Mean Mother Trucker

The setting and protagonist of Mean Mother Trucker are pretty novel for parser IF – you’re a transwoman big-rig driver in a last-chance truck stop at the desert’s edge – though the goal (taking the pretty waitress away from all this) and approach to puzzling (a traditional collect-a-thon) are more conventional. Still, it knows not to wear out its welcome, allowing the player to get in and out before the novelty’s worn off.

I can’t place the exact antecedents of MMT’s style, since this isn’t really a sub-genre I’m that familiar with beyond having played Full Throttle back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. But nonetheless I can tell the author’s doing a good job of capturing the tropes of truckcore or whatever we should be calling this. Here’s what you get when you examine the jeans you’re wearing:

"Empire-waisted relax fit jeans that still show off the ropy thigh muscles you built up from slamming on the gas pedal and the wide ass you built up from sitting in the cab 23 hours a day."

There’s the inevitable biker gang (though they’re born-again), truck-stop sexpot, and salty short-order cook, with the descriptions and dialogue all hitting a gritty, sleazy vibe that fits the material without going too far over the top. There are some flies in the ointment in the form of some small typos (quotation marks sub for apostrophes a couple of times) and spacing errors, but nothing too bad.

The puzzles are less interesting, though they’re fine enough as far as they go. To convince the lovely Flo that you’re lucky enough to make the Devil’s Taint run (like, to successfully drive through the bit of desert called the Devil’s Taint), you need to collect a pair of good-luck charms. This is accomplished through a pretty straightforward sequence of puzzles that typically boil down to USE OBJECT ON PERSON/THING. None of them are too brain-teaser-y, and while there are some unneeded objects, there aren’t so many red herrings that it gets confusing, and if it’s not always clear how any particular sub-puzzle contributes to achieving your goal, each of them is cued sufficiently well that the player can take on trust that they’re making progress.

I did find the technical implementation a little iffy. There are a couple of bugs – I was able to take my truck’s rear-view mirror, which I’m pretty sure should stay attached, and there’s one puzzle that, per some conversation on the IntFiction forum, is broken in a way that made me unsure how I solved it (it’s the one about getting the roadkill that’s stuck to the road, (Spoiler - click to show)which I later realized is supposed to require using the spatula, but the bug mean that if you just try to take it twice, you’ll get it on the second go). And overall there were fewer synonyms or alternate syntaxes than I’d like – for example, as I was trying to dislodge the roadkill with a stick I’d found, I couldn’t find any versions of PRY ARMADILLO WITH STICK that the parser would accept ((Spoiler - click to show)even if that’s not the intended solution, it does seem the sort of thing that should lead to a useful failure message).

None of these niggles really did much to undermine the fun I had with the game, though – solving a bunch of easy puzzles creates a lot of momentum, and the short length meant that the enjoyment I got from the setting and characters didn’t wear off through the drudgery of repetition. MMT is a lightweight, but it’s endearing while it lasts – I can picture a graphic-adventure version of it fitting in seamlessly among the more offbeat LucasArts classics.

I am still a fairly prudish person, and happy with that choice, but growing up I rarely left the house and just read books most of the time, and went to school and church. I had some vices and saw friends and family doing extreme things, but it all felt distant.

So for me, when I stopped at a truck stop across the Wyoming border on a trip for the first time, it seemed like a frightening place filled with evil and temptations. Pornography magazines, tons of kinds of alcohol, t-shirts with wild slogans or charts comparing breast sizes, everyone smoking or buying chewing tobacco, tough-looking truckers. It blew my mind.

This game brings back a lot of those memories. You're a truck driver (who, as you discover, has recently [early spoiler about character] (Spoiler - click to show)undergone some major changes regarding gender), and you're about to drive over Devil's Taint, one of the most dangerous roads out there (which also reminds me of driving to and from Utah). You have to get help from biker gangs, a 'lot lizard', a smoky waitress, and more to fulfill your dreams and get ready to brave the mountain range.

The author used to write in Quest but has switched over to Inform, and I definitely prefer it. There were a few errors here and there (mostly in trivial things), but it was generally pretty smooth.

I still haven't recovered from my childhood shock, and, frankly, fear of the scary mountain truck stop. But this was a medium-ish, fairly entertaining piece of entertainment.

You're a big trucker with a soft spot for the waitress in a rundown truckstop. You'll have to prove to her you can safely take her accross the mountains to take her away.

Looking for ways to accomplish this, you meet a bunch of colourful characters, each with their weaknesses you can exploit to get a step further to your goal. (I was intrigued by Ranbir the shop owner.)

This could have been a fun comedy game, were it not that it's badly executed.

There are a bunch of typos and missing spaces, not enough synonyms, and often there is a blank line missing above the parser prompt, gluing the response to the previous command onto the next command line.

The game suffers from shoddy implementation. OPEN DOOR gets a response that refers to an obstacle that you just got rid of for example.

And I cringed when I saw this:

(In Convenience Store)

>BUY SODA

"Nothing is on sale."

Not only is it an unforgivable oversight not to implement BUY in a store, the author also managed to use the wrong expression.

[Edit: the expression "on sale" has different meanings in American and British English. Only in American English does it mean "being sold at a lower than usual price". I was wrong, the author was right to use "Nothing is on sale." in this way. Since this was the most grating flaw I experienced, I upped my rating by one]

Two or three more sendbacks to the testers and a lot of attention to detail could make this game a fun little comedy. As it is now however, the lack of careful finish got in the way of my enjoyment.

I look forward to a post-comp release of Mean Mother Trucker, where I might dive right into the comedy.