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Number of Ratings: 15
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1-17 of 17>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
Call this game "Insultatron." Its purpose is to insult you in as many ways as possible, though not with a great deal of creativity. If that sounds like fun to you, than you'll probably love the game. If not, then you're like me.
- Edo, January 24, 2022
- Malasana, August 14, 2021
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
The game's title says it all, August 26, 2020
The Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky is a very short, seemingly aimless parser-based game from 2003. Its flippant subject matter caught my attention, so I decided to give it a try.
You are apparently an obese, simple-minded man confined in a small room with a rubber duck. You are invited to pick up the duck and use various verbs on it to see what happens, but in the process the narrator will insult you.
I must admit that the extremely abusive, foul-mouthed narrator voice caught me off guard at first, making me laugh out loud. It's not very often you get a narrator like this in Interactive Fiction, so the game is pretty unique in this respect. I even thought whether (Spoiler - click to show)we could be dealing with a completely unreliable narrator here. He does seem to be quite petty and intent on disliking you, so he probably wouldn't be above embellishing some important details about how ugly, fat, clumsy, dumb and gassy your character actually is. But the truth of the matter is probably irrelevant, since almost nothing happens in this game. There are no big character moments, no grand revelation, no heartbreaks to mend (except maybe the player's own, if they listen to the insults for long enough).
The implementation is better than you'd expect, but still not very thorough. There are only two things to interact with: the player and the duck. Many standard verbs give generic messages. A lot of the verbs hinted by the prose do nothing. Especially by modern parser-based game standards, it comes across somewhat inconsistent and slight, and it doesn't help that the humor is pretty one-note as well.
This game might be fun for 10 - 15 minutes if you're someone with a dark sense of humor (like me) and also enough of a pedantic completionist that you'd try scrounging the limits of a joke game to find all the verbs that work (also like me). But for anyone else, might be the best to steer clear...
Oh, and I did find an ending (of sort) to the game: (Spoiler - click to show)by typing "xyzzy".
- CMG (NYC), November 22, 2017
- VK, May 29, 2016
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
An obscene game that does nothing but insult you, April 17, 2016In this game, you are the fat lardo. In one room, there is a duck.
Most standard verbs are implemented, and result in insulting you.
Why three stars? The game is polished. It is very descriptive in its insults. And it succeeds in producing an emotional reaction.
But the interactivity is bkring, and I would not play it again. I do not recommend this. Includes frequent strong profanity.
- Ivanr, October 12, 2015
- Blake, November 10, 2014
- Simon Deimel (Germany), December 6, 2013
- Andrew Schultz (Chicago), October 18, 2013
- Grey (Italy), December 25, 2009
- Nusco (Bologna, Italy), December 5, 2009
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), January 15, 2009
- brattish (Canada), October 26, 2008
- Quintin Stone (NC), October 23, 2007
Baf's Guide
The author uses his one-room game to scoff at a mentally handicapped person. While, from the technical point of view, he demonstrates quite remarkable writing and programming skills in doing so, the target choice for his jeer seems inappropriate, to put it mildly. Thus, if things like, say, kicking people who can't defend themselves in the teeth don't belong to your hobbies, avoid this game at any rate.
-- Valentine Kopteltsev
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