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ECTOCOMP 2023 games archive
Contains Taller Tech Mauler Mech.zip
At the IF Archive.
This is a pseudo-format used to represent download adviser records that apply to multiple formats. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

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Taller Tech Mauler Mech

by Andrew Schultz profile

Episode 7 of Prime Pro-Rhyme Row
2023
Inform 7

(based on 4 ratings)
3 reviews7 members have played this game.

About the Story

EctoComp 2023 Petite Mort entry

Awards

19th Place, La Petite Mort - English - ECTOCOMP 2023

Ratings and Reviews

5 star:
(0)
4 star:
(0)
3 star:
(2)
2 star:
(1)
1 star:
(1)
Average Rating: based on 4 ratings
Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 3
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A confusing entry in a rhyming series, November 22, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This game has me at a bit of a loss. I'm a big fan of Andrew Schultz and probably have had more total fun playing all his games than almost all authors over the last decade.

But this one just doesn't do it for me. It has an amusing start (reminding me of Five Nights at Freddies), but then it got bogged down.

It uses rhyming pairs; each room name has two words in it, and you must find things that rhyme with those two words and which also are alliterative.

There were two problems for me. The first is that progress seemed to require hitting all of the rhyming pairs the author thought of (at least, some enemies weren't counted as 'defeated' until you had done so), and second, the game didn't recognize a very large number of rhyming pairs that would logically work. This is almost certainly due to the short timeframe of the game (4 hours), so as a speed IF this game is actually quite remarkable, but as a game in general I found it less successful.

The second thing is bugs; the downloaded and online versions acted differently, with the downloaded version not accepting the command that gives access to the east and west areas. The online version didn't accept one command in the walkthrough, and the final area could be accessed directly from the beginning of the game if guessed correctly.

Outside of those issues, the game is pretty great; I love the idea of having a showdown with multiple mech monstrosities. Literally the one thing that could take this from a (for me) two star game to a 4 or 5 star game is more polish, but, alas, that is exactly what this specific competition proscribes.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
I loved Very Vile Fairy File, but ..., June 29, 2024
by cgasquid (west of house)

... this kind of game CAN'T be written under time constraints.

When you've got a wordplay game, you really need to be prepared for absolutely anything the player would try. There has to be some kind of feedback, some kind of cluing, some way for the player to think of the rhymes that the author intended. Here, typing anything wrong pops up a reminder that it didn't recognize your rhyme and normal verbs don't work.

What's more, there was a feature in another entry I played where you were informed if you got half the rhyme right. I got a rhyme half right in the second room and just got the same generic message.

Andrew Schultz is very good when taking as much time as is necessary; I very nearly solved Very Vile Fairy File with no hints because the game itself was so user-friendly. But these time-limited competition games just fundamentally do not work.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Rhyme but no reason..., November 8, 2023
by manonamora
Related reviews: ectocomp

This was my introduction to Andrew's rhyme game series, Prime Pro-Rhyme Row, and it took me a while to "get" it - as in, I went to download the walkthrough because I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. Like other games in this series (which I have not played as of the writing of this review), the gist of the game is to... make rhymes. Word plays is at the centre of it all, with commands having to match the name of the room to progress, rather than your run-of-the-mill parser commands (examine, take, etc...).

On top of the quirky gameplay, the premise of the game is very silly, which makes sense considering the commands you need to input to solve the "puzzles" and progress through the game. The writing, in the rooms and the responses to commands, is pretty funny as well!

Though quite difficult*, the alliterations are pretty fun - see the title of the game for an example. And if you love rhymes and puns, this is probably a joy to go through. If you are not good at those, or if English is your second language, it will not be a simple walk in the park.
*cries in ESL, it was so freakin' hard.

Since it was done in such short amount of time, the only help you will find will be in the external walkthrough (if you don't want to keep guessing forever). Though, I did run into an issue where a command would not work, blocking the trigger for the next "event" to clear.

Final score: 14+1/23

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Game Details

Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: October 31, 2023
Current Version: Unknown
Development System: Inform 7
IFID: 3FB2F168-7795-4109-9D51-71B17BDD81F6
TUID: mkae1vl4fb2nvttv

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