IFReviewed by
Andrew Plotkin on 2006-06-25 09:11
Narrative voice is funny in places. In other places it's trying to be funny. Half points.
Severely short of synonyms. "Get in limo", "enter limo", and "drive limo" should all be equivalent to "in" (if you're not already in it). "Jump in water" should be the same as "jump into water".
The author really should have considered the likelihood that I would play his game. If he had, he wouldn't have left the blatant bug in the high-score board.
After finishing the game, I'm upgrading the funny to three-quarters. The poster made me laugh. The diary was good too.
Would have been better if the metaphor had been consistent. I liked the games that were mimicking realistic situations which mimicked the mechanics of familiar video games. But a couple of the games had no familiar game equivalent -- they existed only to support puzzle solutions. It would have been much more clever to think of a real video game, which you have to solve in its own right, in which you delivered speeches... okay, I can't either.
(Hm. "Paperboy", except you're delivering bills to Congress? Strained, I know... The alien spaceship has a lot more options -- practically anything with an alien setting. "Berzerk", maybe.)
The "list exits in status line" option that TADS3 apparently has is annoying. (Square Circle used it too, and it was annoying there too.) It's visual noise, and if I try to navigate by it, I get more disoriented. (Because I'm not reading room descriptions any more, only looking at exit patterns.)
The automated "can't go that way" generator also causes some nastily confusing sentences. Example: "Obvious exits lead west, back to the building top west; and down, to the structure southeast." So far, T3 is not impressing me with its advanced technology.