ASCII and the Argonauts

Baf's Guide

One of Speed-IF's gems, this game brilliantly reproduces the style and appearance of a Scott Adams production. Room descriptions are sparse, objects are simple, and puzzles are fiendish; though the game is fairly short, you should expect to restart four or five times before you get the sequence of play correct. Nostalgia value isn't the only thing the game has going for it, though: its terse messages are often hilarious, and it manages to compactly include the elements of several major episodes from Greek myth. The result is unusual but stylistically seamless and extremely satisfying.

-- Emily Short

SPAG
What impressed me about the map though, was that there were some fairly crafty puzzles buried in its structure. These puzzles typically revolved around strategic inventory management; the net effect of which was that if you solved certain puzzles too early, you could put the game into an unwinnable position. Unwinnable positions aren't new to IF and certainly not new to Scott Adams games, but unlike many of those games, the unwinnable states here were not caused as a result of poor game design choices. Rather, they were caused by what I feel was the author forcing the player to conserve his limited resources in an attempt to come up with a strategy that took into account the entire game as opposed to one individual puzzle.
-- Francesco Bova
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