Fingertips: Come On and Wreck My Car

This game has more variation in it than any other one-move game I have seen. Depending on your action, you could be a human, a robot, a galaxy, or who knows?

Each scenario is well written. I would have given this game 4 stars, but it has a meter telling you how many of the endings this reached, and this just made it frustrating as its quite difficult to guess all the verbs.

A lot of the Apollo 18 one-movers followed the basic formula of forcing the player to pay attention to detail to find out newer, more precise moves. Some made an actual story. COWMC doesn't quite, but its different branches certainly provide a lot of amusement. It's got a nice little percent-solved meter, and the mathier among us will see the number of ways through. Some obviously contradict each other. And plus, it starts with your car falling and manages many endings other than the obvious one. Strictly they're implausible, but so's a falling car, and it's more than fun and well-written enough.

You'll need a bit more patience reading than with What's That Blue Thing Doing Here or Leave Me Alone, which are worth playing to compare and on their own, but it definitely pays off. It allows more different actions than LMA, which is more about finding fun wrong stuff and using classical IF commands than about observation. There's more of a narrative than WTBTDH, which has some really clever meta-jokes I'm a bit jealous of.

The one thing I would add to this game would be a (Spoiler - click to show)tally of what you've looked at and maybe how you got it, or maybe even eventually hint which endings you need to re-look at(yes, one of my Apollo games needed this even more,) so you spend less time running in circles (I did, and so did ClubFloyd,) wondering if you took care of X or Y or Z. This sort of violates the strict one-move premise, but given how endings clue new endings & that's part of the game's strength, it could help the player get that last lousy point from a blind spot he may have.

That's technical, though. This is an effective and entertaining use of the one-move limitation, and I'm glad I eventually got to be part of a group that worked through it all.

The author credited "Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die" as an inspiration; the format overlap is evident, but this one's more lovingly described and also has a reassuring score system to let you know when you've discovered everything. Catnip to a multiple-endings-aficionado such as myself.

For a lark, I tried putting together the possible actions in a natural flow. There are a great many variations with which one could approach the game, of course, but some endings suggest other endings, so here's one list.

(Spoiler - click to show)Crash
I
exit
fly
wear sombrero
get tape
open glove box
X severed head
call 999 (or 911, if you prefer)
X windows
X forward
x rear
take guitar
sing
X side
turn off radio
listen harder
take pencil
wake up
push button
X odometer (mileometer does not work for this one)
wake up