ADRIFT Adventure Reviews

Review of Seek and Enjoy by Backmasker by DB

duncan_bowsman@yahoo.com (DB) — Sun 22nd May 2011 04:02

Poorly executed

An uninteresting quest, banal setting, guess the verb puzzles, no hints, largely unimplemented, needs proofreading... should I even go on? What about things like this:

> x mushroom
The mushroom looks dead tasty. Your stomach is rumbling.

> eat mushroom
You can't eat the mushroom.

...

My suggestion for Backmasker is to spend more time learning ADRIFT. Join the forum and ask questions if you need to. You can do better.

Rated 1/5

Review of Monster Island by Po. Prune

Rosenloev.1@gmail.com (Po. Prune) — Sat 22nd Jan 2011 21:28

This review was written by Phkb.

I also had a quick go. The short descriptions were the most telling thing for me. They prevented me from engaging with the game at all. There was no sense of depth, no urgency, no compelling reason to stay and play. I came across a puzzle about making musket balls and just felt flat and unmotivated to work it out. I guess as it's a conversion of a VIC-20 game the short descriptions correspond to the lack of memory on that machine, but I think the game would be well served by updating the text to make it more interesting and rewarding to read.

You also might like to work on some of the tasks and making them more flexible, to avoid exchanges like this one:

QUOTE
> x gate
It's an old metal gate with a lock that looks like a skeleton key would fit. Iron gate is closed.

> unlock gate with key
Iron gate is not locked!

> open gate with key
I can't open iron gate with the skeleton key.

> unlock gate
The gate is now unlocked.

> open gate
Okay, the gate is opened.

There are lots of ways to phrase a command, but you haven't catered for a lot of the possibilities. There is one command you are looking for, and nothing else the player types in will work. Games from the 80's had this sort of thing happening all the time, but today players are expecting more from their games. Responses like these are misleading and damage the trust the player has with the game. Here's another example:

QUOTE
> kill creature
Any idea how?

> kill creature with harpoon
Any idea how?

> shoot harpoon
I don't understand what you want me to do with the long harpoon.

> stab creature
I don't understand what you want to do with The Creature.

> fire harpoon
I don't understand what you want me to do with the long harpoon.

> shoot harpoon at creature
I don't understand what you want me to do with the long harpoon.

> fire harpoon at creature
I don't understand what you want me to do with the long harpoon.

> stab creature with harpoon
I don't understand what you want me to do with the long harpoon.

Looking at these responses makes you think that maybe you can't kill the creature with the harpoon. Again, misleading, and breaking the trust the player has with the game.

Review of Monster Island by Po. Prune

Rosenloev.1@gmail.com (Po. Prune) — Sat 22nd Jan 2011 21:27

First game

This review was written by David Whyld.
I had a quick bash through your game and unfortunately found it pretty rough around the edges.

First things first: go easy on the multiple text colours in the intro. I have my display set to white text on a black background and dark purple and green text just doesn't show up very well. You're best picking one colour and sticking to it (though admittedly I used to think multiple colours were a nice idea at one point). You also need to flesh out the introduction. I'm not saying a five page intro is necessary, but you certainly need more than just a single line.

Past and present tense are often mixed up. This is the main cabin:

QUOTE
This was the main cabin of my boat. Much of it was destroyed in the storm. Also here is a supply chest. I can only move up.

The first two sentences are past tense, the next two present. It makes for a jarring read.

On the deck, examining the gas tank informs me that it"s closed. I try to open it but can"t because I'm not carrying it. Upon trying to take it, I'm informed I can"t, though no reason is given as to why not. The hints (and please create your own hints. ADRIFT"s built in system is awful) tell me I need to siphon some gas out of the gas tank, though at the time I saw the hints I wasn't even aware it had any gas in it. The description of the gas tank certainly doesn't indicate this.

I spotted quite a few typos right from the start: tastey and cementary stood out. And why does the Creature need a capital C? Is Creature its name?

Descriptions are short. Much too short. This is a text adventure. At least give me something interesting to read. In particular, when I killed the Creature, I was told something like OK, the Creature is dead . Shouldn't this have been a little more dramatic?

Fix the score. I achieved a score of 150 when I quit but was told when I typed SCORE that I had a score of 150 out of 0.

On the plus side, you avoided the newbie pitfall of not providing descriptions for static items. On the down side, almost every description was too short to have any real depth, which is nearly as bad as no descriptions at all.

Review of Shadowpeak by kevin bailey

kevbailey@live.co.uk (kevin bailey) — Sun 28th Nov 2010 14:56

Rated 5/5

Review of The Dark River by albaniua

aecheverria@interact.ccsd.net (albaniua) — Tue 28th Sep 2010 21:29

Rated 3/5

Review of D-Day trailer by Po. Prune

Rosenloev.1@gmail.com (Po. Prune) — Fri 24th Sep 2010 07:43

I received this e-mail regarding D-Day, and thought I'd share it.

Hi Finn...
Finished D-Day just now. I realize this short version was just a "teaser" for a larger, more inclusive game. The graphics and sound were outstanding and I bet for anyone who was there very realistic. No, the puzzles aren't too hard, the solutions are logical - one just needs to keep his thinking cap on. A longer version of D-Day would be a great game and I would be very keen to play it. Thanks for sending and I'll look forward to playing the full article.
Cheers,
Ron

Rated 4/5

Review of Camelot 1.05 by Eric Anderson

Hensman.Intl@hotmail.com (Eric Anderson) — Tue 31st Aug 2010 04:22

When I first saw the title "Camelot" I was prepared for a serious medieval plot and spending hours on end to achieve a crusade-like goal. Reminicent of "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", I was anticipating a challenge of mythic proportions.

Maybe I"m spoiled on the concept of Camelot, and this game was more of a short spoof I did find it humorous and enjoyable. A few of the commands eluded me as I am 'old school' and expect to input more detail than less. Example, light torch I kept trying to light torch with matches . In this type of game I was expecting at least one secret passage and kept examining a wrong location, certain I was missing something as the descriptions were so vivid. The actual secret passage was less described, thus it took a long time for me to find.

One of the frustrations for me was the use of timed delay between rooms. After being kicked out of one of the rooms I wanted to race thru the directions to get back there. That delay prevented that from happening.

The anacronisms seemed a little too out of place, however overall it was a cute short game. That said, I await the new updated version...

Rated 4/5

Review of Camelot 1.05 by Lumin

lumin_orb@myway.com (Lumin) — Sat 28th Aug 2010 00:55

A land of magical wonder and very, very poor hygeine.

Looking at file sizes, Camelot was the heftiest game in the comp, continuing Finn's trend of writing longer IF, something I always think we see too little of these days. (I suspect because it requires a whole bunch of work...) I probably spent the longest on this entry than on any of the others, and while, thinking back on it, if you simply listed the required puzzles it may not seem all that substantial, the truth is there is a LOT to do here--Camelot is one of those games that really rewards the player for taking the time to poke around the world trying different things, something I also haven't seen that often recently.

The puzzles that are there seemed a little more challenging than the usual, requiring some thought. (theoretically a good thing except I suck at logic...) Close attention to detail is definitely important here...there were a couple of points where I became seriously stuck and had to PM the author, only to realize the answer had been right under my nose all along. Also, this game has convinced me to include more secret passages for the player to discover in my own WIPs; I don't know what it is about the things, but they rock and always make me feel all smart and stuff when I figure them out. :)

On the whole I really enjoyed this game, and though ALL of the eligible entries were impressive in one way or another this year, for me at least Camelot managed to edge its way out to the head of the pack. The only real criticism I can even think of has to do with the plot--other than a handful of typos that I believe have already been fixed in a newer version, the writing was excellent, with lots of attention to the detail of the setting.

It's actually the realism there that hurts it a bit, in my mind. For the most part the player doesn't find themselves in some shiny fairy-tale Camelot, but a fairly convincing depiction of a medieval castle. (The description of the kitchen alone made me want to scrub down all my counters with bleach, and then shower in the stuff for good measure...and don't even get me started on the dungeon.)

The plot, however, gets pretty silly once it's revealed--not that that's a bad thing in itself, and there are some genuinely amusing moments there, it's just that it doesn't mesh well with the setting at all. And though it's probably beside the point, I never did figure out why it was assumed the main character would be able to fix everyone's problem in the first place...though for the sake of MY (precious, precious) MIMESIS I finally did come up with the theory that, in addition to being an underachiever he was also a gigantic nerd; Merlin must have seen all the Dungeons & Dragons supplementals in his apartment and mistakenly come to the conclusion he was an expert on the subjects. :P

Rated 4/5

Review of the virtual human by TDS

T_D_S_otp@hotmail.com (TDS) — Fri 13th Aug 2010 23:06

Interesting

I really like this. It's polished. I like the premise. It's interesting. It's brief. And at the end, it gives you something to think about.

But it is an acquired taste. Very.

Rated 5/5

Review of Spring Ting 2010 entries by Po. Prune

Rosenloev.1@gmail.com (Po. Prune) — Sat 3rd Jul 2010 16:00

Lumins comments

I am posting Lumin's reviews...
(Hope it's ok, Lumin... if not let me know and I'll erase them.)
Po. Prune

Egg Hunt

At first glance, this game written by a newbie plays exactly like a game written by a newbie, with all the 'my first gaem' mistakes I've seen time and time again when these things pop up on the adventures page. From a gameplay perspective the biggest problem of course were that the descriptions and puzzles were all but non-existent, something that will usually immediately make me quit with the thought that I'd be putting more effort into playing the game than the author did into writing it. But since this was a comp entry I pressed on, and discovered even worse problems with the plot, which apparently started out as an attempt at a classic Christmas folkstory I've heard a few versions of, but then devolved pretty much immediately into some of the clumsiest sledgehammer preaching I've ever seen, so much that I can't help but wonder whether the author was for real or not. (I became even more confused a few minutes ago when I looked them up and saw that they'd written 'Igor' as well, a flawed but still pretty decent game.)

So while I'm not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, the only positive thing I can really find to say about this one is in noting the nice sound effects that were added for different rooms, though that kind of attention to a welcome but unnecessary detail while the much more important 'text' part of the text game was all but ignored is somewhat baffling in itself. In the end, my advice to the author is the same as it always is in these situations: it's best to play a few games before you attempt to make one of your own, just like a wannabe novelist needs to do plenty of reading before they're comfortable with writing. Go to Baf's Guide, pick out some good IF and some bad IF, get a sense of what works and what doesn't. (And if you're serious about the Christian fiction thing, try Eric Eve's All Hope Abandon and Paul Panks' Jesus of Nazareth...see if you can tell the difference. :-p )

Wes Garden's Halting Nightmare

This game. This freaking game. While I'm glad Jubell's going to get his free copy of Adrift and all, he really should have saved it for the Summer Comp...unregistered limitations and all, I think it still would've given some of us more experienced Drifters a run for our money. I loved everything about this. Well, okay, I admit thought the whole 'Soul Scythe' things sounded like something out of a cheesy action game, but everything else--the intro and the writing, the genuinely creepy rooms and mindscrew plot, and of course the amazing art and music, just blew me away. I even loved that I still had no idea what was going on at the end. Usually that's something that would annoy me a little, but here it's a strength...I was SO glad it didn't all wrap up neatly with a pat 'but it was alllll in his head' or whatever ending.

The limitations of the unregistered version did show up in a few cases, (mostly when I was getting drawn into a trippy room description but not being able to examine something that seemed prominent) so I'm really hoping that in addition to a sequel, the author might be able to go back and flesh this one out a little once they've got their shiny new full version. And though this one's more a matter of personal taste, it also seemed like there was a lot of plot railroading, long cutscenes and such popping up every couple of minutes. Though once again, even though it's something I don't always care for, in this case I might call it a good thing because it allowed so much plot and content to be crammed in despite the limits and made the game seem a lot larger than it actually is. (I noticed you made good use of conversation topics as well, which is also a good trick in this kind of situation.)

The one and only thing I would have to say I definitely didn't care for were the combat aspects - the fact is I simply hate hate hate Adrift's default combat system and have never seen it used in a good way. I found it yanked me out of the story here too, and finally after being killed half a dozen times in the first fight (my own hits never seeming to do any damage) I got frustrated and changed the opponent's stats in the generator, which let me move past that part but may or may not have caused a bigger problem later.

For the second fight, I got the message saying I was being attacked, but nothing happened (I was alone in the room) and since I couldn't trigger the end of the fight I wasn't able to progress any further after that. I can't say with any kind of confidence that it was a bug, because there's a good chance I broke something with my meddling earlier, but even if it was, the game up until that point was amazing enough to more than make up for it. Happily I was able to sort of experience the last few scenes by following along with the walkthrough and the generator anyway, and the ending did not disappoint. Really, really, REALLY looking forward to whatever this author decides to write next.

Review of Top Hat by Metron4

metron4@gmail.com (Metron4) — Sat 26th Dec 2009 20:47

Has that "pick-up" game feel.

An enjoyable game that provides a quirky environment to try out several ways of "pleasing the boss". It brought a smile to my face to try out different things, stop the game, then come back later and come up with new ideas. The game gently pokes you in the right direction to obtain the best ending.

Rated 5/5

Review of Ghost Town by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Mon 21st Dec 2009 19:57

Ron

Hi Finn....

I want to tell you I finished Ghost Town and enjoyed playing the game. I expect there are several paths to a sucessful end and I'll play it again to find them. This game had much more substance than other Adrift games and was more challenging to solve. The graphics were well done and helpful, although I didn't hear any audio other than the opening "Green Sleeves" . Were there any other sounds I should have received? Thanks again & I will be looking forward to playing your next work which I assume will be Through Time.

Thanks and Cheers,

Ron

Rated 4/5

Review of igor by TommoHawk

iantommo@hotmail.com (TommoHawk) — Tue 24th Nov 2009 14:16

Just blowing my own trumpet!!

Rated 5/5

Review of igor by TommoHawk

iantommo@hotmail.com (TommoHawk) — Tue 24th Nov 2009 14:15

Rated 5/5

Review of Ghost Town by Mel S

Mellio2@hotmail.com (Mel S) — Mon 2nd Nov 2009 21:01

An epic adventure featuring a captivating story and some wonderful use of art. If you're looking for a long, engaging Adrift experience, it'd be harder to find a better place to start than this.

Rated 5/5

Review of The Dangers of Driving at Night by Metron4

metron4@gmail.com (Metron4) — Sun 1st Nov 2009 01:05

Listen to your father!

Only experienced drivers should brave long, untested roads alone. Great descriptions and involving story.

Rated 4/5

Review of Where Am I? by Metron4

metron4@gmail.com (Metron4) — Thu 29th Oct 2009 03:14

It's like being shunted between mirrors facing each other.

A curious experiment that takes advantage of the game engine's ability to make traveling feel like you are on a treadmill. I would like to see this idea expanded.

Rated 3/5

Review of The War of the Worlds by Campbell

campbell@adrift.org.uk (Campbell) — Wed 14th Oct 2009 14:51

Not easy to get started

Hmm. Well you start off in a room with a very sparse description. The only object mentioned is a desk. But the desk doesn't exist. And you can't move anywhere.

Cheating and looking at the source reveals there is a door that must be unlocked. But you aren't told of the existance of the door in the first place.

More testing please.

Rated 1/5

Review of Where Am I? by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Wed 16th Sep 2009 08:42

Great little game

In "Where am I" you find yourself in a 9 x 9 ft. room with no obvious exits, and very little infor about what to do (which is actually intriguing)
This being Rich's first Adrift game I find it well written, and quite "irritating" at times.. But it is absolutely worth playing.
Personally I will be looking forward to see what he cooks up next.

Rated 4/5

Review of Shadowpeak by kevin bailey

kevbailey@live.co.uk (kevin bailey) — Tue 4th Aug 2009 20:11

As we speak

Rated 1/5

Review of Shadowpeak by kevin bailey

kevbailey@live.co.uk (kevin bailey) — Tue 4th Aug 2009 20:10

A rather nasty bug in the game which is now been corrected.

Rated 5/5

Review of Ghost Town by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Sun 26th Apr 2009 10:01

Review by Nick

I have taken the liberty of posting Nicks review of Ghost town.
I hope it is ok..
Thanks for the nice words Nick, and thanks for your help testing the game.

Ghost Town by Cowboy is one of those landmark games in the ADRIFT community. It is the first complete game to fully embrace the graphic ability of ADRIFT.
With detailed artwork depicting the scene of every location, Ghost Town takes a step away from the usual IF medium of listing every object. Instead the Player must pay attention to the artwork to pick out things of interest that may or be not be included in the description. This adds a whole new dimension to gameplay while not detracting anything from the storyline.

The premise of Ghost Town is to fulfill the final wishes of your Great Grandfather and inherit his entire estate and visit the abandoned gold mining town of Battle Creek.
It sounds like a simple task, until you begin to unravel the unsolved mystery of Battle Creek as you discover the morbid secrets of its morbid past...

The puzzles in Ghost Town range in difficulty. Some require just a little common sense whilst others require some good old fashioned detective work and in-depth interaction with the environment.

The gameplay is not as linear as you might expect, with areas you might miss completely the first time you play.

This game is highly detailed and the effort which has been put in to cover every "default" ADRIFT response and every object and/or alias makes the occasional "missing capital letter" easily forgivable.

This is a must play for everyone and certainly for those who think if they've played one, they've played them all.
Ghost Town raises the bar in the ADRIFT community, so congratulations go to Coyboy, this game has been a long time coming, but well worth the wait.

Review of the virtual human by WriterBob

WriterBobL@gmail.com (WriterBob) — Sat 21st Feb 2009 20:02

A Brief Diversion

After reading the "About the Story," section of "the virtual human," page, I was intrigued. I've experienced other works of IF that have offered personal insights, but this piece is not one of them. The decisions that the player is expected to make are for the most part superficial.

This work is inspired by a Jorgen Leth film. Since I am not familiar with the film, I can't say to what degree this work mimics the film. However, I suspect that this work has the same issues that IF works inspired by non-interactive media suffer from. This work runs as if it were on rails. The decisions made by the player do not affect the outcome of the work.

Still, even with these issues, this work is smooth and polished. It is interesting to play through once.

(reposted from IFDB - http://ifdb.tads.org)

Rated 2/5

Review of the virtual human by DB

duncan_bowsman@yahoo.com (DB) — Mon 1st Dec 2008 22:52

Not a learning experience

Although the description makes it out to be some sort of learning tool, "the virtual human" is nothing more than a fill-in-the-blank fest.

The whole thing is structured like a poem, but lacks any poetic elements, leading me to think the author is probably a pretentious twit.

When playing, it's mostly impossible to tell if what you are typing in will fit with the rest of the game's layout, and the lack of any sort of undo function means that one misstep requires restarting the whole thing all over again.

Not really worth any replay value. My advice is to play Mad Libs instead, since they have a robustness of scenario that "the virtual human" is sorely lacking.

Flomitts.

Rated 2/5

Review of Laboratory R.A.T.S. by DB

duncan_bowsman@yahoo.com (DB) — Mon 1st Dec 2008 22:41

I agree with DW's review (below)

...except that I didn't think the constant NPC comments helped the game at all. There were too few, they became stale and annoying quickly, and clogged up my screen because they were all really long. Why did the NPCs even have to be there?

Rated 1/5

Review of The Nonsense Machine 6000 by DB

duncan_bowsman@yahoo.com (DB) — Mon 1st Dec 2008 22:35

Interesting experiment needs polish from an ugly Albanian woodchipper with no face

What time I spent with this this game I did enjoy. It held my attention for maybe three minutes.

Some extra proofreading would have helped this game, as would some variation in the structure of its output. The interspersing of variables throughout variables could have helped accomplish this, although working all of that into the game with a nice network of dependencies, etc. would a while (understatement).

Overall, felt like I could have gotten more from it, but not entirely dissatisfied with the download.

Rated 2/5

Review of PROVENANCE by Corey Arnett

coreyarnett@hotmail.com (Corey Arnett) — Sun 9th Nov 2008 20:32

Rated 2/5

Review of PROVENANCE by Corey Arnett

coreyarnett@hotmail.com (Corey Arnett) — Sun 9th Nov 2008 20:32

Rated 3/5

Review of PROVENANCE by Corey Arnett

coreyarnett@hotmail.com (Corey Arnett) — Sun 9th Nov 2008 20:31

Rated 4/5

Review of Short-lived by DB

duncan_bowsman@yahoo.com (DB) — Sun 27th Jul 2008 19:40

Pointless

Rated 1/5

Review of No Name Competition Entries by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Thu 10th Jul 2008 09:18

Pieces of Eden

Review by David W.

Sometimes new (and old) authors do really strange things, like introducing puzzles that are impossible to complete without cheating (The Perfect Spy take a bow) or overriding the font settings in a game to force the player to use a font so miniscule and painful to read that anyone even considering playing the game would be left with a class A migraine from it all. Why do authors do this sort of thing? Why force the player to use a horrible, horrible font at a tiny, tiny setting? Beats me. So if you're going to play this game, I"d suggest copying the following line into the game"s ALR because without it, the thing is practically unplayable:

<font face="Arial Narrow" size=10>|

(Just a little note to the author: there's an option in the ADRIFT Generator to set the font style and size to whatever you want. It takes all of two seconds. You don"t need to put the line <font face="Arial Narrow" size=10> into every single room/object/task/etc.)

Once all that messing around was out of the way, I started on the game itself. At first, it didn"t seem too bad. Quite well written. Wasn"t too sure what it was about, but seemed at least reasonably engaging. But then the instant deaths and the errors started creeping in and my opinion of the game went from average to bad very quickly indeed.

As far as instant deaths is concerned: the game will kill you if you move either east or west at the start, though you won"t know this until it happens. It turns out you need to pay the waiter before you can leave the coffee shop. Only, funnily enough, even if you pay him then exit to the east, you'll still be stopped by a message telling you that you left without paying! In the next location, you'll also be killed without warning. (As an aside, the game also used ADRIFT"s built-in end game sequence so every time you die, you're faced with the rigmarole of navigating your way through that. If ADRIFT 5 gets rid of this, it'll be worth using for that reason alone.)

As far as errors? Lots of them unfortunately. Aside from the game not realising you"ve paid if you exit the coffee shop to the east, there are numerous typos (comtemplate pops up a time or two), grammatical errors (missing full stops and sentences split over several lines seem to be a favourite of the author"s) and some really bad errors right at the end of the game which make it impossible to finish. Again, we've got a newcomer to the scene who doesn"t realise that you can"t have a full stop in a task command because ADRIFT won"t process it correctly. Now I'm not saying a newcomer is necessarily going to know this (there's no reason why they would), but as it renders the game unfinishable, it means the game wasn"t even tested from start to finish. Bad, very bad. If there's one thing guaranteed to get a game a negative response, it"s being unable to finish it. Even more annoying is the fact that the game comprises a whole three locations and can be played from start to finish in less than ten minutes so it"s not like testing it properly would have really taken much effort.

One final point is the bizarre logic at play in the game"s final puzzle (for want of a better word). You meet a man who asks you a question. You reply to him (after you"ve edited the game"s code so it won"t throw a tantrum over the full stop) and he asks you a second question. Only one possible response to this question is given, yet it doesn"t work. For some reason I couldn"t fathom, the correct response here is the number 104. Yep, didn"t make any sense to me either.

Yet another game from a newbie I wouldn"t recommend in a million years. Hopefully one day we"ll have a game by one who has actually bothered to learn how to use ADRIFT before trying to write a game with it.

Review of No Name Competition Entries by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Thu 10th Jul 2008 09:17

The Perfect Spy

Review by David W.

The first thing I thought when starting this game was effing hell, that"s one big wall of text . As I was playing in a minimised window, the introductory wall of text I was hit with sprawled to just over five screens. Ouch. Hitting someone with *that* mother right at the start of the game just isn't a good idea.

After the wall of text complete with numerous typos and commas in the wrong place was past, I got on with the game itself. The storyline is a nice enough idea scientists trying to create a super spy have discovered how to transform humans into various animals but it isn't handled very well. Another huge wall of text when changing into a tiger is just so over the top that my eyes glazed over when I saw it.

There are a number of bugs, most involving changing back and forth between human and animal. As a mouse, I was able to carry around some tools (yes, very strong these mice) and at other times, exits would only become available if I was in one form yet be invisible in others. This meant there tended to be a lot of changing back and forth between various forms to see if there was anything hidden. In some locations, the CHANGE command won"t work and instead returns an error message, no doubt the author only intended it to work in certain places and didn"t account for people trying it elsewhere. Worst bug of the lot, though, and the one that really brought the game to a crashing halt, was the author"s strange decision to hide a key item. In one location, there's a certain item you need to take to progress further, only for a reason I can"t quite fathom the author has chosen to hide it away and not make it possible to discover. This makes the game unfinishable without a cheating look into the Generator.

Then again, the puzzle with the ball of yarn (yes, I've given away the name of the item there, but as you won"t finish the game without cheating this isn't likely to spoil anything for you) shouldn"t really be necessary anyway. I was able to change back into a human inside the hole despite the room description assuming I'm still a mouse so surely a fully grown human should be able to see off one little cat?

Overall, a bit disappointing. Not the worst game by a newbie I've ever played, but the puzzles need a good reworking and the text some serious rewriting before I could recommend it.

Review of No Name Competition Entries by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Thu 10th Jul 2008 09:16

Beanstalk and the Jack

Review by David W.

At first, this seemed frustratingly buggy. There were little annoyances like trying to close an open window and being told it was open and the listed exits being wrong in every location. Later on, after much muttering and cursing, I realised this was actually the point. If the title of the game hadn"t clued me in already (and no, it hadn"t), the game plays in reverse, e.g. you start at the end of the game and have to retrace (backwards) the steps you took to get there. So if there's an exit to the east, you need to approach it by going west; if something is closed, it can only be opened with the close command; you'll often be told what you need to do next *after* you"ve done it; and so on Quite an inspired idea, but annoying till you figure out what is going on and almost had me quitting.

