Zebulon

This Hosted game is very short and quick, and wasn't really designed for the same kind of things Hosted games usually are.

It was for one of the Jay is Games Casual Design competitions (I'd heard of these competitions before because they also ran one for one-room parser games, which ended up with fun games like Dual Transform, Fragile Shells and Hoosegow).

As a game made for a relatively quick competition where the rules are 'web-playable game about friends', I think it does a great job. You pilot a starcraft with friends Fred and Linda, and most of the game is dealing with their two opinions (I saw Fred as more of a goof-ball and Linda as more level-headed, but they're nuanced).

You have been give less than a week to track down and reboot a computer on a mining asteroid. You're lucky to get this job, because you just messed up something important on the asteroid Ceres.

For a small game the author has managed to throw in a lot of neat choices. You can pick what you and both of your friends train in; you have the choice of two extra crew mates or none, there are multiple new ships you can buy. There were so many options I was worried I'd pick a wrong one and die, but it all worked out; either it's rigged to always work out or it's a gauntlet and I lucked out.

When I say short, I mean Ch. 7 for me was two pages with no choice and Ch. 8 was one page with no choice. The characters have personality and there are funny jokes, but the plot it pretty thin.

Zebulon was written for a contest/event a long time ago. I think the theme was 'friends' or something. Anyway, here, we have two bickering friends with wildly different personalities to appease.

Compared to many of the older choicescript games, and even today, I think the writing is pretty good, with a strong dose of humor without overly-lengthy prose. Most of the options will have you choosing to make either one or the other of your companions happy. The game is often explicit about who you'll make happy and who you'll piss off, although there seems to be few, if any options to make both happy with the same choice.

You are given a mission to complete an objective within a certain time frame. Speed is critical, as with balancing your expenses, and managing the two people along for the ride. Still, it is a fun read, even if a short one.

Zebulon was released during stone-age CoG, and was probably one of the stronger HG titles at that time. But even now, I think it's still an interesting read, even if the choicescipt arena has come a long way since.