Cow V: The Great Egg Quest

This game should not be classified as "Interactive Fiction" as there is no interactivity with the game whatsoever! The game, which features a ridiculous quest bordering on parody, requires you to head over to the hen house, fetch some eggs and give them to your Uncle Willy. The game does not go into more depth than that nor does anything else happen whatsoever. Heck, just interacting with your environment will be a hassle, due to the lack of objects and bad parser.

Take for example the introduction room: Uncle Willy's kitchen. The text clearly states there's a door here. However, any attempt to interact with said door will provide the text "I don't understand what you want to do". You cannot open it. You cannot examine it. Even simple commands that are standard to IF such as "go north" or "n" will not work. Only the command "North" will work. Had there been any objects to interact with, this would be a major problem. But considering there's only one real object that you can interact with (the chicken feed) and you can only take it, you won't notice it as much as a full fledged IF. However, the fact that the parser cannot understand simple commands is frustrating and confusing.

The game also consists of about four rooms total and the game can be beaten in a few turns at most. Seriously, here's a walkthrough for you: (Spoiler - click to show)North, take feed, east, west, south. At best this is an excersize in monotony. At worst, this is a pitifully bad piece of IF that offers no interactivity, no depth, no story and no fun. Seriously, I can't even recommend this to new players as the parser will still throw them off and it will leave a horrible taste for the genre in their mouths after completing this IF.

I seriously can't recommend this IF to anyone except those who get a pleasure from beating talentless games in 30 seconds. There's no thinking required to beat this game, there's no depth and pretty much everything that makes IF wonderful is absent from this game. Avoid it like your ex at the mall.

Whoever wrote this was most likely learning to program Windows 3.1 games and decided to start simple, with a throwback to Colossal Cave or something, but with only a handful of rooms and a very limited lexicon. It's good for all of 30 seconds or so. If you read the included instructions, you will realize the author wasn't taking this game seriously at all. All the more so because it's described as "HippoWare." For fun though, I took a little time to see if the other games in the "Bovine Software Cow series" actually existed. This game could use a good MiSTing.