I didn"t make a whole lot of progress with the game under my own steam. Trying to figure out the command I needed to type or the *previous* command I needed to type got me beat most of the time and instead I spent the majority of the game just randomly trying things until something finally worked. A trio of puzzles about midway through the game are essentially the same puzzle just repeated three times, but it wasn"t until I was on the third of them that I realised this. No doubt if I"d realised it a bit sooner, I wouldn"t have had anywhere near as many problems as I did. Fortunately, the game isn't password protected so I was able to sneak a peek in the Generator (a more polite way of saying I cheated something rotten) every time I got stuck.

Considering this game was written in the unregistered version of ADRIFT 4, complete with all the nasty restrictions meant to give you a taste of what the system is capable of without allowing you to actually producing anything worthwhile, there's a surprisingly complex game here and the idea of starting at the end of the story and working your way to the start is certainly an interesting one. The restrictions make themselves apparent in a few places and there are definitely some rough edges that could have been ironed out with the registered version, but all in all Beanstalk and the Jack is a far more accomplished game than I"d have expected one written with the unregistered version to be.

Review of The Sisters by Nchalada

nchalada@yahoo.com.au (Nchalada) — Sun 22nd Jun 2008 22:55

scary

whoa, what a ride

Rated 4/5

Review of Cell (part I) by Hideki

miraiMonogatari@gmail.com (Hideki) — Tue 17th Jun 2008 20:59

Intense.

From your meager description, I wasn't expecting anything very memorable. Pardon me for being wrong! XD

The introduction statements were interesting- being partially a narrative helped instantly set the mood for the whole game. Very nice use of "personality" to make the player understand what the main character was going through.

I also enjoyed your extremely talent of transforming realistic locations and situations into text. Even the "event" scenes were creatively programmed; The urgency you put in each part was outstanding!

The explanation for Genevive was a bit overboard, I thought, but I can understand the player character reacting that way, given his condition. Her role and actions were surprisingly well coordinated- I wanted to make a significant note of her in this review.

Although I found multiple parts of the setting overly reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid, the entire theme and execution is wonderful. You are quite gifted with writing skill; the way you handled action stood out quite prominently.

- Slight spoilers past this point! -
A favorite part of mine was the subtlety of the "hiding" sequence. When she first screamed at me, I didn't know how to respond, and lost. After retrying several times (I tried hiding behind her, under the table, behind the corpse.. kind of laughable now that I think of it ^__^;; ), I noticed the lockers being listed in the room's description. They were cleverly shown as all being locked except for one, giving the player the choice to hide inside.

The only negative I could find in this adventure was its length. I was already hooked and wanting more after the very first room; I can say I'll be looking forward to the sequels (if you are still developing them).

Rated 5/5

Review of Rocky Raccoon by Hideki

miraiMonogatari@gmail.com (Hideki) — Tue 17th Jun 2008 20:09

Descriptions too short, absolutely no guidance!

Sounds like a neat idea at first, but the intro immediately gives away the quality of the game. One paragraph (a poorly written one, as well) dumps you off with little or no idea on what the point of the game is.

Sure, you are supposed to get back to "Dan and Nancy's" house, in order to rescue your family. All right, seems simple enough. Firstly, I looked around the beginning room, perhaps to fish for some clues or some kinda of atmospheric setting to start it all off. One sentence tells you about the room, describing it as "in a dark alley running east and west in the middle of a big city". I'm sorry, but especially for the very introduction to the game world, this is awful!

The other areas were logically linked together (ie. alleys going to streets, sewers linking different city roads, etc.) but sadly all lacked decent explanations! One area included a "pile of logs". Now, I don't know if the author isn't familiar with dynamic/static objects, but I was able to simply pick up and carry the logs! Remember, the player is a four-year old raccoon in this adventure. Not too much thought there.

After wandering about for a while, I became frustrated with the lack of descriptive items. The rooms would say things like "a barking dog is here" when there really wasn't. Trying to "look at the dog" did absolutely nothing. Same happened with areas that claimed to have "a dumpster" and "a bum", they were supposedly in the room but had no object to allow the player to truly interact with the game's universe.

Several characters were placed about, including "The Ratpack", whom I didn't know how to communicate with, and "Doc", the talking catfish. Earlier, I had found a loose brick in a wall, with which I was instructed to remove it (per the room's description). It got me a golden necklace, which in turn informed me that a "Doc" had sent me to find. Now, I would understand if Doc had previously called me over the minute I entered his room, and explained to me about a hidden trinket. But merely walking past him (I had no clue what topics he was programmed with, his description was "A large mutated Catfish with a drinking problem who is in a mourning period after losing his beloved goldfish wife to a gang of fishnapping rats.") Once I had found the necklace on my own, I tried to talk with Doc about it, and he congratulated me saying I could keep it as a gift.
...huh?

I also tried talking with the first character from earlier, The Ratpack, about Doc (after struggling with him and his necklace quest). They just said he could give me guidance.

About at this point of the game, I was 100% confused and lost. Sorry, but you need to work on two things, if you are going to continue making text adventures and/or remake this one.

1. Make the player feel -inside- the locations. Being ditched into an alley with a few words about it isn't very personal; maybe you should try to start each room with the sights, the smells, what it feels like to be standing in the place. If you can learn to appeal to the senses, you'll become a great writer.

2. Include a bit more help for the player. You could experiment with creating a backstory for your world, even if it is only for a few characters. The very first part of the game could include a short narrative about the main possum; He could talk about missing his family, or reinforce his fear/hatred of humans. Mentioning people such as Doc would make it welcoming when the player finally stumbled upon him while exploring. Offering too much help to the player is always better than leaving them without any idea on what's going on.

I apologize if this is too long or harsh, but I didn't want the theme for this adventure to go to waste.

Rated 1/5

Review of Goldilocks - Breaking & Entering by Campbell

campbell@adrift.org.uk (Campbell) — Sat 3rd May 2008 15:55

It would help if more objects were created, for example, there is a coat on a coat stand, but you can't take "it", because there is no "it".

Rated 3/5

Review of The Angel, the Devil and the Human by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Tue 11th Mar 2008 11:02

Enjoyable

Quite a neat game, and although it takes a little thinking (but that is the whole point, isn't it?)not too hard to figure out.
I enjoyed playing it.

Rated 4/5

Review of LED Display by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 15th Feb 2008 20:15

Players concerned with cross platform compatibility should be aware that some aspects of this demo are not supported, primarily I believe its use of colors. If you want a similar effect, replace the colors with different symbols.

Review of Conversation Tree Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 15th Feb 2008 20:10

Written by Scurvy Sockpuppet. This demo shows one way to create a conversation tree. Sockpuppet uses the ALR and a variable updated by an expression to track the player's location in the conversation. Relatively few tasks were needed so it appears to be relatively efficient.

Rated 4/5

Review of Interrogate Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 15th Feb 2008 20:08

Written by Scurvy Sockpuppet. The Interrogate Demo shows how to setup a conversation tree using the ALR and a variable updated with an expression using only 5 tasks.

Rated 4/5

Review of Synonymizer by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Mon 11th Feb 2008 02:08

Very useful

Stewart McAbney's Synonymizer is an excellent idea for a module - why keep entering the same synonyms every game when you can import them all at once?

Rated 5/5

Review of Goldilocks - Breaking & Entering by J. J. Guest

jason.guest@gmail.com (J. J. Guest) — Sun 10th Feb 2008 11:58

Who's been playing MY Goldilocks?

Hmmm. A trapdoor? A cellar with shackles on the wall? A refrigerator, a television, barred windows, a window painted shut? Even the layout of the house seems similar to my own "Goldilocks is a FOX!", with only the kitchen being in a different place.

Since a burgling Goldilocks is, I'll admit, a rather obvious idea, I'm going to be generous and assume these similarities are mere co-incidence. In all, not a bad first effort. The writing is a little flat in places, but good in others. The staples of the Goldilocks story, three beds, three chairs, three bowls of porridge have not been well integrated into the story, which is something I took great pains to do in my own version, but that's a matter of taste.

Technically, there are a LOT of unimplemented scenery objects, and the occasional typo. "x me" produces the default response. The worst problem is guess the verb; even after looking at the game in generator I can't see how you're supposed to know how to find the thing that's hidden in the couch. SEARCH and EXAMINE don't work on the hole. This game could use a bit of beta-testing, and that's putting it mildly.

An encouraging first effort. For his or her next game, which promises to be good, I'd like to request the author NOT do a Victorian ballooning adventure.

Rated 3/5

Review of In The Claws Of Clueless Bob by Demon Drifter

ruairidh.james@live.co.uk (Demon Drifter) — Sat 9th Feb 2008 17:10

Amazing

Funy to eezy wif ta wokthroo but impozzibil wifout. wel dun

Rated 5/5

Review of The Forest House v1.0 by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sat 9th Feb 2008 16:22

Excellent writing but could use a v2.0 update for playability

One of the entries for Ectocomp, this one had a lot of promise in writing and story. The revision, which I think this one is, still isn't quite robust enough as I had guess the verb problems involving the flashlight and a bug/guess the verb issue that prevented me from ever entering the forest despite having all items that the explicit hint told me to have.

I'll withhold my rating for the time being as I would like to rate this game after another revision.

Review of Ghost town by Cowboy

finn-r@mail.dk (Cowboy) — Sat 9th Feb 2008 15:36

Lumin (Jaquline): (Beta tester)

Hey, just been playing your game and while I've gotten a wee bit stuck at like, the second puzzle (i am so gud at teh enteractive fictin gaems omg lol...), I really like what I've seen so far. The artwork is fantastic (you've got some very talented friends!) and the writing is great, very atmospheric.

finally got a chance to finish playing this evening, (well okay I've yet to see what's inside Rita's tent, but more on that later...) and you've definitely got the makings of a great game here. And I love seeing someone stick it to all the naysayers who insist Adrift is dying or that there's no point in writing anything until v5 comes out. :P

---Aww, that's the end? I was looking forward to poking around and stirring up a few ghosts, but I guess I have to remember this is just a teaser. I'm curious, what percentage would you say this is of the entire game? And about how far along with the rest of it are you? (and the artists?)

Anyway, I know I've been nitpicking on a lot of the little details but I really enjoyed this, as a trailer it definitely accomplished the goal of whetting my appetite for the rest. There are just enough details about Holly and the shooting and such to make me want to get into that town and start doing some detective work, so I hope to see the completed version soon! :)

Mel S: (Player)
It took me a long time to get around to it but I finally played the Ghost Town trailer tonight and it was fantastic. I love a good ghost story and this is definitely shaping up to be a great one so needless to say, I'm very excited to play the final game. I only have one tiny little suggestion for it: if there's one thing I think that could really create even more atmosphere in the game, its music. You've already got the graphics down pat and I think adding some spooky music as well would really draw a person into the experience. Keep up the great work, I look forward to the final product. I just hope I don't have to wait too long for it.

Rated 4/5

Review of No Drop Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Wed 6th Feb 2008 21:10

@Amanda - Most demos are utilitarian and simple on purpose.

The no drop restriction can come in handy in a number of ways, not limited to but including such situations as preventing unwinable scenarios and allowing you to secretly reuse rooms for elevators and generic places.

Rated 4/5

Review of Notebook Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Wed 6th Feb 2008 20:34

Interesting use of player input

I've wondered how to capture player input before and this demo shows you how to do it. One use for something like this would be a notebook but you could also check player input against the contents of text type variables.

Rated 5/5

Review of Name Me by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Wed 6th Feb 2008 19:18

A short and too the point demo on how to allow the player to choose their own name for the pc.

Rated 5/5

Review of The PK Girl by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Mon 4th Feb 2008 14:12

Awesome Game

This was one of the first Adrift games I ever played. Comes with sound and artwork, and has multiple endings. Highly recommended.

Rated 5/5

Review of The Isle by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sun 3rd Feb 2008 06:55

An impossible to find crab would be one that is still in room hidden...

Just to be sure that wasn't the case, I opened it in the generator and it is indeed on the map, though as a static object - which may or may not be listed in the room description because of that.

Since I only looked at it in the generator without playing it I will withhold giving a rating until later. As games go it appears fairly short, but since the author says so up front I wouldn't hold it against him.

Review of An Exercise in Viewpoint by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sun 3rd Feb 2008 06:30

Thanks, Ren. I worked a lot on this and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I've always enjoyed games with multiple player characters, the Earth and Sky series by Paul O'Brian being a favorite of mine.

Review of An Exercise in Viewpoint by Ren

the_mighty_ren@yahoo.co.uk (Ren) — Sun 3rd Feb 2008 01:15

A lot of unique game-building potential

Nice port. I've used an identical system myself, and it works pretty well. It is a bit of a hassle to maintain (two tasks per item, more if it is wearable, more if you want more than 2 playable characters), but it gives you a chance to create some unique puzzles.

Rated 5/5

Review of Hidden Character v.1.1 by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sat 2nd Feb 2008 16:39

I find MonsterHeads review to be terrible - I give it 0 out of 5 on the helpfulness scale.

As for the demo, I think you should watch your paragraph breaks a bit better. You can insert <br> into places to makes sure things are separate.

Though I didn't open it in the generator, I suspect all you did was move the Marc character out of the room to hidden for a few turns before it moved him back. Some indication that Marc was hiding in the room, since you saw him, would have been nice. If you look under the room descriptions you will see that you can make alternate descriptions based upon tasks. For when Marc is hiding, I would do this:

If MarcHidden task complete, then description is: This is Marc's room. He is hiding in here ... somewhere.

Something like that would be more interesting. You should also allow for the character to find Marc before he comes back but that would require the use of variables and custom look or search tasks.

I'll give the demo a 3 to balance out Monsterheads.

Rated 3/5

Review of HYPER Battle System by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sat 2nd Feb 2008 16:33

Sorry, but not many people make use of the battle system in their games these days.

Review of Door Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sat 2nd Feb 2008 01:11

Doors you repeatedly have to reopen to get through are annoying. Nice work on this, Mystery.

Rated 5/5

Review of 2 Player Extreme (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 05:43

Rough around the edges but Interesting

Interesting idea but the implementation is rough around the edges and the descriptions are basic as dirt. There are no comments on how it is supposed to function.

The way the inventories are kept separate doesn't handle worn objects properly. Before switching, everything carried by a player is moved into a bag they are conveniently holding (which should be made undroppable by the way to avoid complications with switching). This includes all worn items...

This wouldn't be a problem if when you switched back they went back to being worn, but I believe you'll have to create additional tasks for it. If clothing is interchangeable, removable by the player, or you have lots of them, then you will have a lot of extra and perhaps complicated tasks to create.

The switch mechanism should have made use of variables but an object state is used instead. The ALR would be useful in smoothing some parts out but I don't think the Author made use of one.

Neat idea but as a demo the presentation could have used work.

Rated 2/5

Review of Car Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:57

This demo is one of two that show you how to make a car in your game. If you need a simple vehicle that need not be like a room and hold objects, Simple Car by Mystery might be a better place to start.

Mileout, the author of this demo, made the car a room and created an object to represent the outside. Using the ALR and some variables, he lets you see whats outside your window while in your car, and also get a message indicating that your car is present when you are out in the normal locations. He left commentary in his ALR, so if you need help understanding what does what, be sure to read it.

Rated 5/5

Review of Simple Car Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:54

This simple car demo by Mystery is an excellent place to start if you need to implement some kind of vehicle that can go between locations.

I would say that this implementation would be ideal for a bicycle. In this case you would want to make it ride-able (allow the player to sit on it) and check to see that the player is on it before you go anywhere.

If you need your car to be more like a room and hold objects, look for the Car Demo by Mileout. Its attributed to Anonymous but he is the author.

Rated 5/5

Review of Character follows Character (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:44

I found this demo fairly useful. An effect like this could be used for any number of things. Other demos about npc movement that are useful to look at would include "Stop Following" and "Follow Me" by David Whyld.

Rated 5/5

Review of Day-Night Cycle (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:35

There is another example of how to do this by Mystery. I would recommend looking at both.

Rated 4/5

Review of Demo of emotions (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:29

While this demo is only a simple simulation of emotions, tracking npc to player relationships is one method for more realistic npc's. Perhaps not useful to all games but it could be worth it for some. For example, in a Mystery Thriller you could track whether or not the player had earned the trust or suspicion of the other characters depending on what they had done (preferably while in the presence of the npc in question).

Rated 5/5

Review of The Cat (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:25

This demo has a cat on a chair but no restriction of the player sitting on the chair while the cat is still on it. For an idea of how to go about something like that I would recommend looking at "Seated character demo" by KF.

Rated 2/5

Review of Seated character demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:22

Something that has always bothered me in a game where you can sit on stuff like chairs, etc, is if there is no restriction for sitting on something where another character is already sitting. Fortunately, this demo has the answer on how to prevent things like that.

There was a demo here in the archives with a cat in a chair I saw once. I tried sitting on the chair while the cat was on it and got the message that I had sat down with no mention of the cat I was now presumably sitting on. On a related note, if you wanted a custom description to indicate whether or not you had a cat on your lap, a variable and the ALR would be a good way to do this.

Rated 5/5

Review of Character turns back demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:15

Most games don't track the position of characters within rooms. While this is unnecessary for most puzzles, it comes in handy for others. The demo uses the example of trying to stab a character in the back but you could just as easily be shoplifting or any other task requiring that you not be seen.

Rated 5/5

Review of Room Group NPC Walk (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:12

Dynamic NPCs are always more interesting then ones that sit around all the time. If you've ever wanted to figure out how to do this, then this demo is an excellent one to get started with. There are a lot of different options in the character movement window so if you have questions be sure to come to the forums.

Rated 5/5

Review of Dress by Gender (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:10

Being able to choose characteristics of your player character has always seemed rather cool to me. Anyone thinking of doing something like this should however make sure that such information actually gets used in the game otherwise it is a rather superfluous choice which some players would find annoying, like being asked to input a name but never have any NPC use it when talking to them.

Rated 5/5

Review of Time and Weather System (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Fri 1st Feb 2008 00:08

I always liked being able to simulate things and this demo does a good job of showing how you could make something similar for your games. This setup is easily adaptable to simulate a large number of environmental things.

Rated 5/5

Review of Gumball Machine Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:59

This tutorial was the first one I tried to figure out how the ALR works. If you've never used it before this is a good demo to help get you started. The description of things is randomized also, showing some other aspects of the ALR aside from simple text replacement.

Rated 5/5

Review of Stand on stool to examine (Demo) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:57

This is a rather clever idea. Puzzles based on where the player is located in a room are neat in my opinion as they're not used that often. Having to stand on a stool is only one such idea. The demo file is simple and easy to understand so if this is something you've wanted to include in your games, this is a good demo to get started with.

Rated 5/5

Review of Player name as input (DEMO) by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:52

Being able to have the player input text into game is really neat but aside from allowing them to choose names for the player character, what else could one do with it?

Custom dialog comes to mind, but you wouldn't have anyway for npc's to appropriately respond so it would be more a gimmick then anything else, though a Monkey Island style Pirate insult fight would be cool though probably too similar.

A mad lib style mini game is another possibility. Also, if you could have objects with variables for names, you could create a puzzle, albeit a rather silly one, of figuring out what things really were with the player having been asked to give names to them before hand without knowing. I've tried things with variable names before and not had it work but perhaps in Adrift 5 this would be possible.

Rated 5/5

Review of Demo: A Dead Room by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:37

Rated 5/5

Review of X Me by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:35

Lots of games don't seem to pay much attention to the descriptions of their player characters. There are a lot of different things one could have in the player description which could be changed throughout the game. Mystery and Spy games could vary it according to disguise, fantasy games by whether or not you were cursed, rpg's by what kind of health you were in, even things like tans and haircuts, etc

The demo makes use of tasks with restrictions and then has the completion message output the correct description of the player based on what they are wearing. While this is one level of variable player description, I think a lot more can be done. A more flexible approach, however, would be to make use of variables and the ALR. As long as you keep good documentation of what variables are what, etc, editing various aspects of the player description should be easy as its all in the ALR as opposed to being inside a whole ton of tasks.

Rated 3/5

Review of GPS Demo Ver 1.2 by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:16

I wrote this awhile ago but have since come to the conclusion that there aren't that many uses for it. It is built upon over-riding all the compass directions so that you can update the variables depending on what direction you go. If you have a complicated map, something like this would be hard to make use of as you would have to program additional tasks to take care of all the exceptions. If your game had a large grid of wilderness locations, something like this would come in handy. On the other hand, large amounts of empty locations look rather poor unless you have a purpose for them.

Review of Sniper Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:12

I found this demo quite clever. When you're looking through the scope, you are actually being 'moved' into the rooms you are looking at.

If you wanted to implement a telescope that you could point at distant objects or even things in the night sky, this would be one way of doing it. Care must be taken to make sure that any task other then shifting the telescope, examining things, etc, are the only ones permitted while the player is in these other 'rooms'.

A neat feature would be if the next time you looked into the telescope it was in the place where you last left it pointing at. You could do this with an invisible object that follows the player around while they are in these rooms which gets left behind when they stop using the telescope.

Authors that include ways of looking into other rooms via vistas, windows, etc, bring interest to their games in my opinion as it enhances the sense of a real world. While challenging, I think the effort is worth it if its inclusion would benefit to the game play experience.

Rated 5/5

Review of Stop Following by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 23:04

I don't see many games that make use of this kind of npc behavior. If you need help understanding the various movement options for npc's, this demo is a good one to get started with.

A character can have multiple walks which can be started or stopped with tasks. Also, while the walk is in progress, you can specify that certain tasks are run when the character comes across other characters, or the player, or certain objects. You can also have a specific message to show when the player is in the same room as the character when a particular walk is in progress.

Lots of different options that a creative author can make good use of.

Rated 5/5

Review of Event Demo by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 22:54

In making a working Timer, David makes use of Events, Tasks, and variables. If you take a look at how he did it in the generator, it should be rather easy to understand how its supposed to work as things are clearly labeled. If you want to make something that is dependent on knowing the number of turns that have passed, than this is a good demo to look at.

Note: When you test the demo, make sure auto-complete is off, as the command to start the timer is n. If you wanted to do something similar in a real game, you would want to cover north, go n, and go north in addition to n in your task overriding north.

Rated 5/5

Review of Listen For Monsters by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 22:45

This demo was interesting, but without Adrift being able to determine spatial relationships, implementing a listen task for everything that makes noise and moves, for each room its capable of going into, is a bit too much work. Excellent idea though, of the six senses, sound is one the more underimplementated ones.

Rated 4/5

Review of Hold Breath by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Thu 31st Jan 2008 22:40

I had been contemplating how to implement holding one's breath for being underwater. This demo, while being about poisonous gas, would work just as well for any other situation where one would need to hold one's breath.

Anyone making a horror genre game for example could use something similar to this for holding one's breath so the monsters don't hear you breathing, except that in this case, breathing in the presence of a monster could result in the execution of task or plot point rather then just death.

Note:
Holding one's breath in the start room of the demo doesn't seem to do anything. Realistically, you should be forced to breathe after 3 turns in the start room as well as the gas room, but everything one would need to do that is already there.

Rated 4/5

Review of Greek School Adventure by Dan McCurdy

revdmc247@yahoo.com (Dan McCurdy) — Mon 28th Jan 2008 05:16

Just to pass...

No saving the world here. I'll try to make it more obvious in subsequent versions, however.

Review of An ALR exercise by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sat 26th Jan 2008 22:38

Known bugs:

*** In Adrift you can type anything in between examine and a valid alias (woman or lady) and it will be accepted. This allows for things like "x red-headed lady" but also means that "x asldjfh lady" would be accepted. I may try to use a variable character prefix to fix this.

(This bug occurs only in the official runner as SCARE doesn't even permit anything to go between between x and an alias like in my example.)

*** The npc name in the generator is actually a variable for woman or lady. I also have aliases for woman or lady. If I remove the aliases you can no longer interact with the npc as the runner will claim you can't see that.

This would seem to indicate that I can't have a variable as a name for a character and have the ALR change it without having problems.

*** In SCARE, there are texts that are not being replaced by the ALR like it does in the official runner. These unreplaced texts occur in a Task Completion message I was using to announce the arrival of the NPC.

I may change where I have those messages to see if that makes a difference, but that is where I had them in the original version.

Review of An ALR exercise by ElliotM

orangelorax@gmail.com (ElliotM) — Sat 26th Jan 2008 21:05

There are some display problems involving paragraph breaks. Ralphmerridew was also kind enough to point out that there were some other problems that occurred when running the demo in SCARE. I'll see what I can do.

Review of Greek School Adventure by Demon Drifter

ruairidh.james@live.co.uk (Demon Drifter) — Fri 25th Jan 2008 17:32

Well written

It was well written but may I ask what the point of the game is.

Rated 4/5

Review of The Angel, the Devil and the Human by Demon Drifter

ruairidh.james@live.co.uk (Demon Drifter) — Sun 20th Jan 2008 18:40

Comment

I withdraw the comment i made earlier.

Rated 5/5

Review of The Angel, the Devil and the Human by Demon Drifter

ruairidh.james@live.co.uk (Demon Drifter) — Sun 20th Jan 2008 18:36

Help

How do you do this. Why can't you drop the human on earth? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!

Rated 4/5

Review of The Warlord, The Princess & The Bulldog (version 2) by Demon Drifter

ruairidh.james@live.co.uk (Demon Drifter) — Sun 20th Jan 2008 18:29

Challenging

Well done!!! The best storyline in the world. However, it is very hard. I can't get past the door. Well done anyway.

Rated 5/5

Review of armor and clothing slots by TDS

T_D_S_otp@hotmail.com (TDS) — Thu 20th Dec 2007 15:02

Good work

This is a pretty helpful module if you're creating a rpg. Thanks for sharing.

Rated 4/5

Review of The Adventures of Space Boy Volume II by skypig

pldeibert@charter.net (skypig) — Fri 23rd Nov 2007 21:04

Kinda stops before it starts.

