Secretary of Defense, no Penny Priddy, no Kolodny Brothers or Rugsuckers or Blue Blaze Irregulars, no neurosurgery, no particle physics, no rock and roll, no laughs and no action. Most of the game is spent laboriously gathering and using items to refuel a car. The greatest insult comes at the end, when we learn that (Spoiler - click to show)to defuse a bomb, we need to transmit the code "warfin" [sic]. This despite a memorable scene in the film where John Lithgow spells out his name to a telephone operator: "That's W-H-O-R-F-I-N. You got that, honey?" Perhaps it's an homage of sorts to the Red Lectroids' misadventures with English, but given the rather lax attention to spelling and grammar throughout the game, I doubt it.