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Special Detective Agent

by Pradeep Baral profile

2008

(based on 8 ratings)
5 reviews

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Member Reviews

5 star:
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Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 5
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A bug-ridden first attempt, January 26, 2009
by Rose (New Zealand)

I hate writing bad reviews. But frankly, in this case I don't seem to have an option. This game seems to have been written for a university project, which is great: IF is vastly underrated in general, and the more people who write games the better off the community is.

First of all, I'm not trying to discourage the author from writing more IF. I sincerely hope that the author will practice more and continue to write -- if nobody ever wrote for fear that their writing wouldn't be perfect, nothing would ever be written. Practice makes perfect. However bad the game mechanics, I think the enthusiasm of the author shows some promise, and wish him luck with future works.

The standard commands "about", "help" and "credits" turn up no responses. The game constantly breaks the fourth wall trying to hold the player's hand. I did appreciate the attempt to prevent the game from becoming unwinnable by clearly stating objectives, but there are subtler ways of doing it then blatantly mentioning the INVENTORY command in game text. Guess-the-verb problems are frequent; scenery is unimplemented; punctuation and grammar mistakes are rampant; plot information is included in room descriptions; exits aren't mentioned in room descriptions. I quit when a NPC started talking about an item I hadn't seen anywhere and couldn't locate.

I would recommend a revision of the game to the author: if you tidy up the game mechanics, fix the bugs, provide help commands and clean up the grammar and punctuation, I would be willing to revise my review, and I believe other reviewers would also be willing. I would also recommend that with future works, you ask a competent IF player to beta-test it for you. It makes a world of difference.

At present, as a game, Special Detective Agent certainly does not shine. It is, however, a start. If you want to know whether it is worth playing, then the answer is no. If the author wants to know whether to have another shot at it, the answer is yes. One star.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Awful!, January 24, 2009
by Parham Doustdar (Tehran, Iran)

This game is poorly written, poorly formatted, poorly done, and full of bugs and misspellings. I do not wish to be discouraging; indeed such a work is just the author's first work, and it's a university project/homework, after all. However, the exits from rooms are not pointed at most of the time, and you shouldn't be able to do many things (but you can).
(Spoiler - click to show)For example, you can go into your office with the car, you can look in Angelina, many objects in the locations should be figured out with typing "X ALL" and etc.
At least, there has been one thing the author has done: telling you that you need to do something before you can move on.
All and all, it is still an attempt, and I hope the author comes up with projects that he'd do better.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A good first attempt, marred by design issues, January 12, 2015
by Bad Dog Studios
Related reviews: first attempt

The game starts somewhat promisingly, and faulty spelling and grammar aside had me interested.

However once you're out of the initial location it starts to descend into guessing what order you're supposed to do things in order to leave the area.

There are also key items that are hidden quite obscurely. In the end I got to a point where I suppose I was meant to find something in a room and despite exhausting every verb I could think of could find nothing, and thus could not leave the location.

I do hope the creator continues to make games as there is promise here.

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1 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
A Good start though, January 26, 2009

I played the game.The concept was well laid but some minor mistakes can be noticed like driving the car inside a room, not enough information for directions n so on.Though the author provides useful information at each level and tells us what we need to do. I think this is the first trial of the author.A good start and i appreciate that.The author shows his creativity by using different kind of objects and techniques that we cannot see in a single game. A mixture of all flavors.I encourage the author and i hope his next attempt will be far better.

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1 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Nice Game, January 23, 2009

I played this game.Nice thought and a good game play.Keeps you busy and curious.A great game!

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