I liked it, but just as it felt like something exciting was going to happen it ended. It was more like a demo in the form of a teaser. Good and to the point descriptions, no point being wordy and intellectual when the game is certainly meant to be silly. It's not overly hard if you pay attention to descriptions and examine everything. The one thing I noticed was talking to the bartender. You learn his name immediatly but can only communicate with him via, "Ask man about...", not a big deal at all though. Anyhow, I'd like to play the full game so...hurry up :)

Rated 4/5

Review of Rain Module by rbaseel

rbaseel@gmail.com (rbaseel) — Tue 9th Oct 2007 01:22

Works like a champ!

This module works like champ! I added it to my WIP and modified the etxt slightly. My game now has rain! Thanks!

Review of HOUSE by Akrate

adamd23@hotmail.co.uk (Akrate) — Fri 22nd Jun 2007 17:48

0/10

I love the way you type "East" and the game crashes.
Remarkable.

Rated 1/5

Review of Random Number Generator by Louisisthebest007

litb007@gmail.com (Louisisthebest007) — Sun 22nd Apr 2007 15:37

Great Feature!

This file contains everything a writer could need for making random results occur within their game. Nice job!

Rated 5/5

Review of Hidden Character v.1.1 by Marc Andersen

marcandersen@mail.dk (Marc Andersen) — Sun 15th Apr 2007 02:24

Monsterhead

This game is boring!

Rated 1/5

Review of The Successor by kev25811

krcantara@hotmail.com (kev25811) — Wed 7th Mar 2007 06:26

BETA TEST!!!

Having played through only a few seconds of this, I decided to quit. I simply don't have the patience to keep messing around with games that have obviously never been Beta Tested.

For example... when a door says it's open, I expect to be able to walk through it. Just a thought.

I don't want to sound ENTIRELY mean. I'm really quite interested in where you're going with this story, and would really like the opportunity to play a new game.

Please pull this submission and correct it. I'm very interested in writing a glowing review for the "official" version.

Rated 1/5

Review of Professional by kev25811

krcantara@hotmail.com (kev25811) — Mon 23rd Oct 2006 18:17

Wow!

What can I say? With superb descriptions, biting social commentary, humorous characters that abound, and a replayability value of several hundred times that of lesser games, this may be the best game ever!

(I would actually write a real review of this game, but that would just be silly, as the game makes it quite clear that it wants to be mocked.)

Rated 5/5

Review of PROVENANCE by TDS

T_D_S_otp@hotmail.com (TDS) — Sat 15th Jul 2006 23:10

Kind of disappointing...

Provenance by Corey W. Arnett

Even though you know better, some unseen force draws you up the long path towards the house for a closer look. No good can come of this, you are certain, but the attraction is simply too strong. You must investigate. You are beginning to develop an uneasy sense that all is not right here, but that it is somehow up to you to find out. Church bells in the distance sound out four o clock in the afternoon. It will be dark soon. And with the night comes things that go bump.

I always laugh at that last sentence. The whole paragraph is incredibly overwritten. So much for good first impressions.

Before the game even starts you are hit with even more ridiculous lines such as:

The sun has breached the horizon and its fervent intensity warms the land, pulling the moisture from the ground in a sinuous miasma that rises up into the atmosphere like languid serpents.

Yes, the game is literary. Too literary for me. When the game finally does begin you are creeping around a house for no reason. In my case I was stuck wandering around for quite some time before I realized I'd missed a very important item. I had missed an item list that told me what I'd be collecting. That's what the game is about. Collecting items on a list. You have to be kidding me.

Wading through room after room of stale (yet full) descriptions doesn't interest me. Very little action progressed the story at all. In fact there's a huge gap from the beginning to end where story advancement is concerned. You don't learn much more about it except from these two points. This would be fine but there are no good puzzles to hold the story up. Most of the puzzles have been thrown in for the sole purpose of keeping the player busy. Actually all of the puzzles have been created for that reason. The flowery writing is the weak glue that keeps the game from falling apart to reveal what it really is. A tedious, story-thin treasure hunt.

To beat the game you must collect items off a list and travel to the center of a maze to win. If that sounds fun to you then this game will keep you busy for ages.

If I judged games on how good they look instead of how well they play this game would get a 9/10. But because presentation isn't everything I give it a...

3/10.

Rated 2/5

Review of A Spot Of Bother [version 4] by phazonstorm

I.Campbell43@hotmail.co.uk (phazonstorm) — Fri 12th May 2006 21:45

Great...

... but slighlty flawed. Only, slightly, though, as overall this is an extremely well-written and funny game, but there are tiny problems.

When I went into the room with the desk, bookcase and wardrobe, the hints indicated that the book in the bookcase might give me a clue to how I opened the wardrobe with showering the room with bits of myself. However, 'pick up book' 'read book' examine book' 'open book' and 'disembowel David Whyld with book because he's made a huge glitch' all failed when I just wanted to read what the book had to say. Maybe David has re-released it and fixed this glitch, but in the version I played the book must have been superglued shut because I couldn't open it, read it, or find out what you had to do to disarm the wardrobe.

Other than that it is a great game, but this glitch needs to be fixed, because I hate going through the whole game with just two lives.

Rated 4/5

Review of HOTEL CON FUEGO by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Wed 26th Apr 2006 22:37

Awesome Demo!

Hey! I tried your demo and I think it is really cool. Love the descriptiveness. You are obvously very imaginative and I think this will be a really cool game. I can't wait to test otu the full one. Nice work!

Rated 5/5

Review of Newspaper rack demo by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Tue 25th Apr 2006 12:37

Quote from Amanda: "There is nothing to this thing. A child could do it. Especially with ADRIFT. First the rack should be static. Second, your room description is horrible! Here? A place? I mean come on! Even for a demo, you can do better than that! And who needs to know how to create an object you can put things in with an object inside it? I have only been using ADRIFT for less than a month and I could have told you that straight off. Sorry to say but this has got to be one of the most useless demos I have ever seen!"

Just because the writer of this demo wrote a less than glowing review of your boyfri- sorry, John Greer's demo, is no reason to go writing a bad review of this one.

Review of Space Boy"s First Adventure ver 2.5 by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Tue 25th Apr 2006 02:05

Not bad. A bit tricky.

I have tried this game and not gotten far. I couldn't seem to call out LAVaaH's name because I couldn't get it entered the way it needs to be. However, I do think it is pretty cool. I imagine it's a cool game. I'm just having a bit of a hard time working around that little kink. Nice work! I like a challenge.

Rated 4/5

Review of Slot Machine Demo by KF

kf@kfadrift.org.uk (KF) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 22:35

Just to explain the confusion

Unfortunately there was an error in the expected commands, which the author now knows about and will correct.

The expected command PUT MONEY IN MACHINE didn't work, though PUT MONEY did.

Rated 3/5

Review of Newspaper rack demo by Richard Otter

richardo@delron.org.uk (Richard Otter) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 21:59

It is quite possible for a newpaper rack to be portable (the ones in my house are) and therefore a dynamic object rather than static. When you use Adrift for a bit you will soon learn about ambiguity problems.

Rated 3/5

Review of No Drop Demo by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 19:19

I'm impressed! It's useful and it works!

So far I have tested about five of your demos and this is the only useful one that is not flawed in the code. I still think it is lacking in creativity but it does give me an idea of what you had in mind. Nice work on this one!

Rated 4/5

Review of Newspaper rack demo by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 18:49

What were you thinking?

There is nothing to this thing. A child could do it. Especially with ADRIFT. First the rack should be static. Second, your room description is horrible! Here? A place? I mean come on! Even for a demo, you can do better than that! And who needs to know how to create an object you can put things in with an object inside it? I have only been using ADRIFT for less than a month and I could have told you that straight off. Sorry to say but this has got to be one of the most useless demos I have ever seen!

Rated 1/5

Review of Endless Nightmare by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 13:36

That was awful quick off the mark there, John Greer. The demo's only just been uploaded and yet already you've had "hours" of of entertainment with it. Something about that seems mighty suspicious to me.

Hmmm...

Review of Newspaper rack demo by John Greer

jpgreer@sbcglobal.net (John Greer) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 12:48

And?

Ok, for a demo of creating objects I will have to say that there are two of them. But could not figure out why anyone would need to carry the newspaper rack around with them. Perhaps if the newspaper rack were created as a static object instead of a dynamic object it would make more sense to me.

Rated 2/5

Review of Slot Machine Demo by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 00:30

How to make it work.

I have played this one and it is so simple to do. For the person that was having trouble, try a look command, a standard adrift command. I think this thing will make a great addition to the full game.

Rated 5/5

Review of Evil_house Prototype by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 00:27

Inore last 2 reviews

Those last 2 reviews were for a different game. I goofed and clicked the wrong add review link. Sorry

Rated 1/5

Review of Evil_house Prototype by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 00:10

How to make it work

This thing is pretty cool. For the person who couldn't figure out how to use it, try a look command, a standard command used in adrift. That should give you what you need. I think this thing is a nice little minigame though. Since it will be a part of another game, I think it will be pretty cool added into it.

Rated 4/5

Review of Endless Nightmare by John Greer

jpgreer@sbcglobal.net (John Greer) — Mon 24th Apr 2006 00:03

Can't wait for the full release

This game has so many twists and turns that just the demo kept me entertained for hours. Can't wait to play this game when it is fully completed. Not gonna give away any hints because that to me is part of the fun of text adventures; trying to figure out what the writer has in mind for you to do. Personally, I love the challenge this game provides.

Rated 5/5

Review of Evil_house Prototype by Amanda

arr_781984@yahoo.com (Amanda) — Sun 23rd Apr 2006 23:54

How to make it work

You have to do a look command. Isn't that a normal command for a text adventure? Try it! I guarantee that is what you are missing. I have tried it and it works just fine. It's not a bad little thing. I kind of like it.

Rated 4/5

Review of Slot Machine Demo by KF

kf@kfadrift.org.uk (KF) — Sat 22nd Apr 2006 10:02

Frustrating

Even for a demo you need a bit more detail. A transcript brings up:

hint
You need to put money in first.

put money in slot machine
You need to put money in first.

insert money in machine
You need to put money in first.

x machine
You need to put money in first.

x slot machine
You need to put money in first.

x bill
You see no such thing.

x money
It is your typical 100 dollar bill.

x note
You see no such thing.

x bank note
You see no such thing.

Nowhere do you get told how to put money in the machine. You are very short on alternative names for things, which is a very easy thing to correct. At the simplest level you could just, at the start, provided the basic commands needed to play.

When you make a demo it isn't very useful to have it passworded as, if you cannot work out what is happening, it demonstrates nothing.

Rated 2/5

Review of Invasion of the Second-Hand Shirts by Mr.Dot

tickkm@hotmail.com (Mr.Dot) — Fri 7th Apr 2006 23:31

Rated 1/5

Review of PROVENANCE by Hombre

hombreviii@myway.com (Hombre) — Thu 2nd Feb 2006 18:46

Very promising

First of all, I want to say that this game so far has some of the best writing of any IF game I've seen. If it weren't for the rather cheesy "with the night come things that go bump" comment at the end of the intro, I would say it was the best writing I've seen in an IF so far, on par with the excellent game Anchorhead, (sorry guys, it's not an Adrift game). Adding to the effect is the fact that the author has removed objects from room descriptions. When they are listed seperately, it's too easy to ignore the room descriptions altogether, and often they don't have much to do with winning the game. By forcing the player to read the room descriptions carefully, the image the writer is trying to convey is a lot more effective and really highlights Corey's talent for description. Also adding to this effect is the same names given to rooms "On a brick walkway". Instead of just looking at the room name, I need to look around the room description until I've walked through it enough times to be familiar with it by the mental map in my head.

The reason I say it has excellent writing 'so far' is because I haven't gotten very far into the game. Until I read David's review below I had no idea there was a welcome mat I could look under. As much as I agree with Corey's decision to not list the items seperately, it does mean he needs to be very thorough in ensuring that the items actually do appear in the room descriptions. Additionally I find myself agreeing with David's other criticisms below as far as I've played the game. When I did go look under the mat and get the list, I didn't feel that as a character I had any reason to actually go gather the items. In real life in that situation I would probably look at the list quizzically for a few seconds and then stuff it into my pocket to be thrown away at the next opportunity. A torn page from a diary with something like "wants to bless all of the items in the house, with which we might drive away the demons. Although these items still seem completely ordinary to me, he insists that they are in fact minor holy relics..." accompanying the list might be a bit cliched, but it's better than nothing at all. And the fact that it's possible for the player to map out a 100 room maze only to find nothing in it's final room... well, that just isn't right. As hard as it might be considering the amount of work the author obviously must have put into it, a new, smaller maze of about 8 rooms should be used instead, or the maze should be scrapped entirely. Mapping out the first maze I encountered in an IF game, (The Collosal Cave), was kind of fun. The 8th one wasn't, and the idea of doing one today that's 5 times bigger than any I've ever done in the past has no appeal whatsoever. I know that nobody who has put that kind of work into something like that is going to want to throw it away, but I hope Corey will really consider whether or not having it in there is a benefit or detriment to the game, and if he decides it is a detriment that he will remove it, as hard as that would be. I hope he gives similar consideration to the inventory limit.

I've decided not to continue playing this game yet, because I don't want my experience of it to be spoiled by a few problems like those, when I think that the game very well could become the best IF game out there with just a little bit of work from the author to fix them. I will also hold out on giving it a rating for now, in the hopes that I could give it a much higher one later. I look forward to the rerelease of this and/or future games from this author.

Review of Must Escape! [Version 2] by Hombre

hombreviii@myway.com (Hombre) — Wed 1st Feb 2006 18:36

A good game to introduce children to IF

This could be good for introducing children to IF, as the prose is short enough and the puzzles simple enough to appeal to them. The stick figure fighting, which seems well implemented, also seems more likely to delight a younger audience. Adults might find stick figures fighting in IF intriguing from a coding perspective, but probably not from a "lots of fun to play" one. Also, they are likely to get bored with the "find the key" style of puzzles and shallow storyline. The game takes approximately 5 minutes to play through.

Rated 2/5

Review of A Party to Murder by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:48

DuoDave's entry for the 2002 IFComp, A Party To Murder is a thoughtful, well-written piece of interactive fiction which is nicely accessible from the word go. Indeed, most of the locations can be reached with a minimum of trouble. The puzzles lie in other directions.

Starting with an introduction which sets the feel of the game well, A Party To Murder comes across firstly as a straightforward murder mystery. Tony Ravine, the head of the local homeowners' association, has been hitting you, the player, with penalties and fines for years and his latest move is to put a lien on your house. A party thrown at Ravine's house seemed as good an opportunity as any to speak to him and get the matter sorted out. Only now you find yourself sitting in a police station being questioned in relation to Ravine's murder. Needless to say, things are not as they appear

The majority of the game is set within the confines of Tony Ravine's house, a fairly large number of locations populated by the other guests attending Tony's party. Describing locations which are all pretty much the same (i.e. a room in a house) is never easy, but the writer pulls the feat off with ease. Clever use is made of static items, with a good number of dynamic items (often essential to the plot) hidden carefully away in places you might not at first think to look.

As with Menagerie, the puzzles are logical, though often not that easy to figure out. One involving placing certain books on certain bookshelves had me stumped until I took a look at the walkthru, because while putting books on bookshelves might be the sort of thing you'd do in real life, it's not really what you expect to do in a text adventure.

A Party To Murder boasts quite a range of characters, a few of whom have the annoying habit of wandering off to different locations when you're trying to speak to them. The majority of the characters do not really have anything essential to contribute to the plot but it's a nice feature that they are all outfitted with a proper set of conversations so you can interact with them. So many times, characters are only included in games when they have something vital to add to the plot; the characters in A Party To Murder are there to add depth to the game and this is a feat they handle easily. Some hidden extras involving certain characters (flirting with the detective and losing yourself points, flirting with Bunny and gaining points) added some humour to the game and also made attaining the maximum possible score more difficult than finding out who murdered Tony Ravine.

A few more than difficult puzzles (placing the books on the bookshelves) did little to mar an otherwise excellent game.

Logic: 8 out of 10
An impressive use of static and dynamic objects equalling a nicely logical game.

Problems: 10 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
Fortunately none.

Story: 7 out of 10
While the murder mystery idea is hardly new it's an interesting one all the same and beginning the adventure with the implication that maybe you are the killer was a neat twist.

Characters: 8 out of 10
Interaction is possible with all of the characters in the game and they're both well drawn and believable.

Writing: 8 out of 10
As is usual in Duo's games, well above average.

Game: 7 out of 10
All in all, I didn't enjoy this game as much as Menagerie but it's still a superior piece of interactive fiction.

Overall: 48 out of 60

Rated 4/5

Review of When Beer Isn't Enough v2 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:46

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting to like this game. It had been through two versions previously and the author's only other work - a pretty dismal effort about a man going on a quest to find more hair - hadn't exactly impressed me. Indeed the idea behind this game - a kangaroo called Kuel with a broken pouch that he needs to fix - didn't do a lot for me either, but in all fairness the game was a lot better than I expected.

When Beer Isn't Enough is a remarkably strange game. It doesn't have quite the same kind of inspired weirdness that marks Heal Butcher's games but is generally just one nonsense task after another from start to end. Some of these are quite amusing - drinking beer and winding up in Hell where 7 year old girls with braces are playing recorders - whereas others are downright bizarre. Very little in this game makes any kind of sense and by the time you reach the end, you will have poisoned people, killed the Devil and shot a man the dumped his body in a convenient pool of acid for no apparent reason. Clearly not the sort of game you'll like if you prefer playing proper hero figures then

Location descriptions tend to be short but fairly detailed. At various points throughout the game you can wind up in Hell and visit God. A little fleshing out in these places would have helped quite considerably.

But weirdness aside, When Beer Isn't Enough has a kind of charm that raises it above the level of plain stupidity. The standard of writing isn't all that remarkable yet it gets the message across clearly enough and there's nothing disastrously wrong with it. A little more effort on the part of the writer to explain why things need to be done would have a good idea - most of the time you really have no clue as to why you're doing the things you're expected to do. More often it's a case of "well, I tried everything else and it didn't work so I'm trying this" than anything you might figure out logically.

Logic: 3 out of 10
Perhaps the most illogical ADRIFT game of them all but the lack of logic isn't really a bad point here because the game plays fairly well all the same.

Problems: 8 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
Very little clue as to what you're supposed to be doing next and a feeling that the game was pretty much written as fast as possible but I didn't come across any actual problems.

Story: 4 out of 10
Weird to say the least. You play a kangaroo called Kuel who has broken his pouch and needs to fix it.

Characters: 3 out of 10
God and the Devil pop up but there is precious little conversation or characterisation on offer.

Writing: 5 out of 10
Average for the most part but with a definite flair for comedy from time to time.

Game: 5 out of 10
Better than I expected but hardly a masterpiece. Still, it passed the time and was amusing enough in a few places to make me curious about a sequel.

Overall: 28 out of 60

Rated 3/5

Review of Asylum by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:46

Asylum begins with you waking (quite predictably) in an asylum. You have no memories of how you came to be there or even your own name, although a quick look around your room indicates you might well be called Mr Tanakian. Wander around the asylum itself and you'll encounter the other patients but it's clearly not a large place you're confined in as I only found three others besides myself.

Aslyum is a likeable enough game without ever really being anything special. It lacks the humour of Mel S' comedy games - The Evil Chicken Of Doom, Escape From Insanity and Dance Fever USA - and the ease of use of The Lost Mines but it has a kind of charm all the same. The conversation system is a nice idea although as it never seems to change and characters respond with the same default answer every time you speak to them it doesn't work that well.

Guess-the-verb strikes in a few places, most notably in the task involving trying to distract Leroy: a cord was plugged into the wall which I wasn't able to pull out yet I was able to unscrew - something that would never have occurred to me if I hadn't been carrying a screwdriver! There is no hints system in the game (always a bad thing) although an unintentional one helped me out a bit. Upon examining a pillow in one of the other rooms I was told it was empty unlike the one in my own room. This came as quite a surprise as I hasn't even examined the pillow in my own room at that stage!

One thing that is usually the bane of Mel S' games - the dreaded "use object on object" command - was mercifully absent here which made a refreshing change. Then again, as I spent most of the game wandering around with an item I was unable to find a single use for it maybe wasn't such a great thing. At least when an author uses a similar method for solving puzzles in every game you tend to expect that sort of thing and be ready for it. When he suddenly changes and different methods are used, it often becomes confusing figuring out what those methods are!

Progress is pretty difficult. I came across several points in the game where I was stuck and no matter what I tried it just didn't seem to work; obvious things like giving the cross to the guy called Jesus failed miserably. This isn't a big game so maybe the author figured that people wouldn't encounter too many problems with it and hints weren't necessary but I, for one, would have dearly loved a little guidance somewhere along the way.

Logic: 7 out of 10
Guess-the-verb with the cord was a long way from logical but everything else in the game - at least that I've encountered so far - was nicely straightforward.

Problems: 6 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
Guess-the-verb reared its ugly head as well as the unintentional hint with the pillow.

Story: 4 out of 10
No background at all, and just a few short lines telling you the current situation. Admittedly, a game which begins with the player not knowing anything about himself would be pretty much ruined if it came complete with a detailed background but I'm sure there are better ways to set the scenery than this.

Characters: 5 out of 10 Three other patients in the asylum, as well as a nurse and a doctor. Leroy is quite interesting and the conversation system a nice touch but a few changes to what the characters say from time to time could have made it quite a bit better.

Writing: 5 out of 10
Average for the most part.

Game: 5 out of 10
A likeable enough game with a few rough edges that clearly could have done with a little more work before the finished version was released.

Overall: 32 out of 60

Rated 3/5

Review of Black Sheep's Gold by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:45

Finally released after much delay on the writer"s part, Black Sheep"s Gold follows the adventures of a young girl called Maria as she embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather Rupert"s hidden treasure. Rupert, it turns out, is the black sheep of the game"s title and the gold is the proceeds of a bank robbery some sixty years before, and while Rupert himself was arrested for the crime the location of the gold was never uncovered. Until now

Black Sheep"s Gold has a professional feel to it throughout. Locations are very well detailed with most of the static items examinable and often containing either items or clues to help you through the game. There"s no hints system used here but then Black Sheep"s Gold doesn"t really require any hints. Most of the puzzles are straightforward and direct and are mainly a case of whether you have the right object for the right task. Even when you don"t have the right object it"s not difficult figuring out what you need and how to get it. There are very few instances when you really need to struggle to figure out what to do next.

Where the game excels is in the writing which is excellent throughout. It"s mainly a light-hearted game and is enjoyable to play for the most part. In fact, the only really negative thing I could find to say about it involves the kidnapping of the little girl by a gang of thugs also after the gold and an unpleasant incident when one of them stamps on her wrist. Considering that Black Sheep"s Gold had been pretty much a cheerful and happy game up to that stage, the sudden kidnapping and assault comes as quite a shock and doesn"t seem to fit in well with the rest of the story. At times, it"s like the writer decided to combine two very different games and the result didn"t quite work.

Bad things aside, this is certainly a game worth playing. Mystery and Campbell Wild even pop up as characters in the main town (examining Mystery leads to an amusing comment about beta-testing which was probably the funniest thing in the game!) Unfortunately the rest of the characters aren"t particularly enthralling; conversation isn"t well handled on the whole, being just a simple case of talk to [character] and a set response. There"s no real interaction which is a shame because the game would have benefited immensely from this, especially in light of the hints in the magazine found in the first location which specifically tell you to talk to the characters.

A few rough edges - the kidnapping and assault and some truly bad guess the verb problems - let the game down but nevertheless Black Sheep"s Gold is certainly a decent game.

Logic: 9 out of 10
Nothing really illogical about it although when exits just mysteriously appear after a task has been completed when there was no sign of them before, it often leaves me scratching my head in confusion.

Problems: 5 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
Guess the verb the dreaded bane of quite a few games was out in force here. Getting through the wall in the cave was a nightmare even though I knew roughly what I should be doing but the worst problems hit with the bear. I must have typed twenty or thirty different phrases (all meaning pretty much the same thing) before the damn bear finally took the honey and left me alone feed bear and give honey to bear failed miserably. It also didn"t help matters much that when both the snake and the bear had been dealt with the location description still has them listed as being present.

Story: 8 out of 10
Well written and interesting enough to hold your attention.

Characters: 4 out of 10
Better interaction would have been a great bonus as, while conversations with characters are possible, they don"t have a lot to say and what they do say generally doesn"t have much relevance.

Writing: 8 out of 10
Excellent from start to finish. Some of the darker elements of the story could have been toned a little though.

Game: 7 out of 10
Despite a few unpleasant moments, this was a great game overall and definitely bodes well for the writer"s future adventures.

Overall: 41 out of 60

Rated 3/5

Review of The Merry Murders by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:44

Mel S' first full size game since The Lost Mines is the story of a series of brutal murders at the SynTex corporation headquarters during an office party. And "series" is the right word because by the time you catch the killer, there's hardly a soul left alive.

I've always been a sucker for murder mysteries because they allow you the opportunity of seeing if you can figure out who the killer is before reaching the conclusion of the game. Disappointingly, The Merry Murders (what the "merry" in the title refers to I've no idea) doesn't allow for any real detective work. Solving a series of puzzles - some logical, some not - leads you to the inevitable conclusion with the killer, but there are no prizes along the way for figuring out the identity of the killer beforehand, and no way to stop the killer from committing further murders if you do happen to stumble upon his/her identity. The ending, involving a fight to the death with the killer, occurs whether you've guessed the killer's identity or not.

There are a number of things that bring the game down overall, the most common being the way the game sometimes refers to the player as "you" and other times as "I". This, on top of it being written partly in past tense and partly in present tense, makes for confusing reading.

