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Number of Ratings: 6
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1 people found the following review helpful:
A lot of minigames with little in the way of a connecting story., November 3, 2023The blurb for this title encapsulates its entire story: the player is at a retro gaming convention in Las Vegas. Although the convention lasts for 2 “days,” you have as much time as you want to explore everything.
The author has pulled off some feats of programming that are far beyond my own Twine capabilities. You can play 3 different games at the convention and gamble on 4 different activities in the casino. Each of the 7 options presents a mini-game in its own right, including one that is a functional parser experience.
But just because you can do something, that doesn't mean doing it is a good idea.
RetroCon 2021 works as a proof of concept, but I would have enjoyed a narrative arc that offered more than arriving at a location and leaving when I got bored.
(To be fair, engaging narratives are difficult to implement! Especially when you’re making a game about playing other games. It took a lot of work to build RetroCon2021, and that deserves to be recognized.)
- Kinetic Mouse Car, August 4, 2022
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Inoffensive minigames, December 23, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Okay, real talk: I found RetroCON 2021 – a low-key, low-plot collection of minigames – kind of boring. But as the last game to come up in my Comp queue, actually it was kind of pleasant to have something so inoffensive to close things out. It was nice to dip into the seven different activities on offer, dig into the one or two that interested me, and quit without feeling like I needed to exhaust everything the game has to offer. It’s an inoffensive time-waster – and an impressive demonstration of programming skill – that’s not especially memorable, but sometimes there’s a place for that.
There is a thin frame story tying this all together: you’re in Vegas for a retro gaming convention, providing justification for the three different games on offer as well as four opportunities for gambling. But there are no characters to interact with in this layer, or any consequences so far as I could tell for winning games or money, so it’s really just there as a semi-elaborate menu for the minigames. I’d roughly divide these into the fun ones, the duds, and those that are fine but left me cold. In the third bucket I’d put all the gambling ones – I’ve never found straight games of chance at all compelling, so the horse-betting, keno, and slot machine didn’t hold my attention for more than a minute. The fourth gambling game – video poker – I’d technically classify as fun, though there’s nothing novel about this implementation so I didn’t feel inclined to spend much time on it either.
That leaves the three games, which are presented as retro throwbacks to old, late 70s-early 80s video games. Two of them fall into my dud category, sad to say: there’s a zombie-themed card game you play against the computer that relies heavily on take-that gameplay, meaning that in my first go-round it took me 22 turns before I could do anything at all useful, at which point the computer was a turn away from winning. There’s also a text-based football game that’s got a complex and interesting set of choices, though I found it was tuned too hard to be fun (my passes failed just about every time, even when the defense was focusing on the running game).
Thankfully, the final game is a full, albeit small text adventure, with a text parser integrated into Twine. This isn’t anything to write home about, as the parser is pretty bare bones, the adventure has a generic plot (you’re searching for a hidden inheritance from your uncle), and there’s only one and a half puzzles to solve, though there are two solutions. But again, at least for me at the end of the Comp, I enjoyed going through the generic house and yard, searching the furniture for hidden keys, and working out simple challenges that don’t overstay their welcome. With a more robust frame story, some incentives to reward success in the minigames, and a smoother difficulty curve for some of the rougher ones, RetroCON 2021 could have been more than the sum of its parts – but eh, as is there are still worse ways to kill twenty minutes.
Highlight: I took two runs through the horse-racing game, and in the second one I won big putting my money on the dark-horse contender, so that was fun (and a nice justification for stopping gambling now that I was ahead).
Lowlight: I only dimly remembered what Keno was, and then once I clicked on it I remembered that it’s the world’s most boring “game” (you pick a bunch of numbers, then they get called or not).
How I failed the author: I played this one with only half my brain at best, but I think that’s more or less the expectation here so hopefully it’s not too big a failure to wrap up on!
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2021
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
No joy, November 4, 2021These games are hard! I was able to win poker from time to time, and I made some money sticking with the safe bet at the horse races. But the zombie game? The computer would always pick them off while I couldn't even get started. I was not able to figure out the parser game. I don't know anything about football, so I didn't do too good there. And the Keno game didn't pay out very much when I played the 20-spot. I didn't come anywhere close on the slots, and even when I made it to the bonus game, I immediately matched two zeros. Also, I had a terrible flight home. I got sat next to this annoying guy who was going on about how he beat all the games and made a ton of money. Next year, I'm using my vacation time to visit Amsterdam.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A bunch of mini games wrapped up in Twine, October 5, 2021This game is unapologetically just a bunch of mini games wrapped up in Twine with an ultrathin story applied.
The minigames include:
-A slot machine with fruit graphics and some animation
-A poker draw game
-Keno
-Horse Racing
-A football game
-A zombie-shooting card game
-A short custom-parser text adventure.
Each of the games worked pretty well, and some of them were pretty fun. All are based on RNG except the text adventure. The text adventure has a pretty basic parser (which has a tendency to insult you) and is of the classic 'my dead male relative's house' style, with each room lovingly recreated.
+Polish: Very smooth. The parser isn't awesome compared to dedicated parser languages but impressive for Twine
+Descriptiveness: It was easy to see what was going on usually
+Interactiviy: Most games worked well for me.
-Emotional impact: I felt distanced emotionally from my character and the games
-Would I play again? It was interesting, but I don't think I'll be revisiting.
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