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Nominee, Best Writing - 2000 XYZZY Awards
| Average Rating: based on 49 ratings Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 11 |
You are a Chef! is solidly within the "look, I have written a really bad game!" school of comedy. We can see this from the very first line: "HELLO CHEF!!!!!1". The string of exclamation marks ends with a '1' because the fictional 'n00b' author put his finger off of the Shift-key a little too early.
The main problem with this approach to comedy is that an intentionally bad game is still a bad game. To take badness and elevate it to another level is possible, but very hard; and I doubt that taking a straightforward approach to it is the way to go. See Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective" for a non-straightforward, and much more successful, example. There, a separate "commentary" track is used to make fun of the source material. In You are a Chef!, we are just playing the very bad game.
Nor is the sheer absurdity of the events enough to make the player chuckle. Absurdity is only funny if there is some method behind it. Random objects falling from the sky simply do not qualify as a good joke.
Perhaps the dreariness of the game is best demonstrated by this exchange:
Iron safe falls from the sky!
It lands on top of clown and breaks open!
>x safe
In the iron safe you see a MYSTERY INGREDIENT.
>take ingredient
Taken.
>x it
I cannot tell you! It is a mystery!!
If you thought that was funny, please play this game.
This is a pleasant and zany little piece of SpeedIF. It's positively nonsensical, but so enthusiastically so as to be quite amusing. There's no real puzzle--walking about typing 'take all' would be sufficient to solve it--but it's brief enough that it's oddness alone is enough to sustain it. How can one not love a game that opens with "HELLO CHEF!!!!!1 You must make FOOD! You have a list! First to food wins!"?
It's silly, it's fun, it has a monkey in it, and the goal is to make soup. What more could you want? (It's Speed IF, so don't expect it to be typo-free.) Effectively puzzleless.
One of SpeedIF's gems. Pure nonsense, but nonsense of a highly enthusiastic and infectious sort. Very small and easy.
-- Carl Muckenhoupt
Comedy that works by Emily Short
Light-hearted, well-paced interactive humor.
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