Locations are nicely written and the way some of them change from time to time - items appearing, a computer suddenly becoming useable, and so on - is a nice touch. Various lapses in logic mar the game somewhat, though; the other characters seem happy to stand around doing nothing while a brutal killer stalks the building picking them off with remarkable ease. And why the killer didn't just try to bump the player off despite the progress you're making towards finding out his/her identity is never really explained.

Not a bad game, but not a great game either, The Merry Murders would have been better handled with a little more detective work by the player. But it's an interesting way to pass an hour or two and the difficulty factor is set so that you shouldn't have too many problems reaching the final conclusion (although saving your game beforehand is a very good idea because you only get one chance to win the final fight).

Logic: 7 out of 10
A few lapses in the way the killer(s) actually help you out during the game if you ask them the right things but nothing disastrously illogical.

Problems: 5 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
The main problems involved the character alternatively being referred to as "you" and "I" and the game's frustrating habit of switching from past to present tense at seemingly random intervals. If it had happened just a few times it could have been overlooked, but the sheer number of times it happened made playing the game quite painful at times.

Story: 6 out of 10
There's nothing new about murder mysteries but it was well handled and having a few seriously dodgy characters (Trey in particular being especially vile) kept you guessing who the killer really was.

Characters: 6 out of 10
There were both good and bad points in relation to the characters. On the plus side they were quite believable and had a fair set of things you could question them about; on the down side they seemed quite willing to hang around in a building with a killer on the loose who was busy massacring them.

Writing: 5 out of 10
Fairly decent although the game switching between calling the player "you" and "I" did leave a lot to be desired.

Game: 5 out of 10
A bit of a letdown after The Lost Mines but interesting enough to keep you occupied through to the conclusion.

Overall: 34 out of 60

Rated 3/5

Review of Lara Croft : The Sun Obelisk (IF version) by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:44

Chris Cole's first proper non-AIF game (one room game aside), Lara Croft: The Sun Obelisk is actually an adaption of an AIF he wrote a while ago. While there's nothing actually overly erotic about this game, several elements from the earlier version have crept in, although even with these this is the sort of game that shouldn't offend anyone but the most prudish of gamers.

The storyline behind Lara Croft: The Sun Obelisk follows Lara's attempts to find the mysterious Sun Obelisk, an artifact that grants special powers to anyone who gazes on it. However, the map containing the location of the Sun Obelisk has been stolen by Lara's former friend, Damian Strathairn. Armed with a copy, Lara heads off in hot pursuit...

In many ways, this seems like an old-fashioned text adventure, the sort of thing that blossomed in the 80's. Emphasis is on the puzzles and less time is given over to descriptions which are straightforward and to the point (although nicely written all the same). There are a few bad points - several of the locations are very similar - but nothing glaringly wrong, and a few occasions where very unfair puzzles are thrown at the player of the one-wrong-move-and-you're-dead variety.

Not all of the AIF elements have been taken from the game. Examining a certain part (or, rather, parts) or Lara's anatomy is still possible, and another puzzle later in the game is overcome by flashing said anatomy at her captive.

There's a lot to like about this game: it's fairly easy to make progress with, well written and has several decent puzzles. The harder parts - figuring a way past Jimmy being the worst of them - let the game down somewhat but providing you've got an earlier save game to fall back on they shouldn't prove too frustrating. In a way, the only criticism I would have of the game is that it is too easy. Beating some of the enemies is childishly simple and often the most straightforward approach is the one that works best. Then again, this is probably better than having enemies who are next to impossible to defeat...

After playing this, I'm kind of hoping Chris converts his other AIF games into regular IF format because if this is any indication of what he's capable of, I'll certainly be looking forward to playing his other games.

Logic: 8 out of 10
No real lapses in logic on offer though getting the better of one enemy by exposing yourself left me wondering if such a thing would ever happen in real life.

Problems: 9 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
None as such though some of the enemies could have been made slightly harder to defeat, or the way to defeat them less obvious.

Story: 7 out of 10
A minimum of background but well written throughout.

Characters: 6 out of 10
Several different ones, all enemies. They're reasonably well described although conversation with them seemed a bit limited.

Writing: 7 out of 10
Above average all the way through.

Game: 6 out of 10
Overall pretty good.

Overall: 43 out of 60

Rated 3/5

Review of To Hell in a Hamper by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:43

The winner of the Adrift Spring Mini-Comp 2003, To Hell in a Hamper is the best example yet of just how good really small games can be. Then again, it's not really a small game as such - only one room, true, but there's a fair sized game in there and one quite a bit larger than several "proper" games that have made their way onto the downloads page over the past few years.

The storyline follows the efforts of one Professor Pettibone who is an "eminent Victorian balloonist" determined to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon. Off he sets, accompanied by a single companion, the strange and quite demented (not to mention bizarrely-named) Hubert Booby. Problems soon become apparent as the balloon seems to have great difficulty attaining the necessary height to pass over an erupting volcano, leading you to the sneaking suspicion that your companion might well have smuggled aboard several heavy items in his ever-expanding overcoat.

Every bit as strange as the writer's first game Goldilocks is a Fox, To Hell in a Hamper is, if anything, even better. I have to admit that I wasn't sure whether a one-room game would be much of an entry in the competition but this proved me well and truly wrong (it beat my game as well, but any between-the-lines insults are purely coincidental). There are enough ideas packed in here for several games and the seriously over-the-top humour is always top notch. In particular, Hubert Booby is the sort of character who is just crying out to have a game written about him.

Despite being confined to a single room, To Hell in a Hamper isn't an easy game by any means. It's fairly straightforward making a little progress here and there but problems soon hit when you get a further and have to discover new and ingenious ways of getting Hubert to relinquish his remaining items - killing him, alas, isn't an option. Nor does murder work on his Aunt Gertie despite her nasty habit of constantly whacking me with her cane.

Several amusing features add to the replay value and show a definitive flare for the imaginative: throwing the Egyptian mummy out of the balloon results in an ancient curse being activated; get rid of the dog and it climbs back into the balloon (quite a feat for a dumb animal though not one I appreciated at the time considering the hassles I had gone through to get rid of it in the first place); throwing Hubert's troublesome Aunt Gertie out doesn't work well either as the canny old bird grabs hold of the anchor rope and climbs back inside.

As far as one room games go, it's hard to imagine a better one that this coming around any time soon. Indeed, it's one of the most amusing games I've ever played and will probably take some beating in the comedy stakes.

Logic: 6 out of 10
How logical a balloon risking being destroyed in an erupting volcano due to your travelling companion smuggling a vast horde of items - including his Aunt Gertie, a dog and an Egyptian mummy among other things - under his coat is I'm not sure, but then this was never meant to be a logical game and I don't think it suffers for it at all.

Problems: 9 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
Nothing major but some of the tasks seemed overly complicated - the one involving the ear-trumpet and the dog in particular.

Story: 7 out of 10
There's an amusing little back story at the beginning of the game which sets the feel for the adventure well enough. A one room game is never going to have - or need - a lengthier storyline and this one did its job.

Characters: 9 out of 10
Three, although Hubert Booby takes the cake. I tried hitting him with just about every item I could lay my hands on just to see if I could get another of his daft responses.

Writing: 8 out of 10
Very good indeed.

Game: 8 out of 10
Definitely the best one room game I've ever played and more than a match for quite a few of the full size games.

Overall: 47 out of 60

Rated 4/5

Review of The Woods Are Dark by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:42

The majority of adventure games that set out to be chilling and scary fail miserably - they're neither chilling, scary or (99% of the time) any good. The Woods Are Dark is one of the few that succeeds.

You begin with a lengthy introduction which, while perhaps a tad too long, does give the game a certain amount of depth that is quite refreshing. It makes a nice change to all those adventures where you're dumped in the first location and have no idea what you're even doing there, although an option to skip the introduction might have been a good idea.

The Woods Are Dark concerns a hunt for friends lost in a wood on the Irish coast. Years before a brutal murder was committed in the area. Is there a connection between that and the events of the present? You better believe it.

There are several things about this game that are appealing: the well-written introduction, the location descriptions, the use of puzzles... Each location comes with a proper description that makes you feel like you really are there - there are none of the one line room descriptions that so often plague adventure games of this short. Descriptions are lengthy and interesting, often containing items that need careful examination to reveal necessary clues. There are an impressive amount of static items to be examined, and although the majority of these are nothing more than scenery they add a proper level of depth to the game.

I particularly liked the way most of the puzzles were put together: sometimes just trying something because it seems like the logical thing to do works. No doubt quite a bit of time has been spent on this aspect of the game and it shows.

As you play the game, a genuine sense of unease builds up, added further to by the fact that the game is told in the past tense. This helps give a sense of realism that precious few games manage. It also adds considerably to the atmosphere, a feat made all the better by the stylish writing which, though lengthy, is always interesting to read. If the author hasn't considered a career as a writer of horror fiction he perhaps should do.

The Woods Are Dark is certainly the best of the recent games written with ADRIFT and a testament to the fact that, with effort, it is possible to write a genuinely decent horror game.

Logic: 7 out of 10
Puzzles are amazingly straightforward and it's quite interesting how easy to figure out some of them are when you just give them a little thought.

Problems: 9 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
Sometimes it's difficult to tell if what you've encountered is a bug or not, but after I dealt with the puzzle relating to the dolls house I discovered a ball had mysteriously appeared but I was unable to pick it up. I also found myself unable to pick up the cat. A bug? Or was I simply going about things in the wrong way?

Story: 9 out of 10
A definite winner. Atmospheric, spooky and - quite often - downright chilling.

Characters: 0
No actual characters which was a pity.

Style of writing: 9 out of 10
Impressive throughout, from the opening sequence to the location descriptions.

Game: 8 out of 10
A very well written horror game that is the sort of adventure we ought to be seeing a lot more of.

Overall: 42 out of 50

Rated 4/5

Review of Pathway to Destruction v 1.2 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:41

Pathway To Destruction: winner of the Finish The Game Comp I organised, and my personal favourite out of the comp entries.

What's it about?

You're a worker at the Institute of Transportation and about to embark on an experimental mission that should, in theory, teleport you from one side of the planet to the other. Only, of course, something goes wrong and you actually find yourself in a desolate ruin of the world you once knew.

I felt Pathway To Destruction made very good use of the source material, although in a completely different way than I envisioned when I wrote the source. I had had in mind something along the lines of a medieval fantasy adventure with a swords & sorcery element thrown into the mix, but Pathway To Destruction's sci-fi setting seems to fit in remarkably well with the mini-game that was already written, and at no point did I feel that it was out of place. Full marks for that. A frequent failing of the author's games in the past has been the shallow NPCs and their wildly implausible dialogue, something that Pathway To Destruction is mercifully free of. There aren't any NPCs here, just the main character, and the game is much better for it. (Although saying that, there are bits when the player, despite being alone, speaks out loud which are pretty implausible themselves. Would he really tell himself what to do next after throwing a certain item at another item?)

My only real complaint with the game was the difficulty factor of some of the puzzles; or, if not difficulty factor, then the fact that some of them are so unobvious that it's hard to imagine people ever figuring them out without resorting to the hints. Why would I want to push a lamp post over? Why would I throw a certain item at another item? Why would putting one item on top of another make the second item work? (The second item, incidentally, has a slot in the side which I spent a while trying to put the first item into. It never occurred to me to try putting it on top.) Getting inside the author's mind, or being psychic, is a good requirement for finishing this game. It also didn't help that sometimes seemingly obvious solutions to puzzles didn't work and there wasn't any real explanation for why. I needed to use one item to get the jewel but another item I had, a bar, didn't work. Why?

But overall I thoroughly enjoyed Pathway To Destruction. It wasn't a perfect game, and there were bits that could have done with improving upon, and some of the puzzles could certainly have been better clued, but those issues notwithstanding it was the best game in the comp and definitely the best game the author has written to date.

7 out of 10

Rated 4/5

Review of Can I do it? by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:40

I wasn't expecting much from this game. The author had written two games prior to Can I Do It? One was removed from the main ADRIFT site before I got the chance to play it, although from what I hear of it I didn't miss much. The other? Oh dear Let's just say it was bad and leave it at that. So I didn't have high hopes for this one.

It started off better than I expected. Nice introduction (although it would have had my old English teacher (the one with the grammar obsession) fairly spitting blood) but fails a little as it doesn't actually say what the aim of the game is. I figured it out from the title of the taf ("Heist") but it would have been a good idea to make it clearer in the intro.

Can I Do It? is a better game than the previous one I'd played by the author, but it's still got more holes than some very holey cheese. There are lots of newbie annoyances - GET and TAKE mean different things, so if, like me, you type the former as opposed to the latter, you won't be able to finish the game. A crucial item required to trigger the end game event only works if the TAKE command is used. I used GET, so even though I was carrying the item in question when I left the store the game wouldn't finish for me.

Some of the other problems with the game were minor, but annoying all the same. In one location, there is a food rack and a magazine rack, yet examining either of them just gives you the description for the food rack.

There were a few lapses in logic that were pretty frustrating. I'm able to find a bag and wear it then wander around the store with it on, yet the shopkeeper doesn't think there's anything unusual about this. I'm also able to pick up items (steal them really) and leave the store without the shopkeeper doing a thing about it, yet I'm still expected to buy the items to move the game forward. I'm also kind of dubious that the shopkeeper would tell a customer where he keeps his gun just because you give him some candy. For that matter, why is the gun even where you find it and not somewhere closer to the shopkeeper? A gun out of reach isn't much use in the event of a robbery.

Some bits of the game were in past tense, others present tense which made for a jarring read at times. It could also have done from running through a spell check, and the frequent grammar errors were trying.

But all in all, it's a step in the right direction. By no means a perfect game, Can I Do It? is a marked improvement on the author's previous works and shows that, if he can start writing some proper sized games (this one was 5 KB), test them properly beforehand, and fix his spelling and grammar, he might actually have potential.

3 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of PROVENANCE by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Mon 9th Jan 2006 07:40

Provenance starts off well: a nice introduction which does an excellent job of setting the scene (although the final line "AND WITH THE NIGHT COMES THINGS THAT GO BUMP" rather spoiled the mood). The game had a professional feel and it's obvious a lot of time and effort has been put into its making. It also comes bundled with a lengthy PDF file containing the game's background and some advice on playing interactive fiction in general. A nice touch.

At first impression, it seems like a horror game. You arrive on the brick walkway leading to a large mansion with eerie feelings hanging over you. Something tells you it's a bad idea to go further, but go further you do

The game doesn't credit any betatesters which, for the first game by an author, isn't perhaps a wise thing. To begin with, it didn't seem to affect things too much as I was able to wander around a large number of occasions, perform all manner of tasks, examine things all over the place and all without running into any kind of problems. Later on, though, a number of bugs crept in. A good deal of them have now been fixed (the game is up to version three at the time of writing this review), but quite a few still remain. Some of the bugs actually made the game easier (getting the maul out of the stump was easy in the original version as you simply pulled it out (despite the fact that the game told you that you couldn't do this and the description of the stump still had it embedded there)) yet in the later version it's a lot harder. Likewise, the cellar is now locked whereas before it was wide open and could be entered any time the player chose.

The game is quite picky about what it will and won't let me do. A list of items I found under a welcome mat (not mentioned anywhere in the room description incidentally) advised me of things I needed to collect, although the reasons as to why I was collecting them weren't revealed. One of the items was a canteen which I also needed to fill with water from the well. I couldn't find the canteen at first yet I found a bucket, only couldn't figure out a way to fill it from the well, as even when it was full of items, including a large stone, it wouldn't sink far enough down into the well to fill itself up with water. Then again, I'm not even sure why this was necessary because another location contains a fountain, yet the game won't let me fill the bucket up there. And what about the taps in the house?

Provenance comes with a number of frustrations that I'm sure the author had a good reason for including but which I can't figure out myself. There's a hundred plus location maze which I imagine will have people bashing out QUIT in droves*. There's the item restriction, meaning that you can only carry a certain amount of items and have to spend half the game trekking back and forth picking up different items for different puzzles. As with every ADRIFT game I've ever played which has used an item restriction, this one is amazingly flawed. You can carry, say, ten items (I haven't counted), yet pick up extra ones automatically (finding the knife in the tree trunk, for example, or pulling the axe/maul out of the stump - performing these tasks adds the items to your inventory and neatly bypasses the restriction) and thus go over your limit. The frustrating thing is that if you're carrying more than the maximum item limit and decide to drop one, the game won't let you pick it back up because you're carrying too many items, even though you were quite capable of carrying it beforehand. On top of all that, you're often able to carry around ten or more heavy items, yet trying to pick up something relatively light is too much for you. Oh yes, ADRIFT's item restriction leaves a lot to be desired. In a game like this, with several dozen items scattered all over the place, quite a few of them necessary to complete the game, you're going to be spending a lot of time aimlessly trekking back and forth.

* Actually the maze doesn't need to be travelled through according to the README file which accompanies the game. There's a shortcut to the centre of it from another location, although as to access this shortcut you need to ask the butler about a certain thing that's at the very centre of the maze, and which can't be seen until you've been to the centre, you're going to have to go through the maze at some point. It's even more frustrating that you only need to venture through the maze after a certain point in the game, but nowhere is this made clear. I found the maze quite soon into playing and got out the graph paper and pen and mapped it out the old-fashioned way. Exits from the 100+ locations aren't listed, which was a pain, but as ADRIFT helpfully lists them anyway if you head in a direction which lacks an exit (like up or down), it's fairly easy to get through. But tedious. Oh so tedious. But not half as tedious as reaching the centre of the maze and finding there was nothing for me to do there yet because I'd come too early in the game

Depending on which version of the game you're playing, you might well find that ADRIFT's in built map has been disabled - in a game which boasts two hundred locations, including one hundred in a maze(!) of all things, this is a bad, bad idea. And there are no hints. No. None at all. So when you get stuck, you're stuck. Later versions thankfully enable the map, but there are still no hints around.

Yes, there are a lot of negative things about Provenance but there are also a good number of positive things as well. It's got a fairly high standard of writing and the storyline was interesting enough to keep me playing long after the many frustrations had prompted me to quit.

One of the game's main flaws is that it often requires the player to jump through hoops to attain a fairly simple result for no other reason than the writer has written the game in a certain way and wants the player to play the game that way because well, just because. Escaping from the house (whose door locks behind you the moment you step inside) is particularly annoying because there are all manner of windows around the house which can't be opened, broken or climbed through, not to mention the door itself which, if it was locked, I would have merely booted down to get out instead of getting out the way I did. There are also a few instances of puzzles being inserted into the game for no other reason than, it seemed, to include puzzles. I knock on the door of the house, it opens, and then before I can enter it closes again. I'm then required to search for the key, despite the fact that there's someone in the house who needs my help. Why am I required to search for the key? Because the writer wanted me to do so

Then there's the item list. Granted, it's easy enough to find, but why am I collecting the items on it? For what purpose? And when I've collected them, what am I supposed to do with them? Most of them are easy enough to come across, but with the item restriction in place, it's clearly going to be impossible to carry them all at the same time which is going to require a lot of very tedious trekking back and forth. I never saw a good reason for item restrictions back in the 80's when they were quite common and I sure don't see a good reason for one now. It might be unrealistic to have the player lugging around thirty or forty items, but it's also a handy way of cutting down on unnecessary frustrations. And when I'm carrying a dozen items, try to pick up a piece of paper and get told that I can't because it's too heavy, any kind of realism the writer was going for is just lost anyway.

Overall I liked Provenance but my positive feelings for it were tempered by the many, many annoyances that marred the game. I'm not just talking about the bugs (although they certainly contributed towards a good deal of the frustration), but the way perfectly logical things won't work for no other reason than the writer doesn't want me to solve a puzzle in that way. On top of the lack of hints, the maze and the inventory limit (and the disabled map in the earlier version of the game), I found getting beyond a certain stage in the game something of a chore. Much as I liked it, it was also an irritating game to play at times. I finished it eventually, with the aid of the walkthrough, although the series of events that actually lead to the game's conclusion are a little confusing to say the least. Granted, I'd seen the items list so I knew which items I needed to collect, but where did it say I was supposed to put them there and what I was required to do next?

6 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of The Demon Hunter by thoth

lcudd75@yahoo.com (thoth) — Mon 12th Dec 2005 23:08

I quite enjoyed this game...

...there were one or two MINOR issues that with-held an excellent vote, but all in all a very good game.

I would award an 8 out of 10 to this effort.

Look forward to more.

Rated 4/5

Review of Escape to New York v1.1 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Tue 22nd Nov 2005 20:31

You play the part of a thief who has stolen a priceless painting and has decided to escape to New York" with it. Only you"ve had the slight misfortune to book yourself passage on a ship that"s soon due to have a rather serious encounter with an iceberg yep, you're on the Titanic.

By far the most annoying aspect of the game for me was the way the player will often talk out loud to himself, like:

"Three days lost!" you mutter to yourself. "I could have been having a look at all those first class cabins, with all that loot waiting to be liberated!" Aside from making him come across as some overly dramatic loony, it"s also kind of strange that the player is even concerned over the loot he could be liberating". After all, he"s just stolen a priceless painting. Why risk getting arrested when he already has all the money he"ll ever need?

Although that sort of thing tends to be present throughout the rest of the game as well. Despite having a priceless painting in his possession, the player makes a point of stealing everything he can get his hands on, even though there's a cop on board the ship who"s already suspicious of him. Wouldn"t it have been wiser to just lie low?

The game ended suddenly for me quite a few times, and often just as I was thinking it might have been a good idea to save my position. As the default ADRIFT end game system is used, that means no quick bashing of the UNDO command to return you to the action. Annoying.

Characterisation is generally pretty poor. The NPCs never really seem believable, although it isn't helped that several of them are just referred to as bursar" and barber". Others tend to move around the ship in a very set fashion and will often wander away partway through a conversation with you. Dialogue with them is stunted and they tend to display all the warmth of cardboard cut outs.

Escape From New York wasn"t a terrible game by any means but it wasn"t one I particularly warmed to, either. The woodenness of the NPCs, the frequent death of the player and similar problems prevented me enjoying it any more.

4 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of The Plague (Redux) by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Tue 22nd Nov 2005 20:31

The idea of zombies attacking the living seems a popular theme for the past few years, what with the remake of Dawn Of The Dead, a pastiche Shaun Of The Dead and then George A. Romero"s (very disappointing) Land Of The Dead, and here the idea makes its way into a text adventure. With pretty impressive results, too.

You play the part of Stacie, out for the night with some of the girls, who gets caught up in all the chaos at a subway station when the undead start turning on the living. Your friends become lost and you are trapped in the subway station, weaponless. It"s just you and a horde of ravening zombies.

The bulk of The Plague: Redux takes place in the subway station as Stacie, the aforementioned damsel in distress, struggles to get out in one piece. Along the way, she encounters a few other survivors (including some pleasant chap who tries to rape her (not a game for kids clearly)) and, yes, zombies galore. The writing is excellent for the most part and does a good job of evoking the scene of a terrified young woman in mortal danger of being killed by zombies.

Unfortunately there are some serious errors that let things down. I found some zombies feasting on a corpse in a cubicle and options were displayed on screen to either [F] Fight or [E] Escape. Neither worked. Nor did attacking the zombies work. In fact, I wasn"t able to do anything at all about the zombies, and worst still, when I typed LOOK, I was alone in the cubicle without the zombies. Worse was the fact that when I left the cubicle and re-entered, the zombies were back. This time, however, I wasn"t given the option of [F] Fight or [E] Escape, but just killed them straight off with a weapon I was carrying.

Elsewhere I found a woman who had been mauled by zombies. Even though I didn"t know her name, the game helpfully referred to her as Kate. After some struggling to help her, I figured out what needed doing but ran into a problem in that the game wouldn"t accept my GIVE [OBJECT] TO KATE but only GIVE [OBJECT] TO WOMAN.

If there are any faults with The Plague: Redux (gameplay faults, that is, and not outright errors or bugs like those mentioned above), it"s that the early parts are far too linear. The intro seems to take an age to get through and involves little more than the main character and her friends fleeing from a horde of zombies. There's also the problem that, despite zombies running around and killing people all over the place, it"s possible for the player to take as long as they want in getting anywhere. And the threat of the zombies themselves is somewhat weakened by the fact that the player a young woman armed with a metal pole is able to kill them without too much difficulty. How has the zombie threat progressed this far if they're so easy to kill? (Then again, it never made much sense in the films that unarmed, shambling corpses who can"t think for themselves could overpower soldiers armed with machine guys )

A large portion of the game has the player wandering around the subway station trying to find some money for a bottle of water from a dispensing machine. Why? Because she"s thirsty. This struck me as a pretty flimsy excuse for what is due to the way the money is actually found in half a dozen or so different places, some of them not very obvious a very lengthy and time consuming puzzle. I must have spent a good hour wandering around the subway station searching for a few extra coins for the water all the time wondering just why I didn"t simply go into one of the many shops scattered around the place and help myself to some. Unfortunately, the water is required for an event later in the game and without it you won"t get anywhere, so it"s not a case of you being able to miss it out if you don"t want to.

Examining items and looking under and behind them is often a different thing entirely in this game. Something that I discovered after examining just about every item in the subway station, not finding much, and then realising I had to go over the whole place again to find what I needed. A little README file indicating that examining items was different from looking under and behind them would have been a good idea.

But the problems with the game (aside from the errors with the disappearing zombies in the cubicle) are relatively minor ones and, with a bit of perseverance, can be overcome. Overall, The Plague: Redux is a great text adventure, and certainly the best ADRIFT game I've played this year.

8 out of 10

Rated 4/5

Review of Can It Be All So Simple? by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Wed 9th Nov 2005 23:40

This was my personal fave of all the games in the recent ADRIFT Summer Comp 2005, a decidedly dark horror where very little is as it seems. While not a perfect game by any means, it was an impressive debut. Of the five games entered in the Comp, it came a respectable third but I felt it should have done better.

