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Review
Don't be scared of the title. It's misleading, anyway., December 1, 2010Some smart-aleck was eventually going to riff on the IF trope in the title name, and I'm glad it was someone clever. GtV isn't a long game--the central joke would grow old--and it's not tough, but you can extend the experience by examining everything and rifling through hints of problems you've solved. I haven't seen anything this odd that actually worked in text adventures since _Nord and Bert_.
As an 11-year-old lost at a fair, you find a robot named Lalrry who will let you Guess the Verb for a shiny quarter. You have a dull one, and there's a useless quarter-shining machine nearby. Cue the twisted meta-humor to manipulate the genuinely creepy, though harmless, Lalrry. Each verb you guess sends you to a scenarios featuring an evil wizard, a mad scientist, a dwarf, a spaceship and the author himself, in a particularly metafictional computer lab. The last one actually works.
You're not really guessing the verb in these. You just need to find where to use it. You even help some poor souls who can't quite guess their own verbs or solve a puzzle while your nemeses guess theirs.
Given how small the areas are, the puzzles can only have so many solutions, so there's a ceiling to trial and error, unlike true verb-guessing. Still, GtV's effortless surrealism makes the game feel much bigger than its solution, and it may help you laugh off stress in the next game that requires actual verb-guessing.
Comments on this review
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I tried this game. I thought there were no scenarios. I guessed the wheel spins right every time, and assumed that they were designed so my guesses would be right. This turned me off to the game until I learned later that if you guess wrong you actually have more stuff to do. Ah, randomness.
Good point. There's only a 1/120 chance that will happen, but on the other hand, the author maybe should have considered that, or had a blurb at the end. I'm sure he'd have dropped a joke there.
This does seem like a shortcoming--no matter what, you will always miss one scenario, since you miss the last one.
Oh yeah, you can UNDO all the time to avoud the bug you mentioned. But you're right. I'm not sure how to add that to my review and keep it short.
