You Were Doomed From the Start

Baf's Guide

Only the creator of this trivial programming exercise could explain why he thought it was worth releasing to the public, let alone entering in a competition. It's a small collection of awkwardly-described rooms (the author is highly enamored of periods of ellipsis) in which anything remotely resembling a puzzle is solved automatically, leaving the player with nothing to do but enter the one command - the same command in every room - that toggles the room's one bit of alterable state.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

I hate to say it, but once I saw the author's name, I knew the title couldn't be more appropriate. Doomed is like a very stripped down, simplified version of The Last Just Cause, and is put forth by the author as "more of a 'Example work' to teach programmers how to program a Text-based game more that [sic] a full game." This is too easy a target, so I'll just say this: people interested in writing a text game should evaluate a few different games, perhaps sampling among the systems used in this competition, and decide which ones they'd most like their game to resemble.
See the full review