Can It Be All So Simple? is a strange game. At times, it's hard to understand just what's going on, and even after finishing it, I'm still a little unsure about some aspects of it. It's a very linear game with minimal replay value, although to understand it all you'll probably need to replay it at least once. At times, the game seems to almost force the player along a set path, with the interactive side of things pushed to one side; this is used to make the storyline tighter and works to a degree, but at the same time the freedom to explore is what generally attracts people to interactive fiction. An example of this is used at the beginning when the player awakens in a dark room. The first four or five commands yield no proper responses; indeed, until the player is told he can see the bedroom, little can be achieved at all. This isn't a terrible thing in itself but it's annoying when you've tried certain commands and gotten nowhere with them, only to try them again a few moves later and achieve something.

Good points: well written. There's a nice little horror game here, complete with creepy monsters, things going bump in the middle of the night and weird goings on. It's also refreshing in a game by a newbie to find that items listed in the room description can be examined and interacted with just the way they should be. You need to really try to find the dreaded YOU SEE NO SUCH THING response displayed.

Bad points: it's strange. Too strange in parts. The intro is notable more for its ever-changing colour scheme than for what it's saying. Unfortunately the colour scheme makes the text somewhat difficult to read small red text on a dark background? Hmmm The intro's also a little pretentious. It contains such lines as:

"How did the earth come to be?
Did an invisible hand in the sky form us in seven days?
Did we slowly evolve as a species through millions of years?
Or were we all a product of a cosmic explosion in space?"

And:

"I wonder in the end will it all make sense. I wonder does killing another person matter when it comes to looking at the big picture.
I wonder is having prisons really such a good idea."

After that intro, I was expecting a different game than what followed. Or, at least, a game which bore some kind of semblance to the introduction. But I didn't see any such thing. If anything, the introduction seemed to be tacked on for no real reason and had little to do with the game itself.

There are a few flaws in the game but nothing that really ruins it for the player. I had problems in getting my neighbour, Debbie, to follow me at one point, until realising that she was following me but just wasn't included in the room description. There were a few lapses in logic as well: the player encounters monsters in his parents' bedroom yet his first reaction is to run and tell the next door neighbour instead of going for the police?

One point definitely in the game's favour is that it dispenses with the built in ADRIFT end game sequence and includes a custom one instead. Why is this a good idea? Simply: it gives the player the option of undoing his last command, or restarting the game or loading from a previous save, without the necessity of going through the tedious end game sequence that populates almost every other ADRIFT game. With a simple command, you're back playing the game. Why more people don't do this sort of thing I'll never know.

Can It Be All So Simple? is a very short game. Even taking the time to wander around every location in the game, pick up items, examine things, etc, you'll probably be through the entire thing in half an hour. But it's well worth playing all the same, even if the ending is a bit predictable.

6 out of 10

Rated 4/5

Review of Must Escape! [Version 2] by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Wed 9th Nov 2005 23:39

The original version of Must Escape! an entry in the ADRIFT Summer Comp 2005 (where it came fourth out of five entries) was entered in the ADRIFT Intro Comp. It comprised of just two locations and one fight between the player and a nameless NPC. As a novelty item, it was harmless enough but I never really warmed to it. So when I found out it had been enlarged to a full size game for the Summer Comp, I can't say I was really looking forward to it. But just as when he took the mini-game Veteran Experience and enlarged it to make the full game Veteran Knowledge , the author has added quite a lot of content to this game, turning it from a novelty into quite an interesting piece.

In Must Escape! you are a saboteur. You've just destroyed a laboratory and must get out of the building in one piece.

The full version starts at the same place as the original, but whereas the original finished the moment the fight with the first NPC you encounter is over, the full version continues after that. You're at loose in an enemy building, with guards closing in on you, and you need to utilise whatever resources you can in order to escape.

There are a few failings in logic scattered throughout the game, almost most are common place in the majority of text adventures. The items needed to progress through each of the locked doors are, quite conveniently, just lying around waiting for the player to come along and pick them up; there's a locked cabinet at one point which the player is able to open with an item he just so happens to find right beforehand; enemy soldiers are always encountered one at a time, so there's never any risk of the player being overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. It's also remarkably lucky for the player that all the enemies he faces while unarmed* are also unarmed.

* You broke into an enemy base and sabotaged it without a weapon to hand? See what I meant about logic

Combat makes up a good portion of this game so it's only fair to mention it in this review. I didn't much care for it in the intro, but here it's much better handled. Stick figures of the player and the NPC appear on screen, with commands listed below along the lines of Kick, Punch, Move Left, Turn Right, Shoot, Wait and so on. Figuring out the commands to use to deal with your enemies is part of the fun of Must Escape! but the combats themselves seem heavily weighted in favour of the player. You always get to attack first, you always hit, and so if you've got more health than your enemy there's no chance of you losing.

The final fight varies from the others in that you don't actually need to do any real fighting. It's just you and a gun, facing an NPC and a gun. Shoot him and he has a tendency to duck out of the way through an open door so you end up missing him. Don't shoot him and he shoots you (ending the game rather suddenly, and rather annoyingly as well as my previous save was quite a few moves further back). I figured my way past the guard in the end and that was it for Must Escape! My player escaped and, presumably, lived happily ever after.

The full version of this game is certainly more interesting than the intro, but I can't help feel that it's a bit of a comedown compared to what the author did when expanding Veteran Experience into Veteran Knowledge .

5 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of Laboratory R.A.T.S. by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Wed 9th Nov 2005 23:38

One room games, of which Laboratory R.A.T.S. is such a thing, tend to be more puzzled-orientated than other games. Without a large area to explore, all the gameplay has to take place in a single location and so every puzzle you are going to encounter is there ready and waiting for you. And I've never been fond of puzzle games

Laboratory R.A.T.S. involves several scientists at work deep underground in a laboratory. The idea is to get a microscope a work. Easy? Heck no.

Overall this is one mighty frustrating game. It might only be one room in size, but it's certainly a more confusing game than some I've played that have occupied fifty rooms. Doing just about anything is a pain:

> use microscope
The microscope is on, you just need to put your sample inside and take a look.

> put sample inside microscope
I can't put anything in the chamber while the cap is still on the air-lock.

> remove cap
I haven't released the cap of the air lock.

> release cap
I don't understand what you want me to do with the cap.

Most of my time spent playing the game was wrestling with guess the verb issues like this. What I wanted to do was mind-numbingly simple put my sample in the microscope and examine it yet every command I tried seemed to either not be understood or just produced another unhelpful response.

To make matters worse, examining the cap informs me that it can be rotated, but:

> rotate cap
I don't understand what you want me to do with the cap.

> rotate cap clockwise
I don't understand what you want me to do with the cap.

> rotate cap anti-clockwise
I can't turn the cap while the vacuum is on.

> turn vacuum off
I can't turn that off.

Is this the worst case of guess the verb I've ever come across? If not, it's certainly a close second. One command I tried PUSH PUMP BUTTON produced a message saying nothing happens the first time, but when I tried it again, it told me I had already pumped the chamber. Only after going through the commands in the Generator one by one was I able to make any kind of progress, and as that was about as much fun as watching paint dry, I resorted to banging out a command that, thankfully, the game understood: QUIT.

A couple of NPCs who interject amusing comments from time to time raised the quality of this game just enough to stop me giving it the deathly 1 out of 10, but until some of the guess the verb issues are fixed, I could never recommend Laboratory R.A.T.S. to anyone.

2 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of Target v1.01 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Wed 9th Nov 2005 23:38

Clearly I'm getting worse at predicting things. When I played Target an entry in the ADRIFT Spring Comp 2005 (it was the first game I played) I remember thinking "hmmm this is going to come last". It actually came first. While there's nothing terrible about the game, there's nothing particularly great about it either. Or so I thought anyway. But as it came first, I'm clearly in a minority.

Target is a game about a hit man hired to assassinate someone. It starts with you, the hit man, on the rooftop of a building. You've got a rifle and a description of your target. All you have to do is find him and kill him.

That's essentially the game in a nutshell. One nice feature is that the identity of the hit man you play, as well as the identity of your victim, change each time you play the game. I discovered this after dying several times and finding myself with a different target each time. Heck, one time the hit man was even yours truly! But while identities may change each time, it's still pretty much the same game. The layout of the rooftop remains the same and as you start with a description of your victim, it's a simple task to wander about the rooftop, match up the description and shoot the guy in question. There are no added complications depending upon which victim you are assigned to kill: it's just a case of find 'em and shoot 'em.

I played Target through three times before figuring out the basics behind identifying my victim and dealing with him, and disposing of the undercover cop and the sniper as well, and it seemed like a remarkably short game. Strangely enough, when I opened it in the Generator, I was surprised to see a whopping 1084 tasks (!), which was about 20 times as many as I expected to see. On the surface, Target seems like a simple game indeed; but a closer look reveals that there's actually been a considerable amount of work expended on it. Just a pity I didn't like it more.

Logic doesn't play a large part in this game. My hit man character wanders around the rooftop of the building with his rifle in hand, yet the tramp (actually an undercover cop) makes no effort to arrest me until I've actually gone and shot someone. (For that matter, why is there even a tramp on top of the building?) The tramp makes several inane comments as I stand there, toting my rifle, about the rooftop, a neon sign and the like, yet doesn't bother asking me about said rifle. He provides information about every subject under the sun almost literally but I found his constant comments, every two or three moves, to be so distracting that before long I was itching to kill him just to get a bit of peace and quiet.

Yet despite all its failings, Target won the ADRIFT Summer Comp 2005 and proved surprisingly popular with lots of people. I just wish I could see its appeal myself.

2 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of The White Singularity by Richard Otter

richardo@delron.org.uk (Richard Otter) — Sat 5th Nov 2005 09:13

IF Jim but not as we know it

An interesting story but very poorly implemented.

Rated 3/5

Review of Must Escape! [Version 2] by Richard Otter

richardo@delron.org.uk (Richard Otter) — Sat 5th Nov 2005 09:12

Violence!

The stick figure fighting in this game really made my smile, a very good idea. A simple straight forward IF game, just what I enjoy.

Rated 4/5

Review of Lights, Camera, Action! [version 2] by Richard Otter

richardo@delron.org.uk (Richard Otter) — Sat 5th Nov 2005 09:09

An Enjoyable Game

This is an amusing and entertaining game which should have scored much higher in the recent InsideAdrift Summer Comp 2005.

Rated 4/5

Review of Laboratory R.A.T.S. by Richard Otter

richardo@delron.org.uk (Richard Otter) — Sat 5th Nov 2005 09:06

Fun little game

Sometimes I just want a fun little game to play in my lunch hour - and this is one such game.

Rated 4/5

Review of Can It Be All So Simple? by chillindawg

nsiamas5@hotmail.com (chillindawg) — Sat 29th Oct 2005 18:18

Wow

Once I got to the ending of this game I just had to stop, do nothing, and think. I had a feeling about what was going to happen in the end but once it hit me, it hit hard. This game fills you with the strangest feelings you'll ever feel. You definitely feel crazy playing this game. I have to take my hat off to the author. Although, the only thing that keeps me from giving an excellent, is the fact that I wanted more. I wanted to be able to go into Tony's room, I wanted to interact with characters more. I wanted the ending to be clearer, because there are many people who will not understand. I recommend this game, and hopefully it will be updated soon, but if not I can live with it.

Rated 4/5

Review of In The Claws Of Clueless Bob by chillindawg

nsiamas5@hotmail.com (chillindawg) — Thu 27th Oct 2005 03:54

haha

I love the idea of a game like this. It was a smart choice, and a great game! Thumbs up.

Rated 4/5

Review of Regrets by chillindawg

nsiamas5@hotmail.com (chillindawg) — Thu 27th Oct 2005 01:57

Fun

This game definitely was fun to play. Everything was easy to figure out after thinking, but not too simple. There was only ONE time in the game which baffled me, which isn't so apparent. For a short game, this definitely brought a lot of elements.

Rated 4/5

Review of Crazy Old Bag Lady by J. J. Guest

jason.guest@gmail.com (J. J. Guest) — Sun 11th Sep 2005 13:49

Lots of fun

Not only has this game achieved the near-impossible by making the kleptomanic adventure game tradition of item-collecting mimetic, it also makes me laugh out loud at virtually every line. Well done!

Rated 3/5

Review of The House by phazonstorm

I.Campbell43@hotmail.co.uk (phazonstorm) — Tue 6th Sep 2005 21:22

Oh dear god no!!!!

Chillindawg, leave Adrift. My first game may not have been good, but this game is RUBBISH!! Did you even test it? No, you didn't, because if you did then you'd have found out that it's possible to complete the game in 10 seconds. Just type 'girl is dead' to win. Not exactly a challenging puzzle. If you really want to use Adrift, then spend a year just playing games that don't have passwords, then finding out a few tricks. That way you might fing out how to TAKE SPACES!!! Just don't make any more games for a while, okay?

Rated 1/5

Review of Regrets by phazonstorm

I.Campbell43@hotmail.co.uk (phazonstorm) — Tue 6th Sep 2005 21:05

Well written

Proof, if proof be needed, that David Whyld can write games other than OTT comedies. One of the few 'interactive stories' that focus on plot and to heck with puzzles. All in all a success from Adrifts greatest contributor (game-wise).

Rated 4/5

Review of The House by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 4th Sep 2005 23:40

I haven't played this game, and probably won't, but a few things just jump out at me from the blurb printed here:

"This is a kind of horror game that I created. Please write a reveiw and tell me about any problems so i can fix them. Thank you."

What about a description of the game? Don't put that kind of stuff as the first thing people are going to see of your game. It gives a terrible first impression.

Check your spelling. You want to know why I'm not going to play your game? Because if the blurb here has got spelling mistakes in them, it's a fair bet the game is the same.

It's 7 KB in size. That's so minimal it's barely even worth the time taken to download it.

Review of Love at the Lounge by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Fri 2nd Sep 2005 19:55

Tried it...

...don't like it! This thing is so full of simple spelling and grammatical errors that you can't enjoy what little good might be there. I played it twice and both times found my fingers typing "leave" by themselves.

If this is your first game, please practice harder before you release anymore, and if you do try again learn more before then.

There are several people here who would be happy to BETA test for you so you can get an outside look before you upload anything else. Just ask!

Rated 1/5

Review of Lights, Camera, Action! [version 2] by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 1st Sep 2005 23:33

If nothing else...

...warrants a good score, it is found in the very first paragraph of the introduction...Miss Painino Derriere! An enjoyable game.

Rated 4/5

Review of Regrets by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 1st Sep 2005 23:28

A delightful game.

I enjoyed this game very much. It requires an eye for detail that you don't come across very often; quite nice.

Rated 4/5

Review of A Party to Murder by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 1st Sep 2005 23:01

Didn't think this was worth a full five!

Rated 3/5

Review of David Good"s "Menagerie" by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 1st Sep 2005 23:00

Not that good...

Rated 2/5

Review of Regrets by Chenshaw

chenshaw@hotmail.co.uk (Chenshaw) — Thu 1st Sep 2005 08:31

Well-written short game

This is a thoughtful game with a well-written narrative. A one-room game, you have to really focus on a few items to see what you can find and learn. I liked the feel of this game, although would have appreciated fuller descriptions of the room and objects.

Rated 4/5

Review of Vampires Luck prt.1 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Wed 31st Aug 2005 21:30

Complete waste of space

Mods: please delete this.

Rated 1/5

Review of The Vergowven House by Lumin

lumin_orb@myway.com (Lumin) — Wed 31st Aug 2005 21:12

not playable

I don't know if you and chillindawg are the same person, or friends, or what, but this does seem like a strange coincidence. Right now I'm not completely certain about you two...you might be honestly trying, but then again you might just be trolling. For right now I'm going to assume the former and offer an honest critique.

This is not a game. I'm sorry, but it's just not playable, nor would I have any desire to do so it it was. If anything this is a practice exercise you used to try to learn the program, but in that case it should never have been uploaded to the site. You're not going to make a good game that's 2k or 3k. People don't like one line room descriptions or objects that can't be examined. Most of the time NPCs shouldn't be mentioned in room descriptions, and they certainly shouldn't be created as objects. If you're legitimately interested creating a game people might actually want to play, then try playing some other games first to see what works and what doesn't, bring any questions you have to the forum, and please, please make some attempt at proofreading your work.

Rated 1/5

Review of Vampires Luck prt.1 by Lumin

lumin_orb@myway.com (Lumin) — Wed 31st Aug 2005 20:40

not even playable

There are many, many things wrong with this game. I won't even bother listing them all, except to say that I figured as much after seeing that even the *title* wasn't proofread. I suggest that the author not upload what is clearly a practice exercise up to the public site, and I STRONGLY recommend that he or she tries playing a few other IF games before attempting to make one of their own. (For instance, in this game the player is expected to type either 'North', 'go north' 'head north', 'follow path', yet 'n' gives no response?) The forums are always there if the author needs help with anything, but I'm afraid this kind of thing isn't exactly the way to get the rest of the community to take them seriously...)

Rated 1/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by chillindawg

nsiamas5@hotmail.com (chillindawg) — Wed 31st Aug 2005 03:38

A great innovative game....

When i saw the title, i expected little from this game, but when i opened the game and saw the goal was to kill yourself, not only was i surprised, but intrigued... When i started playing, i found the first couple of ways to kill yourself simple and fun, but then I came to a wall. The game got a little complicated, but a quick typing of 'short' got me some help, and i was back having fun! This games storyline is a wonderful twist of hate and wonder. though complicated, i give this game a 9/10

Rated 5/5

Review of Target v1.01 by Chenshaw

chenshaw@hotmail.co.uk (Chenshaw) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 19:25

Short and fun

This game has some surprises in store, and is a good, fairly uncomplicated game.

Rated 4/5

Review of The Legend of Zelda: Legacy of a Princess by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 17:01

I've never actually played any of the Zelda games - on which this is based - so I'm not sure if I missed out on something and enjoyed the game far less as a result. Or, on the other hand, if it just isn't that remarkable full stop.

It starts off reasonably well. You leave the cave of Impa - some kind of chronicler from what I gather - to be informed that the King of Hyrule has been kidnapped by a strange creature in blue armour. Princess Zelda has demanded your presence and off to the palace you go to meet her. Here, unfortunately, things start going rapidly downhill.

Zelda wants to accompany you and so you set off to find the King with her. Figuring out what to do next is the hardest part. Most of the time I spent wandering around the town which seems to comprise the bulk of the game, not having a clue what I was doing. There were a few NPCs scattered about - the Windmill Man, a librarian, a few guards, some others - but all were very poorly done and had next to no depth about them. The IF equivalent of cardboard cut-outs? It would seem so. Interacting with them was difficult: they react only to "ask [name] about [subject]" and while I was able to garner a few responses from them, nothing I discovered was in any way useful. Most attempts ended in the default message that such-and-such "does not respond to your question".
The few items I have - a sword, a hookshot, a shield and an (empty) money pouch - I was hardpressed to find a use for. The hookshot I eventually managed to use to get some information out of the moblin I discovered in the palace dungeon but the others so far I haven't discovered anything to do with. In fact, I no longer have the shield. Some monster with the seriously unscary name of Like Like swiped it in the graveyard and I don't know any way to get it back. If I need that shield to finish the game, I'm clearly screwed...

The town itself is fairly empty and lifeless. The few NPCs don't so much add depth to the game as merely emphasise just how desolate everything is. Descriptions of the various things you see are basic and to the point without any effort expended to make them feel real; often they don't tell you anything more about the item in question than you had already seen in the location description.

Difficulty wise, Legacy Of A Princess is a hard game. Few games come without so much as a few hints somewhere along the way. Unfortunately this is one such game. It's also not the sort of game where hints are unnecessary as I soon discovered when, after several hours of playing, I still hadn't managed to make any further progress than I had made in my first five minutes. To date I've achieved precious little: I've recruited Zelda to my side, spoken to the Moblin and been attacked in the graveyard while searching for a boat (why is there a boat in the graveyard? I wish I knew.) And about that's it. Okay, there's also the shop which sells a mask I might need but as I don't any any money (rupees) I can't buy it and stealing doesn't seem to be an option. One location in the game contains gazillions of rupees but is no longer available to me and, reloading from a previous save, I was told I couldn't take the gems anyway! There's also the lake I'm unable to cross without a boat - the idea of swimming the lake obviously never occurred to the writer as there isn't an option for it. And that really is it. There could well be a fairly reasonable game past the points I'm stuck on but I suspect not. Most reasonable games start out that way and few of them start bad and then dramatically improve somewhere along the way.

Errors (Obvious and Otherwise)

Not too many but they are annoying.

There were obvious ones at the start in which you're told there you can see some bookshelves; however, trying to examine them hits you with the unhelpful message "Which shelves. The books or the shelf?" The books can be examined but the shelf/shelves can't. You get an ambiguity error each time you try.

The conversation system is unhelpful but never more so than when you try ask certain characters about certain other characters and run into a flaw in the design system. "Ask Katie about Impa" produces "Impa isn't here!" Strangely, "Ask Zelda about Impa" works fine.

Conclusion

This isn't a terrible game by any means and it even looked like it might be worth playing from the opening paragraphs, but lack of hints and depth just persuaded me I'd be far better off trying something else instead.

4 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of The Last Hour by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 17:00

I found The Last Hour quite a strange and disturbing little game. I honestly couldn't say I liked it but then the subject matter isn't the sort of thing a lot of people are going to like.

Unusually, the character you play isn't a hero out to save the world from darkest evil, or someone on a quest for a lost sword/treasure/whatever, or even a hero in the normal sense of the word. No, he's a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he starts the game in a prison cell where he's accused of murdering a black man during a "hunting trip".

While setting a game from the viewpoint of an evil character might not be original, if well done it can still carry great emotional impact. Unfortunately, with The Last Hour the evil character you play seems to have no remorse whatsoever for what he's done and often refers to the man he's killed as an "animal", something which I imagine wouldn't go down particularly well with any coloured people who might play the game. Worse still is the fact that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he insists throughout the game that he was hunting an "animal" and doesn't even seem to realise that killing black people is against the law. Now I don't know any member of the KKK but I'd imagine that even the more extreme ones realise that what they're doing is illegal.

On the plus side, it's atmospheric and there's a genuine sense of claustrophobia at times as the story unfolds while you're trapped in your little cell with no apparent way of getting out. On the down side, the subject matter isn't an easy one to like and there's precious little gameplay to be found throughout. I played from start to finish several times and got the same end result each time. I was unable to escape from the cell or affect the storyline one bit no matter what I did. And my character being executed at the end, while fitting, nevertheless made the game seem pretty pointless. I'd have much preferred an option whereby the main character could either escape from his cell or see the error of his ways and be redeemed. Or maybe even have the option of convincing the guards that it has all been a mistake and he really was innocent.

Spelling and grammar mistakes left The Last Hour with some rough edges (the author's native language isn't English although his English is undoubtedly better than my Italian) but, all in all, there's quite an interesting game here. If you can get over the often strong language (mostly edited out with asterisks) and questionable subject matter, you might even enjoy it.

Logic: 10 out of 10
There was little to find fault with logic-wise.

Problems: 6 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
One of the main commands that tells the player what is going on isn't an obvious one that you'd normally expect to find in a text adventure. As such, play through the game without trying it and you might well be left wondering just what it's all about.

Story: 4 out of 10
Precious little in the way of storyline here: a man in a cell awaiting execution. A little more depth, and some more back story (perhaps told in flashbacks) would have set the scene better.

Characters: 4 out of 10
Several characters show up but they don't have a lot to do and are hard to interact with beyond the basic commands of the game.

Writing: 5 out of 10
Occasional grammatical and spelling lapses aside, not bad at all.

Game: 5 out of 10
Not bad, not good, this was a difficult game to judge. I finished it for the first time and sat there wondering if I had missed something. An effort to turn it into a more regular game - with definable goals for the player to aim for - would have benefited The Last Hour a lot. In its current state, it's worth the ten minutes or so that it takes to play, but it isn't a game that is likely to draw people back to it time and again.

Overall: 34 out of 60

Rated 2/5

Review of Monsters (Release 2) by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 17:00

I liked Monsters from the start. It was nicely written but failed to be particularly frightening as it should have been concerning, as it does, the monsters that every little kid firmly believes are hiding under their bed. Personally I"d have preferred it if the monsters were heard but not seen because they didn"t seem to have the same effect when you've seen them.

Guess the verb was bad in a few places: daybed says the room description, bed is what the game understands. There was also an annoying event which ran every time I seemed to be making any progress whereby mother would show up and carry me back to my bed. This happened a couple dozen times and I began to wonder if it might have been better if there was a limit to how many times this should have happened.

All in all I found Monsters a fairly above average game. It"s small as it had to be to fit inside the competition"s size limit but there is quite a decent game here.

Game: 6 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of ADRIFT Maze by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:59

Time to completion: slightly less than a minute. Yep, and no cheating either. 'Adrift Maze' seems to consist of little more than wandering around a very easy to navigate maze (which is easier still as the map function hasn't been disabled) and picking up a trophy at the end. I came across an alien at one point but he didn't seem to have a lot to say and so I ignored him. I finished the game and then sat there wondering if I had missed something. A second attempt and I wandered into a location with an ugly troll which teleported me to another area of the maze but other than this there seemed to be very little here.

4 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of The Curse of Dragon Shrine by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:59

Following a lengthy and somewhat clumsy introduction in which the player becomes accused of murdering a girl called Jenny O'Brien and has to flee from his accusers, The Curse of DragonShrine starts properly once the player arrives at an abandoned castle. Or seemingly abandoned at any rate.

I have to admit that the introduction to The Curse of DragonShrine didn't impress me a whole lot. It seemed very rushed, as if the writer had tried to cram several pages worth of text into a far smaller space (to prevent the player having to read an overly lengthy introduction?) and the people accusing the player of murdering Jenny O'Brien came across more as rather dense country bumpkins than anything else. Fortunately, things pick up a little as the game moves to the castle where the aforementioned curse comes to the fore.

