Ratings and Reviews by mjhayes
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Pointless, but interesting, September 17, 2015A lot of effort went into having a large "lexicon" of names to choose from when spawning a new girl to hit on at the tavern where you spend the first half of this short game. There is also a list of various personalities for the girls, complete with a multiple-choice system of things to talk about in an effort to get the girl's phone number. Among those personalities are the usual college stereotypes (milf, control freak, ex-nerd, goth, neurotic, etc.)
Too bad not nearly as much effort went into some decent writing. For one thing, you are carrying a pager. If it beeps before you had examined it, you will have missed your chance to find out what it looks like. Beyond that point, all you get when you examine it is what's on the display. There is a tremendous amount of dialog between your character and his sidekick, a "shifty heartthrob," and a lot of it is just awful. The author seems to have been as drunk as the characters in this game.
Then, all of a sudden, after a barfight, you're in a room with a few other guys, getting ready to go grave-robbing. The story kind of nudges you along from here until you either live or die at the end. There are really no puzzles to speak of, save for figuring out how to scale the fence to the cemetery.
So what makes this game memorable? The first half, the bar scene, has plenty of replay value. Be advised though, there is some sexuality in this game - but then, if you didn't quit after one minute, then you're probably not the type of person that would care.
Bad, but not horrible, September 17, 2015Those of us who were taking intro Computer programming classes in college probably clunked out something like this, or at least daydreamed about it. Admit it. My first attempt at an RPG had an interface not much better than this.
Having to enter whole words to navigate might be cumbersome, but at least the game is slightly enjoyable once you get used to it. This is one of those games that should be MiSTed.
More of a rant than a game, September 17, 2015Besides being very hastily written, I knew not to expect much from this excuse for a story when I looked out the window and got the description, "It's a beautiful sunny day. You have a sudden urge to play Nintendo." Imagine my (lack of) surprise when I gave up trying to open the padlock on the refrigerator and ended up reading a long rant about body image acceptance, or some such. Move along; nothing to see here.
Another gag, September 17, 2015If you were amused by such files as Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die, then you might get a kick out of this, before you delete it.
A menu-driven prompt replaces the traditional parser, but to good results, September 17, 2015This was ported to IF from an earlier computer game, using a menu system to input user commands. The menu resides in the Status window of the game, and there is an option to change the number of rows for the Status window. The game guesses, based on the interpreter you are using, the maximum number of rows you can set it to. This worked out great when I was using xzip, which displayed the Status window in a separate window.
As for the actual story, it's pretty good for its genre, which is cybernetics. You play as a hacker who was recently assassinated. Your consciousness remains alive in cyberspace, but with your body being in a comatose state, that means you can't disconnect from the "Net" or else. Luckily, you received an e-mail from somebody who is willing to give you new life in a cybernetic body in exchange for your services.
The game had one minor bug which caused me to get stuck at one point, but with the game having only a moderately-sized map and a limited choice of commands, I never was stuck for too long to lose interest in the story before I finished. If your interpreter can support this game, it's worth a try.
One of the more interesting pieces of '80s IF, September 17, 2015This is a game which I got as part of the Interplay's 10th Anniversary Anthology. I found it strange in that I liked the two oldest games the most, this being one of them. This game included a fictitious newspaper, which is something I admired even more. The early commercial releases of Infocom games included printed material (which you often had to refer to throughout the game, as a means of copy protection) and odd trinkets, which added to the delight of the gameplay experience. That is something lacking in newer games these days.
Tass Times In Tonetown is set in what the '80s MTV generation thought the future would be like. One thing you discover pretty quickly is that Tonetown citizens do not take kindly to strangers. You'll probably die several times without knowing why, until you read the newspaper articles a couple of times over.
Some of the puzzles were strange, and there was a fair amount of inventory management that you had to do. It had icons for common commands and your inventory slots, but I don't think I ever got the mouse to work with this game. It obviously relied on some kind of proprietary early mouse driver.
The strange people and locations kept the game interesting, and I enjoyed playing it through multiple times. It's worth a try.
Excellent for 1984 - dated by today's standards, September 17, 2015I got ahold of this game as part of the Interplay's 10th Anniversary Anthology. The box art and the accompanying CD audio track with the installer made this game immediately captivating.
It's a rather simple game compared to most IF pieces, but the engine that draws pictures with each room gives the game a unique look. Maybe it's because I'm such a huge retro fan that makes me enjoy the pixellated CGA look.
One thing to know is that the name of the game is to recover your identity, and you need to know there is a command to think about names and places, in order to jog your memory. Between the simplicity of the world model and the use of Condor to help you when you are stuck, this game shouldn't take too long to complete. If you've read The Bourne Identity, you'll see the obvious similarities here.
Probably the best piece of IF - should be recommended to IF newbies, September 16, 2015On every new computer platform, it's only a matter of time before somebody writes an IF interpreter for it. After downloading some interpreters for some new devices, the first game I reached for was Anchorhead. It was a new game at the time I was a lurker on the IF scene, and I remember all the rave reviews it got even then.
To this day, I can spend hours at a time replaying the game to look for alternate solutions to puzzles, or to see how somebody will react to something I hadn't tried before. Although Lovecraftian horror seemed to be a too-common theme among IF writers of the day, and I'm certainly not a Lovecraft connoisseur, I enjoy this game for its integration between being an "open world" game with a lot of real estate for an IF title, and its ever-deepening mystery.
What makes this game so enjoyable is that it progresses in difficulty throughout the story, as any game ought to do. Many other IF games simply throw difficult puzzles at the player from start to finish, making them unenjoyable, in spite of how well-written they are. First, this game captivates the player with an excellent description of a generic backwater New England coastal town, and has room descriptions that usually avoid simply telling the player "you can't go that way." By the time the player has settled into the town as much as the main character has, then it's time to ease into uncovering the mystery. That's the other thing that makes this so enjoyable. Instead of being presented with a collection of puzzles to solve, progress at first is made through extensive research, both into the family history as well as the town's folklore. The vast amount of reading material keeps me interested in the game even when I'm not playing. Finally, there are often "second chances" at solving various puzzles. This also leads to the replay value, as it creates interest to find out what the other solution is, and also to find out what would have happened if you had left something undone.
Only recently, I stumbled across a bug, which made me interested to find out whether there would be another revision. As it turns out, the author has a "director's cut" in the works. I hope I don't have to wait until November 2017 to try it out in its entirety.
A gag game based on a comic from a magazine review, September 16, 2015Chances are, there are not too many people who remember, but in 2001, when Nintendo had announced the release of a new Metroid game for GameCube, game critics feared that it wouldn't make the transition to 3-D. One magazine from that time had a three-frame comic showing worse things that could have happened to Metroid. One was to make it into a text adventure game. The other two were to make it into a Dr. Mario-style puzzle game, or a rhythm game not unlike Space Channel 5.
The author must be one of the few other people to have read that, because before long, there was a TADS game based on that very idea. It is deliberately primitive, to emphasize just how bad it would have been to actually turn Metroid into a text adventure game. Just shoot metroids as they come and use healthpacks when necessary. Repeat until you die.
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