Spodgeville Murphy and the Jewelled Eye of Wossname

by David Fillmore

Cave crawl, Satire
1999

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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

The 1996 IF competition was won by a Graham Nelson game with the highly improbable name The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass Of Sherbet. Since then, every year we've had at least one entrant with a long, silly name. In 1997, there was The Obscene Quest of Dr. Aardvarkbarf and Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza. In 1998, we had I Didn't Know You Could Yodel. And this year, David Fillmore brings us Spodgeville Murphy and the Jewelled Eye of Wossname. Is there a causal relationship here? Probably not. More likely, a long and goofy title allows the author to set up some basic expectations about the work at hand. In essence, titles like this say: "Check me out! Boy, am I wacky! Prepare to be taken on a zany and madcap adventure through an absurd universe!" However, the comparison with "Meteor" is instructive in the following way: having set up the above expectation, Nelson subverted it by using a silly and comedic scenario (riding an elephant next to an aristocratic airhead) as the entry point into what became a rather atmospheric and austere cave adventure. The surprise value of this shift lent strength to the sense of wonder that the game worked to impart. His successors, on the other hand, have struggled vainly to live up to the wacky promise of their titles, providing a few funny moments along the way but generally falling far short of the joy of coherent absurdity. Wossname, sadly, is no exception.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A tiny but tricky humorous parody of Indiana Jones+Zork, July 16, 2017
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This is a fairly entertaining parody of Indiana Jones that has some implementation problems. You are at the end of a long adventurer, and already have thousands of points, but you just need to get the jewel and go.

This game borrows some text from and parodies Francesco Bova's The Jewel of Knowledge, and credits that author.

I liked it, but it was annoying trying to figure out the correct syntax and logic of the three main puzzles.

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- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), January 15, 2009

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Shortness ruins it, December 29, 2007

This game is way too good to be so short. The one puzzle it has is excellent and then - it ends. It's like watching 5 minutes of Indiana Jones or getting a plate of delicious dessert with one spoonful left. The author twists the knife by making the game deliberately look like the last puzzle of a grand adventure.

I like to think that during the last 8 years after the publication of SMatJEoW (yikes!) the author has been expanding it to a full-blown game and just waits for the right moment to publish it. One has to have dreams, right...?

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Baf's Guide


You're at the end of an adventure, but now you need to get out of a pit. Short but reasonably entertaining, though one of the funniest bits (the fake full score listing) is stolen from Enlightenment; there are lots of random silly things to try, and the puzzles feel vaguely Zorklike. The competition release had an unfortunate bug that made it very difficult to win the game, so get the more recent release instead.

-- Duncan Stevens

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