The castle itself is large and contains quite a fair number of locations. Unfortunately, the majority are empty of more than the most basic of descriptions and while a large number of locations makes finding the items you need to progress more difficult, it's also a tad disappointing being able to wander around this many locations with so little to do in them. A few NPCs - of which the game seriously lacks - could have been added to these empty rooms for some much needed depth.

The main aim behind the game is to find the body of Jenny O'Brien (yes, she is dead after all) and bring her back to life by use of several potions which, quite conveniently as it happens, are lying scattered around the castle in easy to find places. Actually, the 'easy to find' bit is probably a bit misleading as you actually need to find several different potions and combine then into a fourth potion in order to get anywhere. I remember finding this especially frustrating as I never found any reference to more than one potion being needed and expecting the player to realise that three potions had to be combined in a cauldron and then stirred with a spoon to produce a fourth potion struck me as a particularly cumbersome puzzle, and not one people are likely to figure out. Of course, I suppose clues could have been scattered around the game but, if so, they weren't scattered anywhere that I looked.

A few awkward instances arose. I came across a ghost who couldn't be referred to as "ghost" but instead "a ghost" which struck me as a strange way of handling things. Another problem with the ghost occurred when she followed me and I was faced with the likes of "The ghost of a young woman hovers nearby; now and then parts of her disappear through the wall. A ghost hovers in from the west." popping up on screen, telling me that the ghost was hovering nearby even before she had hovered in from the west! There was also an unusual occurrence in that a door which I was previously unable to open suddenly opened at a later point in the game without me doing anything to open it. A quick peek at the hints informed me that this is supposed to happen but didn't bother with explaining just why the door had mysteriously opened.

A villain known as Master Dracon is referred to from time to time during the game but I never met him at any point which was a bit of a disappointment because there is very little character interaction possible in The Curse of DragonShrine. In the end, his death (told in a few lines in the epilogue) is clumsily handled. Despite a few references to him throughout the game as possessing great powers and even endeavouring to achieve immortality and rule over a world of dragons, he is killed by a few local yokels. Hardly a decent ending for the villain of the piece. Although in all honesty Master Dracon isn't much of a villain anyway. Too little time is spent on making him into a believable character and the fact that he and the player never meet doesn't help matters.

All in all, The Curse of DragonShrine was a playable game which felt like it had been written in a great hurry. Not good, not bad, but somewhere in between.

5 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of The ADRIFT Project : Classified by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:58

Corny was the first thing that sprung to mind when starting this game. You, it turns out, are the captain of a starship called the Beta-Drifter on which something has gone horribly wrong. At your disposal you have the ADRIFT-O-Sweep and the Drift-O-Com. You have to get everything shipshape (pun intended) before the next ADRIFT release as Drifters are getting restless.

I read the intro and groaned. We've had ADRIFTmas Party, ADRIFTmaze and ADRIFT-O-Rama in the past so I guess it was only a matter of time before ADRIFT Project came along. Fortunately it gets a little better.

Eventually anyway. The first location poses a couple of bugs in that an exit is listed to the south but you're not able to progress that way and instead get hit with the default you can"t go in any direction! There's also a vent by the southern door with some writing above it which you're not able to read or even examine. The writing is listed in the room description (and not just this room description but several different ones throughout the game) yet you're told you can"t see it. For the first location aboard a ship called the Beta-Drifter, this showed an alarming lack of beta-testing.

But as I said, things get better. The Beta-Drifter is a nicely described ship and location descriptions are well written and informative. I didn"t spot any real errors in the spelling or grammar departments, although the weird spacing in the text (a fault with many of Mystery"s recent games) was apparent as always which led to the display on the screen looking a bit odd at times. However, some of the descriptions are a little dry: The Drift-O-Sphere is a deep green and looks to be holding a lush forest eco system. The green Drift-O-Sphere is medium sized. This kind of description smacks of lazy writing and just doesn"t have a natural feel to it.

Conversation is in the ask [someone] about [subject] format and while I managed to get a few responses from Luna, none of them were very helpful. The subject of DARWIN a robot run amok who seems to wander around the ship and do nothing useful doesn"t gain a useful response. After trying lots of different things that I thought might garner a helpful response (with varying levels of failure) I began to wonder if Luna actually served a purpose at all or if she was merely an attempt to include an NPC into a game that would have otherwise lacked one altogether.

Problems? The aforementioned bug with not being able to read the writing above the vent plagued several other places in the game. Apparently the player suffers from severe reading difficulties as you aren"t able to read any of the writing in the game. Amusing cockup of the year surely goes to the error message you receive every time you type in a command the author didn"t account for Run that by me agian'- I didn't understand what you meant!

Overall I didn"t mind the ADRIFT Project it was reasonably well written and had a few interesting puzzles but it didn"t do much for me either. It was a difficult game (or maybe I just didn"t have the willpower for another name-dropping exercise) and while it uses the system"s built in hints, these either give away far too much or don"t tell you enough. For any problem you're really stuck on, the hints are next to useless.

But not a bad game.

Rated 3/5

Review of Shadrick's Underground Adventures by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:58

Okay, the start was bad. Very bad. For some reason, all the text was in speech marks, whether it was spoken or not, making for a very jarring read. This strange custom was used a few other times throughout the game without any real reasoning that I could see but it was the one at the start that hit worst. Five beta-testers apparently missed this!

The main premise of the game is pretty similar to the previous Shadrick game your brother has got into trouble so you have to rescue him. Last time it was a bear, this time he"s gone off wandering in some caverns and got himself lost. As the annoying little tyke seems to have a habit of getting himself into these situations, I was half minded to sit around and let him stew but as that wasn"t an option, I set off to rescue him instead.

As with most of Mystery"s recent games, there seemed to be strange gaps in the text. Some locations listed the short description and then several empty lines between that and the long description. Others had just a single empty line. No real problem but it makes the text appear kind of strange on the screen.

I came across a few problems as I wandered around the cavern system which comprises the bulk of the game. In one location that I had never visited I was told that there was an opening in the wall that wasn"t there before. How did I know this considering I"d never been there before? There was also a strange bit at the start where I examined the bar and had my mother tell me off for talking to myself. Which I wasn"t doing!

The overall writing is pretty okay and certainly less jarring than in the previous game as the viewpoint stays firmly in first person and doesn"t have the annoying habit of switching to second person from time to time. It"s also quite a bit bigger than the previous game and shows a nice progression, although I couldn"t say I enjoyed it as much. With the map disabled, the caverns are an awkward place to move through and while there are none of the hideous puzzles that used to plague the maze games I played as a kid, the very idea of a series of twisty little passages brought back those memories. Not nice memories either. The caverns aren"t a horrible maze by any means but they're just not that interesting either.

One puzzle I liked but which needed a lot more work expending on it to get it to work properly involved pushing a large boulder which was too heavy to be carried and thereby manoeuvring it around. The only problem with this is that if you push the boulder in a direction you immediately see the new room description minus the boulder. The first time this happened, I wondered if something had gone wrong and went back looking for it. No sign! However, upon returning to the last location I found the boulder was there after all. Experimenting a few times showed me that the boulder does move when you push it but that it doesn"t show up in the room description until you actually look. Strange. 10 out of 10 for the nice puzzle, but 1 out of 10 for the poor implementation. It"s also a tad annoying to find that I'm told I can"t lift the boulder as it"s too heavy, only to later be able to lift it when I need to place it on a plinth.

Indeed, logic isn't this game"s strong point. Items needed to dispose of every problem you encounter in the caverns are conveniently lying around and most don"t even require much effort to get hold of. In one location there is a puzzle involving three boulders and three plinths which need to be manipulated to open a secret passage leading to where your absent brother is. Strange that your brother managed to get past this obstacle himself without needing to solve the plinth puzzle. Although it"s even stranger that there are three boulders just lying around the caverns which are the exact weight required to trigger the plinths. Hey, now *that"s* what you call one hell of a coincidence.

4 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of Where are my keys? v1.08 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:58

First the good news: as of October 2004 this was the first full-size, non-competition, non-adult ADRIFT game to be released since February 2004 (something of a record). The bad news: it's rushed in places and would seriously have benefited from a few rounds with a good beta-tester, not to mention being fed through the tender care of a spell-check.

It has to be said that the introduction isn't one of the best I've ever read. It's told in centred text with a blank line inserted in between every line of text, which might have seemed like a good idea in theory but in practice it looks a bit of a mess, especially if, like me, you have the font sizes overridden and half the text has disappeared off the screen before you can even read it. Scrolling back up to read text that's flashed by too fast to be read is never a positive thing. It's also not a good idea to have an introduction littered with spelling and grammatical errors: full stops seem to be dropped in purely at random (except in the places where they're actually required) and while a few commas have had the decency to show up, a good few others got lost somewhere along the way. You might get away with this sort of thing partway through a game, particularly if your audience are enjoying said game and willing to overlook minor errors, but right at the start it gives off a very bad impression indeed.

But on with the game

The objective: you've crashed at a friend's house after a particularly heavy drinking session and need to find your car keys so you can get home. The back bedroom, it seems, needs decorating as your wife's mother-in-law is coming to stay and you, being the man of the house (though clearly not the one who wears the trousers) are needed home asap, if not sooner, to get the decorating done. Ignoring the fact that such things as taxis, buses and - heaven forbid - walking on your own two feet exist, you decide to hunt around the house for your car keys.

From the above, you're probably getting the impression that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about the start of the game. You're right, I wasn't. Potentially the most important part of the game left me feeling that this was a game that had been rushed to get finished and little effort had been taken to bring it up to scratch. But it managed to keep my interest long enough for me to actually make some progress with and, after a while, it began slowly but surely to win me over.

This is a game greatly concerned with a vast array of items and in that respect it harks back to some of the text adventures I used to play in the 80's when I'd be faced with a whole horde of items which didn't seem to have a use and part of the fun (or frustration, depending on your viewpoint) was finding out what that use was. Unfortunately I didn't do very well here. At one point I must have amassed somewhere in the region of 30 items which I had scattered about the kitchen floor as there was a limit on how many I could carry and having them in one place seemed the easiest way to keep track of them all. A few - the knife, some bread and the coffee - I managed to discern a use for but the majority just got the better of me. There were others that I was sure I could find a use for but which it turned out I couldn't - the bone, for instance, I thought I would need to give to the dog but after trying unsuccessfully with this and being told that the dog wasn't interested, I guess I was wrong. Either that, or guess the verb reared its ugly head and got the better of me. Even so, I was a bit miffed that a dog wouldn't even take a bone that was being offered to it.

There are several other characters in the game and while you can ask them questions about a wide variety of subjects (Mark, in fact, seems to have a programmed response for almost every item in the game), they're not very interesting characters. All seem to be at various stages of a hangover and despite you having access to items such as headache tablets and mugs of coffee (another couple of items that I managed to find a use for), these don't seem to do a lot for the hangover and the characters remain pretty much the same afterwards. Whether getting them sober is a requirement to finishing the game or just a puzzle that doesn't go anywhere I couldn't say.

Mention of the headache tablets brings to mind one of the game's more annoying aspects. The headache tablets are actually inside a packet. Open the packet and try to give a tablet to someone and you're told, quite bizarrely, that you're not carrying the tablets! This being despite the fact that they're inside the packet which you're carrying in your hand! Having to open the packet and then remove the tablets before I'm able to give them to someone struck me as a strange flaw and one that could certainly have been fixed with a little effort.

But then this is a game with a lot of rough edges and which appears to have been tested very minimally, if at all. Spelling mistakes litter the text and while everyone makes them (I'm as guilty of this as anyone), they're distracting all the same and in this age of spell-checks it's disappointing to see so many. Even more disappointing is that from playing a previous game of the writer's, I know he's capable of much better than this.

I didn't finish the game. I don't even think I came close. Assuming that all the items I managed to find, and which are now making a sizeable dent in the kitchen floor from their sheer number and bulk, have a use then it's probably quite likely that I did very poorly. I did, however, manage to discover where my car keys where. The dog buried them. Unfortunately I wasn't able to use any of the items I had discovered to dig with and nor, in fact, was I able to dig with my bare hands. The hints system seems to imply that the dog can be used to dig up the keys but as he wouldn't respond to the bone and just dropped the toy mouse back in his basket every time I tried giving it up him, quite how I was supposed to make use of him I couldn't say. Either I'm getting at worse at these sorts of games (a definite possibility I suppose) or the puzzles are just getting harder and harder to fathom out.

Clearly this was a rushed game and the rough edges leave a lot to be desired. But there's still a fairly reasonable effort here if you can make the effort to get past the all-too-obvious mistakes and flaws; at times, flashes of the great game it could have been, but isn't, shine through and I find myself wondering if the best thing for it might to be taken down, fixed, put aside for a few months until everyone has forgotten about it, and then a second version released.

4.5 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of The Magic Show by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:57

Games by newcomers to the ADRIFT scene seem to be few and far between these days so I approached The Magic Show with a fair amount of trepidation. The description of the game listed on the main ADRIFT page was at least reasonably interesting:

A skilled magician, you expect it'll just be another night working at the dinner theatre. Or so the evening begins as you head out onto the stage to perform your usual feats of magic. But the night will be longer than you think and your magical skills will become a matter of life and death.

So I decided to give it a whirl.

The Magic Show begins with you, a magician (either Justin Case (heh heh) if you're male or Justine Case if you're female) preparing for the night's entertainment. You're in your dressing room, a sparsely furnished location which would just about get away with so sparsely furnished if it wasn't the first place you see in the game. Most items mentioned in the room description can be examined but there are a few lacking descriptions. The napkin is frustrating in that examining it reveals writing which supposedly can be read but "x writing" and "read writing" both return an error message. "Read napkin" works fine, however, and looks to a good luck message from one of the game's testers.

I got into some guess the verb hassles with a magic wand. I've got my top hat on which, I'm informed, has been magically locked and can only be opened with my wand. All well and good, but where is the wand? By the time I got round to examining my top hat I'd already given the dressing room the once over and never saw any sign of it. A second, more careful, inspection proved no more fruitful than the first. Now I've played games in the past where the writer has forgotten to override restrictions and you can pretty much get away with murder in games like that. I tried it here - "get wand" - and the wand was mine! Wa-hey! Apparently it had been in the sleeves of my tuxedo all along although as the tuxedo isn't listed amongst my inventory items, I had no reason to assume I was wearing it. "x you" doesn't work, "x me" reveals the tuxedo and a few other items. But why weren't they listed in my inventory?

Once you leave the dressing room, the game starts properly as you entertain (or try to at any rate) an audience with your magic tricks. Most of the tricks are the standard fare that you'd expect to see at any magic show: levitation tricks, sawing a woman in half (why is it always a woman that gets sawn in half?), card tricks and the like. The first time I tried them, I came seriously unstuck with most of the tricks because I was lacking a key item needed to move them forward. Without it, I wasn't able to get the tricks to proceed and - here's an annoying thing - there's no way of backing out of a trick partway through and trying something else. So if you've picked a trick and can't figure out how to finish it, you're basically stuck with no way out. Want to hear something else annoying? The 'undo' command has been disabled. So you can't even backtrack a few moves and try something else. As I didn't have a save game at this time, I was forced to restart.

One nice touch which I felt the game lacked would be a timer set to have the audience start heckling you if you just stand around for a while without performing any magic tricks.

My second time through I did considerably better. I did the levitation trick. A problem I ran into was with precise spelling of a certain word. The writer uses American spellings of words like "realise" or "synthesise" whereas I use the English spellings. As one of the words you need to type is the American spelling, you might struggle a bit trying to figure out why your perfectly logical command just isn't working - unless your American of course in which case it'll work perfectly. Ideally, both versions of the word should have been covered.

Another aspect of the game I didn't like, and which the lack of 'undo' made especially worse, was how all the items you find in the first location are returned to their initial location as soon as you enter the main area of the game. I was particularly annoyed to find myself manacled in a black cabinet and unable to reach the skeleton key I knew I had on me. It had been in my hand when I left the dressing room yet the game, in its unhelpfulness, had returned it to my pocket and so therefore it was out of my reach. Normally I'd just hit 'undo' a few times until I was free of the cabinet, get the skeleton key out of my pocket and then carry on with the game as normal. But with 'undo' disabled, that's not an option. Quitting is an option and one I came seriously close to taking right then.

Fortunately, the cabinet trick is one that plays out to completion without any real input from you. Just sit there and wait a few times and the trick is over. You don't get much of a boost to your score but at least you're through it.

When I left the stage - my score was about half of the maximum amount so I guess I didn't do especially well with the magic tricks - I expected the game to be over. But instead there was a letter awaiting me in my dressing room informing me that my assistant, Tiffany, had been kidnapped and I was required to steal something called the "Golden Scarab" from the Tri-City Museum or the kidnappers would murder her. Rather than calling the police, I instead head off across town to the Museum

and that's as far as I got. The museum is locked and the doors seem to resist my best efforts to unlock them. Apparently the doors are locked from the other side - clearly the museum employs its own brand of magicians who are capable of walking through walls and don't require such things as doors with locks on the outside. Unfortunately the walking through walls trick isn't one I've learnt myself and so here I must resort to more mundane methods of affecting an entrance.

In theory anyway. In practice I got well and truly stuck. I couldn't get the doors open no matter what I did. I found some cars in the parking lot but the description of each just gave me a description of the cars as a whole. Was this a bug or just a writer being lazy? In desperation, I turned to the hints.

Ah, the hints. Now, I'm normally all in favour of hints as I'm one of those people who get stuck very often and seldom finish games without them. So when I first typed 'hint' in The Magic Show and saw a whole list of them ready and waiting for me, I was quite pleased. Until, that is, I actually tried one of them.

Oh dear.

Here we have a few of the most unhintful hints I've ever come across. A few of my favourites:

How do I do the coin trick? - Amaze the audience with your slight of hand.

How do I get in the museum? - Explore. There are more ways than one for a magician to enter a building.

Help, I'm no good at riddles! - Fortunately, you're not alone.

How do I do the levitation trick? - The trick can be frightening for a volunteer who's not in a peaceful, relaxed state of mind.

I don't think there's a single hint in the game that I actually managed to put to any use. Most are simply irritating. A few are downright infuriating. One involving the cabinet trick actually says that you're carrying the item you need to perform the trick - yet because you're currently manacled, you're unable to reach it. Confession time: this is the first game I've played which contained hints that I found myself wishing didn't have hints. None are helpful in the least and most seem to be attempts, successful admittedly, on the part of the writer to annoy the player. Wouldn't it have been a better idea to have one of the hints actually be useful?

I didn't get any further than being stuck outside the museum. Of the four hints I quoted above, the middle two are what I got when I arrived at the museum. As neither gave me a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing, I decided it was high time I gave The Magic Show a rest and tried something else. In a way, it's a pity the hints are so bad because if they'd have been better I'd doubtless have spent a lot longer playing the game and might even have finished it. I'd have certainly enjoyed it more.

It's got good and bad parts. The magic tricks are nothing new or original (old hat really and any credible magician wouldn't be seen dead performing them) but interesting all the same. The style of writing is good and if there are spelling or grammatical errors I didn't spot any. My low score for the game - 4 out of a maximum of 10 - reflects the annoyance I felt for most of the time I was playing. The appalling hints (it's probably wrong to even call them that) were a big disappointment and the lack of 'undo' was even worse. At times it felt like the writer was deliberately going out of his way to annoy the player and while I'm sure that wasn't the case, The Magic Show has so many things about it that could be made more user-friendly that it's hard to imagine he was unaware of what a frustrating game this could be.

4 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of Darkness V1.2 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:56

Darkness is a slight game set at a lighthouse where the resident workers all seem to have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. You, the local harbour master, have decided to head out there and take a look (without, alas, a radio with which to call for help if you get stuck )

Part of me liked the idea while another part of me felt that it wasn't presented well enough. There could be the makings of a good game here but the majority of the text seems rushed as if the writer was so eager to get it finished he didn't bother looking for spelling and grammatical errors.

The bulk of the game takes place in the lighthouse and as far as locations for games are concerned, this isn't a particularly enthralling one. It's just a set of not very interesting rooms all on top of one another. A little effort has been made to spice things up by having the player periodically hear someone approaching from behind, yet turning around and seeing nothing. At other times, you can hear someone talking and a hat which you rescue from the sea seems to have a mind of its own about where it actually moves to. The idea of someone else in the lighthouse following you around was a nice one but I felt it was done a little too much. At one point, the player seemed to be hearing someone behind him every couple of moves.

Errors hit in Darkness from the moment you examine the first item you see and get:

In is a wooden ladder which is attached to the jetty.

Typing "in" when you meant "it" isn't a terrible error on its own but when the first item you try and examine has a buggy description, it's not a good way to start the game. Unfortunately, it gets a lot worse later on.

One peculiarity of the game is its way of listing measurements in feet first of all then in metres (or sometimes millimetres) afterwards in brackets. I'm not quite sure what the point of this was (help for those who don't understand measurements in feet perhaps) but it made for a jarring read at times. If I gave a damn about mimesis, I'd probably comment that it snapped it in half like a twig but I'll leave the mimesis comments for the people who really care for them.

Despite taking place on an island surrounded by water, there's no response given to one of the more obvious commands: "swim". There's also a hat floating in the sea which remains there for as long as it takes you to fetch a boat hook and fish it out. Is this an island completely becalmed then? Or just one with incredibly an docile current around it? Strangely, you're not able to jump into the sea and retrieve the hat.

Difficulty-wise it's easier than the writer's other games. I was able to figure quite a few of the puzzles out for myself and I seldom needed to resort to the hints. The hints system at least is competent and should point you in the right direction if you do get stuck.

As with the writer's previous games, Darkness comes with a huge assortment of items, most of which you'll probably never figure out a use for. One amusing thing I noticed is that there are several items which can be worn and there are no restrictions in place to prevent you wearing them all at the same time. So at one point I was wandering around the lighthouse, clambering up and down stairs, whilst wearing a sou'wester hat, a weatherproof coat, some weatherproof boots, some ear defenders, a hard hat, a lifejacket and a rucksack. I'm not sure whether the sou'wester hat was worn on top of the hard hat or the other way round but I bet I looked a bit of a state with all that clothing on.

A radio I found seemed to be either broken or so prone to bugs as to appear broken. Turning the dial increased the number the dial was on by 100, no matter what I turned it to. As the game's intro tells you that you've already tried contacting the lighthouse via radio and received no response (hence you coming out here in the first place), I'm guessing the radio is broken but why the dial number is incremented in this fashion I couldn't say.

I managed to get a few strange responses to what (as least as far as I was concerned) were reasonably sensible commands. "Fill can with petrol" hit me with "don't be daft!" (why is that daft?) while "fill can" just got me "I don't understand what you want me to do with the fuel can." By far the worse error was when I examined the torch and saw

It is your trusty, powerful, battery flashlight which is %state_torch% at the moment.

It's hard to imagine how an error like that escaped even the most cursory testing but apparently it did. Then again, judging by how the rest of the game seems afflicted with so many errors it's quite likely that testing is one thing Darkness wasn't subjected to. At best, I suspect the game was played through to completion just to ensure it could be completed and then was uploaded without further testing.

I wonder if Richard Otter is writing too many games too quickly. He's now produced three full size games in less than four months (not counting the mini-game he wrote for the last ADRIFT comp). The first - Ticket To No Where - was quite good; the second - Where Are My Keys? (see issue 1 for review) - was patchy in places and contained entirely too many errors but was still a likeable enough game in its own right; the third - this game, Darkness - is his weakest effort yet and seems to run into problems from the word go, a good number of which I'm guessing are down to how quickly he's writing them and not enough time and effort being expended on catching errors. Each game he writes seems smaller and buggier than the last. Too much, too soon? It's a worrying progression whatever way you look at it.

In the end, I felt that Darkness was a wasted opportunity. With a lot more effort and some time spent on a decent spell-checker, it could be improved considerably.

3 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of Ticket to No Where v1.2 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:56

This I liked although it wasn"t a game I managed to make much progress with before I had to resort to the hints which, fortunately, are quite extensive but, unfortunately, don"t give more than hints so if you're really stuck on a puzzle and don"t have a clue what to do they're next to useless.

The idea behind the game seems like a very simple one to begin with: you have to be at a certain place by a certain time and have run into problems getting there. So you're hanging around a train station trying to figure out which train you need to board to get you to your destination. Easy enough? Far from it.

The train station isn't a particularly big place 9 locations in total but it gives the impression of being much larger due to the sheer number of things to do and the fact that the NPCs wander around from location to locationplace to place. Quite a few of the puzzles are obvious as a good number of items are literally lying around the place for you to find. Of course, once you find them you have to find something to do with them. Again, some are obvious. Examine enough things and you'll find clues telling you that such-and-such needs something and that someone else has lost an item. But a good few items don"t seem to have an obvious use and there are a few that you're sure should be used for one thing but seem to have another use somewhere else. There's a coin stuck in a slot in one location which I was sure I could remove with the pencil I had managed to swipe, but no such luck.

Conversation is handled in the awkward format of ask [name] about [subject] never a favourite of mine. It"s done better here than in most games in that I was actually able to garner a few responses from certain of the game"s NPCs instead of being hit with the default message that you tend to get when you"ve asked something the writer didn"t expect. But, still, it was trying at times. Communicating with characters by asking them about various things is difficult and most of the time you're sat there desperately trying to think of what to ask them about. The obvious things don"t generate a response or they generate a not entirely helpful ones, and then you're left with the problem of trying to figure just what it is you need to be asking them.

A major communication problem arose when trying to speak to a young girl who is lost (jarringly, she is often referred to as Young Girl) and looking for a train to Donningby. I managed to find out from a helpful trainspotter chap where the young girl needed to go but trying to tell her this got the better of me. Maybe it was something incredibly obvious I was overlooking but after speaking random words to her and not getting a response, I just had to admit defeat. Ironically, she needs to go to platform 1 but even when standing on it I wasn"t able to point this out to her!

There are a fair few things that need doing around the train station which don"t really seem to be required to complete the game (I haven"t completed it yet so I couldn"t say for certain) but merely boost your overall score. Some of these consist of the tried and tested puzzle format of finding an item and giving it to someone else, but a good few are more inspired than that.

One thing I didn"t realise, and which isn't made obvious if you don"t pay really close attention to what is going on, is that boarding a train and reaching your meeting are an impossibility. Instead, you have to get the person to come to you. This was something that completely threw me as what seemed like a relatively simple game to begin with buy a ticket, find which platform you need and then wait there for the required train turns out to be a lot more difficult. Of course, you're not likely to discover that you can"t get to your meeting until you"ve boarded what you think is the right train only to end up failing the game as a result.

Unfortunately this is a game which is very easy to mess up, which I did several times. In one location I found a note and upon speaking to one of the NPCs I was told to hand it to the station master. Which I did. Only to discover that as I hadn"t amended the details on the note first, a series of events later in the game weren"t going to happen. The note was gone by this time of course and with no way of getting it back (that I knew of), I was faced with an unfinishable game. Maybe a warning or two for the player might be an idea?

Negative aspects aside, this was certainly my favourite game of the Summer Comp and with the difficulty toned down a little and some warnings for the player to avoid unfinishable states, it could be a far better game still.

7 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of Veteran Knowledge [Version 2] by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:55

Veteran Knowledge is an updated and enlarged version of Veteran Experience, an entry in the second Three Hour ADRIFT Competition from 2004. While playing the original game first isn't a necessity, it"s probably a good idea to play that one first to give you an indication of just what improvements and changes have taken place. This isn't, as I had first thought, just a slightly bigger version of the original but a whole new game instead.

From Three Hours To Infinity

I wasn"t expecting to like this game very much. It had originally been entered as Veteran Experience in the second Three Hour ADRIFT Competition and came a respectable second and while it was a fair game in its own right (especially for one written by a newcomer to the ADRIFT scene and in three hours to boot), I wasn"t sure how it could really be expanded upon to turn it into a full size game. Add a few extra opponents to fight? Change the way some of the puzzles are handled? Make it harder?

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the writer has taken the original idea that of a has-been wrestler trying to win the world title fight and fleshed it out into a full size game. The main character, the Veteran, is given a better background than in the original game and whereas Veteran Experience took place wholly in the arena where the title fight is staged, Veteran Knowledge begins outside an alley where you are now begging for a living and expands to encompass the arena later on. A flyer blows past and alerts you to the world title fight which, by the kind of remarkable coincidence that only exists within the confines of a text adventure, is due to take place very soon and is only a five minute walk from where you are. Enough of begging, you decide, it"s time you returned to your old profession.

This sounds kind of plausible but I have no doubts that a has-been wrestler who"s been living rough on the streets for the past few years and has a drinking problem on top of that, would ever be able to be considered for the world title fight. Are contenders in such short supply that drunken has-beens (and unpopular ones at that) are the only choice?

The Villain"s Point of View

There aren"t many games I've played where the main character is actually a bad guy. More often than not, you play some kind of hero figure either striving to save the world from darkest evil, defeating criminals or you're on the traditional treasure quest (playing a character who strictly speaking is a murderer and a thief but who is still portrayed as a hero). So it was refreshing to play a game where you play first and foremost a villain. And a remarkably unpleasant one as well. The Veteran, your character, is a particularly nasty piece of work and no mistake. A former wrestler gone to seed, he now spends his days begging for money or, when the begging doesn"t succeed, mugging people. On top of that, he"s got a drinking problem. Hardly your typical hero figure then.

The main problem with playing the game from the viewpoint of such a thoroughly unpleasant individual is that it"s hard to find yourself rooting for him. While several of the opponents you face are equally despicable, most are closer to the traditional hero figures you'd find yourself playing in other games and it"s difficult to sympathise with your character throwing acid in someone"s face or bashing them with a crowbar while they"re otherwise distracted. Part of me would have preferred a less dubious way of handling some of the game"s puzzles, but maybe that"s just me.

Then there's the fact that the player isn't just horrible to his opponents but to everyone he meets. He makes his living (if you can call it that) by begging and mugging. He can steal from a shop run by an old blind guy. He even beats up a couple of kids and steals some oil from them. All in all, not a nice guy by any stretch of the imagination. And yet the feeling seems to be that the player is one of the good guys and that doing what he does is the right thing. Or maybe this is one of those cases where the player reads far more into a game than the writer ever intended.

Your character is seriously outmatched by every one of your opponents and so if you're going to win then you have to resort to underhanded methods. Only one of the opponents do you actually fight in the wrestling ring but whereas he seems quite content to fight fair n" square, you end up going at him with a chair, a fire extinguisher and a crowbar. Why not just step into the ring with a rocket launcher and be done with it? I'm not even going to mention the rules of wrestling which I'm pretty sure prohibit such out and out cheating

While the end of the game and its seriously over the top fight with the Star (the main enemy) was amusing, I can"t help but be disappointed that I wasn"t able to defeat even one of my enemies in a fair fight. Even if the fair fight option proved to be unsuccessful, it would have been a good idea to include it for anyone willing to give it a shot.

In The Good Corner

Aside from the refreshing change to the villain"s viewpoint, Veteran Knowledge was well written and fairly easy to make progress with. I stumbled in a few places due to non-obvious commands but most of the puzzles are simple and straightforward. On top of that, there's an excellent hints system although you'll kick yourself if you use it and then find that the solution was so easy you could have worked it out anyway. I resorted to hints on several occasions but all the puzzles were easily solvable even for someone who can"t get his head around half the puzzles in modern games.

The game layout was easy to get to grips with and there weren"t many times I found myself checking the map to keep track of where I was.

In The Bad Corner

Few games are perfect and Veteran Knowledge is no exception. However, the problems here are all relatively minor and don"t let the game down in any noticeable way. The only two areas that I felt needed some work on were the dialogue and the way certain puzzles are handled.

The dialogue? Okay, let"s be blunt: it"s bad. None of the characters in the game come across as real or believable and most have a tendency to sink into Evil Super Villain Rant Mode when speaking to the player. Here is what the Monster says when you first encounter him:

"How dare you touch those kids! They are my fans, carrying out my bidding. I want damage, destruction and mayhem. I don't want to waste this bottle of acid I was saving for tonight on you, but I am going to make you wish that you had never even looked at them!"

And the Evil Twins are even worse. Seldom do any of the characters in the game give a believable bit of dialogue; at worse they sound like they're reading their lines from a poorly written prompt card; at best they're caricature villains lacking depth.

The dialogue situation isn't helped much either by the fact that it seems to remain constant and unchanging throughout the entire game. Speak to the same character a dozen times and you get the same stilted dialogue on each occasion. A few variations, even the characters getting miffed at your repetition, might have been a good idea.

Certain puzzles? I struggled with parts of the game nothing new as I generally struggle with every game at some point. But this one involved looking under" another item. I"d tried looking under items before that one and not met with any kind of success (generally receiving the exact same response as if I"d tried to examine it in the normal way) so when I came to the one item that I did need to look under, it didn"t occur to me to even try. It"s probably one of those things that doesn"t seem relevant to the author but to the poor player it makes a big difference.

Other peeves with the game were minor: you can"t enter the High Flyer"s house (typing go house , strangely enough, moves you one location further away from the house!) ; there are some crates later in the game that you're told you can"t open with your bare hands yet trying with the crowbar just tells you that there's nothing in the crates that you need why not just tell you that first off so you don"t go hunting for something to open them with?; the Brawler"s car can"t be smashed but it can be broken (actually it can"t be broken either but breaking it returns a proper message whereas smashing it returns the ADRIFT default error message).

Short But Sweet

Even enlarged from its original three hour beginnings and considerably fleshed out, Veteran Knowledge is by no means what you would call a big game. Allowing for time spent struggling with puzzles, I guess I got through the entire thing in little more than an hour; replay value, something I value in games, isn't high. This is one of those games whereby once you"ve played it, you"ve seen everything it has to offer and there is little inclination to try it again.

There are times in the game, particularly right at the start, where it might seem like there is very little to do and no actual way of making meaningful progress. Certain characters only appear and events only trigger after other events have been acted out so you might wander across, say, the north end of the park and find nothing happening there and yet return after a bit of dubious underhand action involving the Brawler to find a couple of brats messing around with an oil can. In a larger game, this sort of thing would be a major problem as you would need to continually wander around every location in the game to try and see if anything had changed, but in a game of relatively modest proportions like this one it"s not too much of a hassle. Even so, I think I entered the park a couple of times after the brats were there before noticing them because it"s not often I reread a room description every time I visit the room.

A Worthy Update?

I think the answer has to be a resounding yes. There are several aspects of the game that need working on the dialogue being the main one and perhaps adding a bit of believability to some of the characters but other than that this is a solid game in almost all respects. The game understands every command that you might think to try and even surprised me a few times with responses to commands I really didn"t expect the author to have covered.

7 out of 10

Rated 4/5

Review of A Walk At Dusk by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:53

New ADRIFT games and by new I mean those not entered in the various competitions which seem to have comprised about 90% of ADRIFT"s recent output are a rarity these days. The only exceptions seem to be the joke games put out by people who aren"t anywhere near as clever as they like to think or the games people upload when they're learning the system and would be better off sent straight to the recycle bin. So when I saw there was a new game out, I hurried over and downloaded it.

Initial Impressions

Some games start well and then go bad, others start bad and then become good. A Walk At Dusk was a bit of a mixed bunch. It started fairly well and if the storyline involving the player deciding to look for a tree frog during a walk didn"t blow me away, it at least wasn"t so horrible I thought about quitting. At least it made a nice change to the save the world storylines that populate so many games and nor was it some deep and fundamental game with serious" issues.

Purpose

My first time through the game led me feeling as if there wasn"t a lot of point to what happened here. I wandered around, examined a few things, became alternately impressed with the decent standard of writing and depressed with the often clumsy programming, and then I found what I was looking for a tree frog and the game ended. It told me I"d achieved four of the ten things I would have wanted to do and nicely listed them for me (I say nicely because it was nice idea not because of the formatting used for the listing which was a bit of a jumbled mess). Which left me sitting thinking well, is that it?

I played it again to see if there was anything else I had missed. There were a few things, mostly to do with examining bits of the scenery I hadn"t thought to examine the first time, but overall it seems that, yes, that is it. Which isn't to say that what"s on offer here isn't enough for a bite-sized game to while away half an hour on a rainy afternoon.

In the end I was left with the impression that A Walk At Dusk isn't so much a game as an exercise for the writer in telling a story using ADRIFT. The intro states that this is an interactive essay and there is a definite story" feel to the game that is a break from the norm.

Looked at from the viewpoint of something to pass the time or a story with ADRIFT , it"s quite likeable. It"s certainly well written (mostly anyway) and while the occasional lapses in programming are a pain, they don"t distract too much from the game itself.

Problems

As with the writer"s last game Wax Worx there are some great pieces of writing in A Walk At Dusk often let down by some exceedingly poor game writing and general lack of attention to detail. Some objects listed in the room descriptions can be examined, others can"t. Some obvious commands are missed out in one location yet equally obvious ones in another location are covered; this leads to the sneaking suspicion that this was a game written very quickly indeed and subjected to no more than cursory testing.

The lack of attention is bad in several places, notably the very first location in the game where the room description notes a field off to one side but trying to examine the field produces the default error message: You can"t see that here. Strangely, just about every other item in the location can be examined and most of them have nicely detailed descriptions.

In other places, the description of a single item seems to have been used to cover the descriptions for many (a case of the writer cutting corners?). The description of the trees and shadows in one location returns the same description for each, which also happens to double (triple?) as the room description. Clearly the three are separate and should be treated as such for the sake of descriptions.

Sometimes the responses you get from the game aren"t what you'd expect. I walked into a spider"s web at one point and tried to break it with some wire I was carrying yet the game seemed to think I was trying to break it with the board.

There are no real puzzles in the game* but sometimes the game"s unhelpfulness can lead to unexpected puzzles arising. One command, in particular, needs to be repeated at the end of the game yet why would the player type it twice when the first time it didn"t produce anything special? As it happened, I only typed it the second time because I had run out of things to do and was going through the various items in the room description and just typing x [item] one by one to see if there were any that I had missed. By chance I typed the same one as I had already typed and this time I got a meaningful response whereas the first time I hadn"t.

* Okay, there's one but it"s so simple and straightforward that I doubt many people are going to struggle to get across the stream.

The only other problem I had with the game was with its often strange spacing between various parts of text. Sometimes the room description will immediately follow the direction command, other times there will be several lines between the two. There are also quite a few instances of weird spacings in the text itself with multiple spaces separating words in the middle of a sentence. No big deal and hardly the sort of thing that is going to either make or break a game but a little unusual all the same.

I don"t understand what you mean!

The default ADRIFT response of I don"t understand what you mean! pops up often, usually in response to commands that really should have been covered but, for some reason, aren"t. There's a stream the player has to cross at one point yet the option to swim across it isn't covered despite this being the first thing a player is likely to attempt. Elsewhere there's a fence but it can"t be climbed. The same goes for several trees.

Conclusion

Although I wasn"t much impressed with A Walk At Dusk after my first play through it, subsequent playings (as I tried to figure out just what it was I needed to do to get the best possible ending) impressed me more. There's quite an involved game here and the idea is a lot cleverer than it first appears. Puzzle-less IF has never been a favourite of mine (despite the fact that I'm hopeless at most puzzles and inevitably start typing help the first time I come across one instead of trying to figure it out myself) but, handled well, it can certainly work and while I don"t think that this game has quite succeeded it was nevertheless worth playing. A more polished version, or perhaps a larger and more ambitious game along similar lines, might be an interesting idea.

5 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of Wax Worx by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:52

Eric Mayer's first full size game since Doomed Xycanthus is a chilling horror story with splashes of the truly bizarre thrown in for good measure (including, among other things, the talking head of Marie Antoinette). Wax Worx starts off well with the player awaking, unsure of where he is or even who he is. A little exploration and things slowly begin falling into place, although it never really becomes clear what is going on. The explanation given at the start - that you've been locked inside a wax works museum - has an air of untruth about it.

Strange errors arose in several places throughout the game, the most glaring example being in the workshop when I tried - after being completely unable to locate an exit - to open a door. I was asked which door "the wooden door or the wooden door?" and was told, no matter what I typed, that "that is still ambiguous!" Funnily enough, when I carefully re-read the room description I didn't even notice any mention of a door there, wooden or otherwise.

"Wax Worx" is an unhelpful game in many places. In the first location there are three doors yet trying to open any of them results in the annoying message "you can't open the door!" For something as obvious as this (and let's face it, what else are you likely to type when faced with a closed door?) it's disappointing that the default response wasn't catered for a little better. The actual command required to open the door wasn't an obvious one either, particularly in light of the fact that I had been told that I couldn't open the door. Then again, problems with doors pretty much dog this game. Several times I tried to open a door and was told I would have to specify something openable. What did the game think I was trying to do when I typed "open door"? There's also an annoying response ("Given your current predicament, does that really matter?") every time you try to examine something the writer hasn't anticipated. And while it's nice that *this* time the default response has been changed, it's also equally frustrating that you seem to get this more often than not. When items are referred to in a room description and you try to examine them, you should see something more than a default response. Why put them in the room description otherwise?

On the plus side, the hints system is especially good which is quite a relief as the game itself is difficult. Quite often, commands which need to be typed to get anywhere (putting the nose on the clown) aren't at all obvious and it's unlikely you'd stumble across them without resorting to the hints. (In the example of the nose and clown puzzle, I didn't even have a nose at the time and while I tried a few experimental "make nose" or "create nose" commands, I never hit upon the correct command that was needed.) One of Eric Mayer's previous games had a section whereby the player had to kiss a statue. This game has you putting a nose (which you don't have) on a clown. Such commands might seem incredibly obvious and straightforward to the writer but they sure don't to the poor player.

The game's saving grace is its stylish writing which makes up for the often sloppy gameplay side of things. At times it is genuinely chilling and while a tendency to put silly in comments does creep in and somewhat spoil the general seriousness of the gameplay, the silliness is usually over with quickly enough so as not to ruin Wax Worx completely.

The ending is a strange one, and not a particularly satisfying one either. Then again, Wax Worx is a strange game throughout and a standard, run-of-the-mill ending just would have seemed out of place. All the same, there's a feeling I always have when a game ends badly for the player no matter what route is taken that it makes the earlier puzzle solving and figuring out what is going on kind of pointless. If you're going to die in the end anyway, why make such an effort to avoid it?

But bad points aside (and there were quite a number I'm afraid to say) Wax Worx was well written and chilling. While it could have been so much better, it was nevertheless definitely worth playing.

6 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of Fire in the Blood V1.03 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:51

The introduction to Fire In The Blood is quite a bit better than those in Richard Otter"s previous games and does a good job of setting the scene. Your wife has been murdered and you have decided to find the killer, and then exact a little payback" for their crime.

Unfortunately there are a number of things which bring the game down. As with all of the author"s previous works (with the exception of the mini-comp gamp We Are Coming To Get You!), there an abundance of items scattered all over the place, the purpose of which is sometimes difficult to figure out. As you wander around the game, you'll pick up more and more items and while there are a few that serve an obvious purpose (the spade and some of the weapons), the majority just seem to be either red herrings or ones whose purpose isn"t easy to discern. Then, too, there are the NPCs. There are a fair number of them moving around the game. On the plus side, they can be questioned about a wide range of subjects and can offer some useful information. On the down side, they aren"t very interesting characters. The descriptions for them are often brief and to the point and what they say isn"t anything particularly rewarding. On top of that, their dialogue tends to be italicized and features very poor grammar, thus the reading of it is often stilted.

By far the game"s worse aspect is the way the player will frequently react in unlikely ways:

You are suddenly overwhelmed by a complete feeling of depression and you shout to yourself, "If only that meeting hadn't gone on so long!

You are suddenly overwhelmed by a complete feeling of worthlessness and you hear yourself mutter, "Jane."

A dozen or more times during my first play through the game, I saw this happening and it got steadily more irritating the longer I played. Just like the creepy sensations that featured in the author"s last game, Darkness, this sort of thing is fine when used in moderation but too often and it makes the player come across as some kind of babbling idiot.

The hardest thing about Fire In The Blood is, as with other games by the author, trying to figure out just what needs to be done. This is clearly an author who doesn"t believe in making his games easy to get into. You are presented with a large number of locations to explore, NPCs to interact with and items to collect, but actually guessing how you're supposed to make a start with finding your wife"s murderers isn"t clear. In a smaller game with less NPCs and less items, it might be possible to hit upon the correct path by trying everything and just hoping something works. In a game the size as this one, you're likely to struggle. I think I"d been playing for about an hour, had collected over a dozen items, visited every location I could find and had spoken to every NPC there was and then I just found myself at a loss as to how I was supposed to get any further. Short of asking every single NPC in the game about every single subject I could think of a mammoth task considering the number of NPCs and possible subjects it"s hard to know what needs to be done. I even ended up strangling some guy in the park with a rope just because he was there, I had the rope and the game would let me do it. Was he the guilty party? I don"t know but it felt so good to actually be doing something instead of trying to figure out things to do, that I just killed him anyway.

Fortunately there's a good hints system to fall back upon. I was reluctant to use this to begin with as I tend to think using the hints system is cheating, but unless you're amazingly good at text adventures, or just amazingly persistent, it"s likely you're going to find yourself consulting the hints again and again.

Relying on the hints soon reveals several things about the game that are likely to get the better of all but the most persistent of players. Characters need to be asked about other characters yet there never seems to be any clear reason why the player would question them about these characters. Maybe I'm missing something and the clues are there after all, or maybe the author just expects everyone to either be amazingly persistent and question every character about every other character, or to use the hints system as often as possible.

Dealing with the people who killed your wife is a difficult task, not helped much by the fact that obvious commands don"t seem to be recognised half of the time. I successfully managed to uncover who one of the killers was (well, okay I followed the hints) but after admitting to me that he had killed her, I then tried to kill him only to be hit with the unhelpful ADRIFT default command of now that isn"t very nice .

The hints also led me to a strange little occurrence which might be a bug or might just be me. One hint advises me that I can use the bottle as a weapon if I break it. So I type break bottle only to have someone shout at me not to break it in my current location (the old tennis court). So I leave the old tennis court and try again to break it. This time I'm told I don"t have the bottle. Sure enough, I check my inventory and see I don"t have it (turns out I gave it away earlier on). Puzzled, I go back to the old tennis court and again try to break the bottle and again get shouted at. Examining the tennis court doesn"t reveal a bottle to me so I'm not quite sure what's going on but clearly the game seems to expect me to break a bottle here. Weird.

To begin with, I liked Fire In The Blood but the more I played it, the less it appealed to me. It"s a large and pretty much directionless game in which nothing is very clear and the only progress you are likely to make is either via the hints or sheer dogged persistence. The writing is average but never becomes anything better than that, and the NPCs are just not really interesting enough to care about. The author needs to work on adding some much needed emotional content to his games.

5 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of Frustrated Interviewee [Version 2] by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:50

Although unlikely to win any Best Title awards, I felt Frustrated Interviewee was the strongest game in this year"s Spring Comp and while not as good as the author"s previous game, Veteran Knowledge, it was still the most accomplished game in the Comp.

The premise of the game is different to say the least. You're attending a job interview and part of the job requires teamwork. So to show what a great team player you can be, you decide to relate a few examples from real life: problems you have solved, ways in which you and your friends have put your heads together to figure things out, etc. Different but good? Well I liked the idea of the game itself being a series of events that the player relates to the interviewer but wasn"t too sure how well it worked in practice.

But the game itself

It"s split into three main parts. The first part involves wandering around your living area at university and getting together the other members of your gaming group. Some of this is fairly obvious, some less so. Daniel is an easy enough person to be persuaded to help you but I ran into quite a few problems with Michael, who is asleep and seems determined to stay that way no matter what I did to him. Strangely enough, when I resorted to the hints I discovered that several of the things that should have woken him up, didn"t. The hints advised me to slap or shake him, which I did. Neither worked. The third hint told me that I should shout at him, which did work. Simply typing wake Michael didn"t do any good either.

All the rooms at the university contain the usual allotment of items to be examined but most of these are just scenery pieces and serve no real purpose in the game. Trying to examine most of the items in the rooms of your fellow university buddies hits you with a default message that you don"t want to be searching through [name]"s belongings, which becomes a bit trying after you"ve seen it for the tenth time.

The only bad thing about the first part of the game was the often poor dialogue. As with Veteran Knowledge, the characters" dialogue is handled badly and they seem to have all the depth of cardboard cut outs. Admittedly, none of the characters are so wildly over the top as the Monster and his clich d super villain rants (from Veteran Knowledge) but they all seem to act like they're reading from prompt cards most of the time. After all, would a university student really say That is not enough chocolates to tempt me to stop reading"? Kind of doubtful.

From time to time, the game is interspersed with comments from the interviewer which add an interesting flavour to the proceedings. Unfortunately, while the comments of the interviewer are in bold print, your own replies are in the same print as the normal text in the game and it"s occasionally awkward trying to tell the two apart. Maybe your own comments could be italicised to make them stand out better?

Part two of the game is quite a bit more interesting than the first. Here you are plunged into a generic fantasy game that you and your university buddies are playing: Frustrated Looters. As with all generic fantasy games, the objective is to find a mysterious treasure, battle enemies and so on and so forth. You become a warrior and your buddies all become the kind of characters that tend to populate fantasy words: a fighter, a thief and a sorcerer. There's some amusing tongue-in-cheek dialogue with each of them that gently mocks the fantasy setting of this part of the game. Anyone who has played a generic fantasy game before (and there must be quite a lot of us) will probably smile a few times at reading this.

There are problems with the second part, though. Not least of which is that the difficulty factor has been ramped up several notches. While the first part of the game was relatively straightforward (problems with waking Michael up notwithstanding), the second part introduces a lot more variables into the equation and figuring out how you're to proceed is confusing to say the least. Your companions, as in any fantasy game, can assist you but it took me several attempts (and more than a few peeks at the hints) before I hit upon the correct solution to the many puzzles facing me. This isn't helped much by the fact that commands required for one specific puzzle often don"t work in any other location. Take the problem with the tree: it needs chopping down. You can"t do it yourself as you lack the necessary tools so someone else has to do it for you. But in the previous location there was also a tree and commanding this character to chop it down didn"t work there so when I came across the tree that did need chopping down, it never occurred to me to even try.

As I made my way through the second part, I found myself resorting more and more to the hints and while a few of the puzzles I'm sure I probably could have figured out for myself if I"d tried hard enough, there were a good number that I doubt I would ever have got the better of. Was I really expected to realise that I needed to pick up one end of the trunk and one of my companions the other end?

Puzzles abound in the game"s second part and most of these are difficult ones. The sun room puzzle which involves putting four sticks in eight different slots in order to open a door almost made me tear my hair out in frustration. This puzzle in particular is very poorly clued. I struggled with it for a while and then, weak chap that I am, went to the hints. After that, there seemed to be a puzzle in every location and it quickly reached the stage where I was beginning to suffer quite badly from puzzle overload. Now I've never been much of a fan of puzzles full stop. Most of the time I can"t figure them out and even the few times when I'm lucky enough to realise what needs doing, I find they tend to slow the game down so much as to make it almost unplayable. Aside from anything else, I just don"t like them period, so when a game comes along that features one in almost every location well, it"s not a game I'm going to think of very favourably. For certain, the ones in Frustrated Interviewee were tedious enough that I would have quit if the hints hadn"t told me exactly what I needed to do to get past them. The later ones I didn"t even attempt to solve. Just banged out hint , saw what I needed to do and did it. Yes, it"s cheating but my patience was wearing so thing that I imagine if it had been a choice of either struggling to solve them and quitting, I"d have quit.

Into part three of the game. This was considerably shorter than the second part but, unfortunately, still had more than its fair share of frustrating puzzles. But either I'm getting better at this sort of thing or the puzzles were easier than in the second part because a couple I actually managed to solve on my own without the hints. The final set of puzzles, though, involving dealing with your treacherous former alley, Tife the Thief, really made me grind my teeth.

So what was Frustrated Interviewee like overall? On the plus side it was an original idea and it was well written. I particularly liked the comical dialogue with the other characters in the second part. The frequent comments of the interviewer were a nice touch, particularly as they seem to think you achieve things by either bribing people or threatening them with violence. On the down side the puzzles. Ah, the puzzles. Too many, too hard, too tedious. Like I said before, I've never liked puzzle games overly much and the ones here are so difficult, and so poorly clued for the most part, that I imagine even people who do like puzzles will probably decide enough is enough and resort to the hints. Not to mention the fact that one puzzle after another is definitely overkill.

All in all, I"d say this was a lesser game than its predecessor but still likeable enough in its own right. More please (only not so many puzzles next time, okay?)

6 out of 10

Rated 3/5

Review of Escape to Freedom v1.1 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:48

In a retro mood? Suffering pangs of nostalgia for the more straightforward and simple type of text adventures of the 80"s that were more about the finding of treasure and less about exploring the vagaries of the human mind? Welcome to Escape To Freedom, a port of a game originally written in 1989 for the Commodore 64 by one Mario Moeller. No, I"d never heard of him either, and while I played a lot of text adventures back then, I"d never heard of Escape To Freedom either.

You play the part of a World War II bomber, shot down over enemy territory and forced to crash land. After that, it"s a case of trying to find your way back home before the enemy grab hold of you and subject you to whatever unpleasantness World War II bombers get subjected to when they fall into enemy hands. Nothing very nice I suspect.

Without having played the original one of the many that passed me by in the Golden Age of Text Adventures it"s difficult to say how accurate a port this game is. There are the obvious differences that hit you straight off text adventures these days go for a miniscule font whereas ones back in the good ol" days had a larger font. Why? Beats me. The game feels retro, though. Descriptions are brief without ever seeming rushed, telling you what you need to know without resorting to anything too flowery. Part of me likes this sort of thing it brings back fond memories of text adventures as they used to be whereas another part longs for more fleshed out descriptions. In the original game the descriptions had to be brief and to the point as the game was written with the Commodore 64, and 64KB of RAM just isn't a huge amount for a full size game to fit into. In the modern age, with memory restrictions so huge as to be virtually non-existent, the descriptions could certainly have been fleshed out.

Unfortunately, fond as I am of the retro period, there are things about it that bug me. Precise wording for certain puzzles is required and so though you might figure out what you need to do to solve a certain puzzle, hitting the correct phrasing is often harder than the puzzle itself. I found some floorboards which I was sure I needed to lift yet couldn"t work out how to go about it. After trying several different ways without success, I weakened and went to the walkthrough. Apparently GET FLOORBOARDS WITH KNIFE is needed, not just LIFT FLOORBOARDS or LIFT FLOORBOARDS WITH KNIFE or even GET FLOORBOARDS. Typical retro period guess the verb for you there. It"s kind of annoying that this wasn"t fixed in the port, although I think the writer (porter?) was going for a true retro feel so he probably felt that leaving in the hideous guess the verb problems was appropriate.

Some of the puzzles are quite good, but poorly clued. They're of the variety that you probably won"t get first time round but after you"ve messed them up, the solution is pretty much handed to you on a plate. Some you might even solve without realising you"ve done them. One involves creeping through a hole you"ve cut in a wire. Creep through at the wrong time of day (when it"s light) and you'll be caught. Creep through during darkness and you're fine. The only problem is, it"s often hard to know what time of day it is. The message telling you just flashes past on screen and probably won"t even be noticed at the time. Examining the sky or your surroundings don"t produce any clues so it"s probably down to timing more than anything else: if you happen to be at the hole in the wire during nightfall, you'll be fine. Otherwise, you're caught and thrown in the slammer with the game telling you that you should have tried when it was dark. Not a bad puzzle, but a difficult one to get first time round as you'll most likely not know what time of the day it is or that it matters.

Being a retro game, Escape To Freedom is very fond of putting the player in an impossible to win situation without giving him the slightest hint that this has happened. On my first play through, I found myself in the prison camp which comprises a good portion of the game. I wandered round, solved a few minor puzzles, tried to escape, got caught and didn"t get anywhere fast. Later, I realised that an item found right at the very start of the game was one I"d missed out on and, as a result of this, the game was impossible to finish. It was annoying knowing that everything I"d done since then was now useless as that one thing had effectively ruined the game for me. This wasn"t a terrible thing in itself, as all it required me to do was restart the game and pick up the item then make my way through the game again to the point at which I had become stuck, but as it happens so rarely in modern games (thank heavens!), it bugged me no end. In a way it"s strange in that I used to play so many games that did such things to me back in the 80"s, and never found it much of an annoyance, yet faced with it today it makes me want to throttle the writer who decided to utilise it in his game. A warning would have been nice

Bugs the game seems just about free of. I only ran into a small problem with a pistol although as this actually helped me out, I'm not going to complain about it at length. The pistol was empty when I picked it up, and yet later I was able to shoot someone with it. Then again, a bullet I had eaten and then vomited out (don"t ask) earlier on mysteriously disappeared from my inventory around this time so maybe that"s where it went. Although if so, the game certainly never told me this.

No retro game would be complete without a maze. Well, that"s not strictly speaking true as quite a few retro games lacked a maze. But Escape To Freedom has one. It"s a forest where all the locations are the same. Now while I have great fondness for retro games in general, mazes are the one thing about them (even more so than the guess the verb issues) that I'm quite happy to go without. So when faced with this one I cheated. Yep, opened up the walkthrough and just typed in the commands as they appeared. I probably ought to feel bad about it, but whoever came up with the idea of including mazes in so many retro games needs shooting. Preferably with a gun with bullets in.

Overall, I liked Escape To Freedom. It evoked a nice retro feel in me that kind of compensated for its other shortcomings. It probably won"t appeal to many people who lack fondness for the retro era, but for those of us who have nice memories of the likes of The Hobbit and Colossal Cave, it should be worth playing. In a way, I'm kind of curious as to why this one got the retro treatment and not one of the better known classics.

Retro rating: 6 out of 10

Non-retro rating: 3 out of 10

Rated 2/5

Review of Crazy Old Bag Lady by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Sun 28th Aug 2005 16:46

You can often tell a lot about a game by its title, and certainly Crazy Old Bag Lady is no exception. If you're looking for a serious or thoughtful game, look elsewhere. If you're in the mood for a laugh, keep playing.

It's the story of, you guessed it, an old bag lady who's a bit on the barmy side and her quest to find, of all things, a golden trolley. You see, she's been pushing around an ordinary trolley for years now and thinks it's high time she found herself something classier. Hence the 'Quest for the Golden Trolley' kicks off.

This could have been an idea that backfired badly. Some mad old biddy hunting for a golden trolley doesn't sound like the sort of premise that would produce a decent game. It sounds kind of y'know embarrassing. And a bit childish. And downright silly. But, fortunately, it's none of those. (Well, actually it's very silly but that's part of its appeal.) It's very funny in parts and quite well written, with a difficulty factor set just high enough to make you think about things without ever becoming so hard you don't have a clue what you're supposed to do next. For a game written by a newbie, it's surprisingly good.

But not without its flaws. The first version of the game I played had a fatal bug which made it crash the moment the player entered the location directly to the west of the start location. This version, number two, has that bug sorted out but several still seem to have been missed during the testing stage. (Then again, I'm kind of wondering how the fatal crashing bug could have been missed during testing - it's the type of incredibly obvious in your face bug that's pretty difficult to avoid, and as it crashes the game for you, it's not likely you could encounter it and not notice. That sort of thing indicates that whatever testing the game went through, it was minimal at best. Or maybe the writer decided to change things after the testers had finished. I think I'd sooner believe this last one because it goes a way towards explaining how such an error made its way into the game.) I spoke to one of my fellow homeless people - the amusingly named Ollie the Magic Hobo - and he asked me to find something for him. This was close by but harder to find than it might otherwise have been because the location I found it in was one I'd already searched before. Turns out the item in question doesn't show up until after you've been asked to find it. Anyway I found it, gave it to him, and then spoke to him again. And he asked me to find him the item. Despite the fact that I'd just given it to him. As I couldn't perform another task later in the game without his aid, and I'm pretty sure there's no other way to get him on your side, it looks like this might well be another fatal bug. Funnily enough, when you examine Ollie, it actually tells you he's carrying the item!

The hints system helps out quite often when you become stuck, although the game uses the built-in Adrift hints system which is a little flawed to say the least. It has the habit of providing you with hints about things you haven't come across yet and potentially spoiling parts of the game later on. Okay, it's a fair point that if you're resorting to the hints and you haven't got the willpower to avoid clicking on a hint for something you haven't come across yet, then really it's your own fault if you see something that spoils parts of the game for you, but I still think a custom-built hints system would have worked better. Aside from anything else, I've never been fond of the little box that pops up on screen to provide you with hints.

Crazy Old Bag Lady is populated by a few NPCs. Some of them - in particular your fellow homeless people - are quite interesting characters, full of delusions, mad characteristics (Scary Mumbling Man likes frightening youngsters to keep truancy down) and, ultimately, completely barmy. However, the non-homeless people leave a bit to be desired. They have names like Shop Gal and Shop Guy and getting anything out of them is difficult to say the least. Asking Shop Gal about Shop Guy indicates that she thinks he's cute, but how you go about getting them together I've no idea.

Items covered in the scenery seem to be pretty much hit and miss. In some locations, you can examine just about everything. And I mean everything. In particular, in the first location there was virtually nothing visible to the player that I wasn't able to examine, and the descriptions were all amusingly written. In other locations, the most basic items are missing. This adds another level of complexity to the game as examining your surroundings in one location yields nothing of any importance - indeed you get the Adrift default of YOU SEE NO SUCH THING flashing up on screen on numerous occasions - whereas in another it brings out an item you actually need. In the end, I found a good few items by the simple brute force method: just examine everything and see what shows up. Other times I ran into the problem of the game sometimes assuming EXAMINE [ITEM] and LOOK UNDER [ITEM] were the same thing and sometimes assuming they were different. So if there's something hidden under, say, the sofa, you won't find it by merely looking at it, you'll need to look under it as well. Elsewhere, you can find what you need by merely looking at things.

The object of your desire - the golden trolley - isn't difficult to find but it is difficult to retrieve. The game won't let you retrieve it on your own, giving the somewhat implausible answer that you'll need to drop all your possessions or risk drowning in the process. Unfortunately, it also says this if you have dropped all your possessions.

I don't really want to criticise this game too harshly because I liked it and I'm aware it was the first game by a newcomer to the Adrift scene. Bashing games by newbies is often remarkably easy - like shooting fish in a barrel, you could say - but at heart there's a very funny game here and, despite its many flaws, it's still one of the better games that I've played this year. But it's also quite a way from being well and truly finished. The fatal bugs aside, there are a number of guess the verb issues that should either have been picked up by the writer during testing - assuming the game was tested which, considering the fatal bugs, is perhaps doubtful - or at least by a beta-tester before release*. There are also quite a few obvious commands missed out** and another instance of the game crashing if you ask for help***. And something else really strange**** that might or might not be a bug. I can't decide.

* The dumpster can only be opened with a certain item, yet OPEN DUMPSTER WITH [ITEM] won't work whereas OPEN DUMPSTER will. There's a whistle with SMM on the side but trying to give it to Scary Mumbling Man or, indeed, anyone else in the game, results in you attempting to blow the whistle instead. If there's a way past this error, I never found out what it was.

** You can't buy anything in the shop or the supermarket and keep being told that whatever you want to buy isn't for sale. Also, trying to take anything off the shelves hits you with a message stating that the shelves themselves can't be taken.

*** The first time you get a few lines telling you off for asking for help; the second time you get an error message and then the game crashes.

**** Bend the paperclip and the game ends. Weird, huh?

On the plus side, Crazy Old Bag Lady has more than enough charm to gloss over its faults. It's a silly game and has silliness throughout it: in the descriptions of every item you come across, the NPCs, the little quests, and so forth. If you don't like silly games, you'll probably find the humour somewhat puerile but if you're a big kid at heart, you'll doubtless have a grin fixed to your face for most of the time.

Some of its faults can be attributed to sheer newbieness, i.e. not knowing what to cover, missing out things that someone with a few more games under their belt would have spotted, eliminating the dreaded guess the verb. Some of them unfortunately are down to simple carelessness. I'm only guessing here but I'd bet money on the fact that the writer never actually played it through to completion before releasing it. If she had, she'd certainly have caught most of the bugs I've listed above.

Fix the bugs and this would be a pretty impressive game. Still silly, of course, but then whoever said that text adventures had to be serious? The bugs, alas, stop me from really recommending it but hopefully by the time you read this review, they will have been fixed. All in all, it's a funny, amusing little game let down by a number of bugs that definitely should have been caught prior to it being released.

5 out of 10 (was going to be 7 but then I knocked a couple off for the bugs)

Rated 3/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:49

Spectacluar!

What a tremendous execution of an unorthodox idea. Seems I have seen this premise somewhere before, but this is just terrific. I do see a lot of this author"s games in here and can only hope that all of them are this well written.

Kudos to you, David Whyld

Rated 5/5

Review of In The Claws Of Clueless Bob by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:44

Quite fun.

What an interesting premise: someone forced to play bad IF games all day...sounds like a Reviews Editor to me! Quite enjoyable, keep up the good work.

Rated 4/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:42

I can't imagine anyone "waiting" for this.

I could possibly understand the poor quality of this game if it came from someone new. However, if this is the long awaited sequel that means that there is more of the kind of rot floating around fouling the web. I can only hope that those interested in IF DON"T find this before anything of value.

Please learn proper IF before you release anything else. PLEASE!

Rated 1/5

Review of Escape to Freedom v1.1 by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:37

I played this as a kid.

Thanks to rotter for giving, me at least, a chance to journey back a few years; loved this game as a child. Terrific!

Rated 4/5

Review of Space Boy"s First Adventure ver 2.5 by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:34

An interesting game.

This game is a bit childish for my tastes, even though the author stated that upfront. I do think it is a fairly good game, for someone new the craft. I do hope to see more from this writer, though perhaps in a different vein.

Rated 4/5

Review of Laboratory R.A.T.S. by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:29

Quite an enjoyable game.

I found this game to be quite easy to work in and it is a great lunch-time diversion. Thanks!

Rated 4/5

Review of Laboratory R.A.T.S. by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:28

Quite an enjoyable game.

Review of Crazy Old Bag Lady by Thoth

jtalk75@yahoo.com (Thoth) — Fri 26th Aug 2005 15:27

Interesting Game...

I found the game play a little difficult in places (but I am new to all this.) I did LOVE the idea and premise of the game. I hope there will be more to follow, mabye an updated version?

Rated 3/5

Review of Space Boy"s First Adventure ver 2.5 by Chenshaw

chenshaw@hotmail.co.uk (Chenshaw) — Sat 13th Aug 2005 18:55

Good first attempt

This game has come a good way since the first version, and for a first game is a decent size with a lot of puzzles. It's unashamedly juvenile in mood, comic-book like, and spare on the details.

Rated 3/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by phazonstorm

I.Campbell43@hotmail.co.uk (phazonstorm) — Sat 13th Aug 2005 16:36

bad

'Long awaited'? By masochists

Rated 1/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by phazonstorm

I.Campbell43@hotmail.co.uk (phazonstorm) — Sat 13th Aug 2005 16:03

CRAP

Adam Dundas, please spend longer than 3 days working on a game. I have been writing my current title for three days and though it is nowhere near finished it at least has good descriptions and funny jokes.

Rated 1/5

Review of Hunt (DEMO) by phazonstorm

I.Campbell43@hotmail.co.uk (phazonstorm) — Thu 11th Aug 2005 19:29

Reviews..

...are only written for the best and worst games. And normally any review written for one of your games are to complain, so demanding reviews is just asking for trouble. Poor descriptions and predictable story. Let's pray you never release it until you can wright better descriptions.

Rated 1/5

Review of The White Singularity by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 11th Aug 2005 18:06

Interesting Mix

I really enjoyed the blend of IF and Story. There were a few hic-cups during the course of play, but overall not a bad way to spend some free time.

Rated 3/5

Review of Laboratory R.A.T.S. by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 11th Aug 2005 17:59

FUN!!

Rated 4/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Wed 13th Jul 2005 18:03

What a terrific game!

I enjoyed this one immensely! There are a few minor GTV issues but all in all a terrific effort.

Rated 4/5

Review of Wax Worx by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 7th Jul 2005 18:25

Impressive!

Rated 4/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 7th Jul 2005 17:12

UMMMM......

...I found this game extremly difficuly to play. The spelling errors alone make it difficult to enjoy. I do hope that this is put out as a pre-release test?

Rated 1/5

Review of In The Claws Of Clueless Bob by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 7th Jul 2005 17:09

Great Game

What an amusing game. I really enjoyed the off-beat humor it provided. Quite an enjoyable "quickie game to play on a lunch break.

Rated 4/5

Review of The Magic Show by thatguy

spaceboydave@gmail.com (thatguy) — Thu 30th Jun 2005 20:11

I really enjoyed playing this game.

My only reservation was that it is a little too detail oriented, but that is just me. It is a great game and I give it 4 out 5 stars!

Rated 4/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by TDS

T_D_S_otp@hotmail.com (TDS) — Fri 24th Jun 2005 00:40

Please...

..don't submit these games like this. Take the time to learn about IF games and authoring them. Until you learn to create a proper adventure, don't make us all look bad with this game.

Rated 1/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Wed 22nd Jun 2005 20:56

Firebolt...

... don't rate your own games. You aren't doing yourself any favours.

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by Pofty

pofty1@yahoo.co.uk (Pofty) — Wed 22nd Jun 2005 07:45

WTF?

WTF Woodfish. Have you even completed it? My game is good. Well better than my other ones. And it aint a one room game.

Rated 3/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by David Whyld

dwhyld@gmail.com (David Whyld) — Wed 15th Jun 2005 17:59

Well...

...what do you expect from the likes of Firebolt?

Rated 1/5

Review of The Annihilation of think.com 3 by Woodfish

woodfish5@hotmail.com (Woodfish) — Tue 14th Jun 2005 19:10

Pointless

... and terrible.

Mundane title and plot set-up, can't move anywhere or do anything.

Minus 5 out of 10

Rated 1/5

Review of Hunt (DEMO) by Pofty

pofty1@yahoo.co.uk (Pofty) — Thu 26th May 2005 20:41

My own gme

Write reviews! God sake lol

Rated 3/5

Review of Follow Me (DEMO) by nudger

gnavin@lineone.net (nudger) — Wed 4th May 2005 19:07

not a bad idea....

On playing this demo I thought what a nice idea, and it is, the only problem is that even if bob is not in the same room as the player you can still talk to him and gt him to follow you and stop as well. Have no fear with a very simple tweak it can be made to react in the correct way by simply adding i restriction into the talk to bob task stating that bob must be in the same room as player. this sorts out the bug.

Rated 4/5

Review of A Party to Murder by Woodfish

woodfish5@hotmail.com (Woodfish) — Fri 1st Apr 2005 14:54

Can't say I liked this at all, not deserving of the highest rated position on the site anyway - particularly since the author awarded himself five stars for it.

Rated 1/5

Review of Wax Worx by Ambrosine

ambrosine@mindspring.com (Ambrosine) — Sun 20th Mar 2005 03:09

Now that was interesting...

Wow. Not at all what I was expecting. Good use of in-game hints to guide the player on the best way to talk to the NPCs. Ending caught me by surprise. Well done.

Rated 4/5

Review of David Good"s "Menagerie" by Sondar

sondar@gmail.com (Sondar) — Thu 24th Feb 2005 21:20

Rated 2/5

Review of Three Monkeys One Cage by Sondar

sondar@gmail.com (Sondar) — Thu 24th Feb 2005 21:17

Very entertaining stuff

Rated 4/5

Review of LED Display by Sondar

sondar@gmail.com (Sondar) — Thu 24th Feb 2005 21:15

Rated 4/5

Review of Wizards Playground by evil_flagpole

evil_flagpole@fsmail.net (evil_flagpole) — Tue 15th Feb 2005 20:13

Review of Changing room description (DEMO) by Mystery

mysterydrifter@netzero.com (Mystery) — Thu 20th Jan 2005 19:23

Excellent

This is an excellent demo that I think many will find very useful. It is simple to implement and solves a couple of different issues with showing the characters and objects in the room, rather than just displaying the room description.

Rated 5/5

Review of The Easy Game by evil_flagpole

evil_flagpole@fsmail.net (evil_flagpole) — Tue 18th Jan 2005 21:05

Good

Wow, this game was just... it blew me away!

Rated 5/5

Review of Unraveling God by ToddWat

jillandtodd@earthlink.net (ToddWat) — Mon 10th Jan 2005 21:16

See the reviews on the Shadowvault site

Davidw did a great job of compiling reviews on my game. See them all at:

http://www.shadowvault.net/r-unraveling.htm

(I'm sorry, I can't help myself, I clicked on "Excellent" for the rating!)

Todd

Rated 5/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by Laurence Moore (Cannibal)

adv@turntopage.com (Laurence Moore (Cannibal)) — Mon 3rd Jan 2005 21:32

Good Game!

This is a highly amusing and fairly original game. The premise is that you have been resurrected by your people to save them and adminster their affairs. However, you were quite content being dead and intend to stay dead.

So begins the quest for treasure? Right? Wrong!

Toss away your bunch of keys and oil lanterns and [MINOR SPOILER] throw yourself off the balcony because the only way you will win this game is by killing yourself numerous times and ensuring you stay dead.

The map is quite small - although it seems bigger - and this is due to the often lengthy and well detailed (and well written) locations packed with static objects that can be examined further and interacted with, as well. The humour is at the right slant and there is a perverse fun in trying to kill yourself over and over again. In fact, I can't think of a piece of IF where the quest is death (yours).

So, is it any good?

Yes, it's good, very good, in fact. And, to be truth, a bit too good to just have been released during another dry spell for Adrift games. This is the kind of game that might have fared well in a competition (possibly the IF one) due to its quality and original plot. A few rough bits here and there but no game is perfect and nothing detracts for the enjoyment factor.

7.5/10

Cannibal

Rated 4/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by KF

kf@kfadrift.org.uk (KF) — Mon 20th Dec 2004 19:33

A fun game

One of the few games this year where the premise interested me enough to play it. As I have a liking for the antiquities of Ancient Egypt, the setting was a real hook.

One or two loose ends, which may have been tied up since I played it, made for a bit of guess the verb. Think I would have the apples removed after the suicide attempt with them, rather than just them being used again.

As others have said the fun is in working out what way to try and kill yourself next. It may have a limited life span, but will provide some real amusement in the meantime.

Rated 4/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by Nickydude

andy@madladdesigns.co.uk (Nickydude) — Mon 20th Dec 2004 19:12

A well written adventure with an unusual plot:- to kill yourself... and stay dead!

Although there are only a few rooms, there's plenty to do and plenty of things to kill yourself with (if you can work out how ;). The adventure is well written in a comical manner and should have you letting out a few chuckles, there's next to no guess-the-verb and everything can be examined.

The puzzles are logical, but there are a few parts that will have you scratching your head, one involving a ceiling and one summoning guards (this one I had no idea about and only found out by reading the walkthrough and must say that I would have never finished it without the walkthrough).

But still a great game, go on, give it a go, you probably do a lot better than I did :)

Rated 4/5

Review of The Magic Show by Richard Otter

richardo@delron.org.uk (Richard Otter) — Fri 17th Dec 2004 16:43

Rated 4/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by Woodfish

woodfish5@hotmail.com (Woodfish) — Fri 17th Dec 2004 08:58

Rated 3/5

Review of A Day In The Life Of A Super Hero by Woodfish

woodfish5@hotmail.com (Woodfish) — Fri 17th Dec 2004 08:58

Rated 3/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately [version 4] by Lumin

lumin_orb@myway.com (Lumin) — Thu 16th Dec 2004 16:38

An entertaining game with an original premise. There are a few small annoyances that will hopefully be cleaned up in subsequent versions, but for the most part 'Back to Life' is a funny and well-written game with a lot of attention to detail. I haven't played many of DavidW's other games, so I don't know how this ranks with his previous efforts, but I had a great time figuring out the various methods of committing suicide (it's not as morbid as it sounds :P) and only wish I could have taken a certain NPC with me...

Rated 4/5

Review of David Good"s "Menagerie" by Duodave

public04@dreamnetstudios.com (Duodave) — Wed 15th Dec 2004 18:36

Ground-breaking coding for its time!

"Set at a circus, this puzzle-packed game also has a plot and is probably the best example of ADRIFT's capabilities for sound, pictures and varied scene description." - Eric Mayer, "Brass Lantern"

"One of the best Adrift games I've played. Location descriptions change from time to time via a clever series of events. The writing is nothing less than excellent from start to finish and it's a pity we don't get a few more games like." -Anon

Rated 5/5

Review of A Party to Murder by Duodave

public04@dreamnetstudios.com (Duodave) — Wed 15th Dec 2004 18:19

Rated 5/5

Review of New rooms by Mystery

mysterydrifter@netzero.com (Mystery) — Sun 12th Dec 2004 23:55

Excellent Demonstration

I really don"t know why someone didn"t have this up sooner. It solves the age old problem of showing the room description,characters, and any objects that might be lying around, when the author uses tasks to move the PC to a random room via room groups.

Well done! And many Thanks!

Rated 5/5

Review of Back To Life... Unfortunately by Mystery

mysterydrifter@netzero.com (Mystery) — Sun 12th Dec 2004 23:43

Excellent Demonstration

I really don't know why someone didn't have this up sooner. It solves the age old problem of showing the room description,characters, and any objects that might be lying around, when the author uses tasks to move the PC to a random room via room groups.

Well done! And many Thanks!

Rated 5/5