David Whyld

Email: dwhyld@gmail.com

Games by David Whyld

Neighbours From Hell
Everyone has bad neighbours. It's just one of those things. But surely no one in the whole wide world has neighbours as bad as yours. For you live next door to the Crumms. But are they really the sadistic murderers you suspect them of being? Or is the truth something different?
Added 07 Sep 2003

Reviews by David Whyld

Comment for Forgoten

06 Sep 2003

"this game is alright i guess, it has one varyable fight, unlike alot of theese games and its kinda fun i guess, you might have to peek in QDK though.."

Way to encourage people to play your game. Spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes AND no indication of what the game is even about. If you can't even be bothered to write a proper description, why would you assume people would want to play your game?

Comment for Team Aurom's fight and other side quests

18 Oct 2003

Amazing that people I've never heard of before keep posting glowing reviews and ratings of 5 for Kidwonder's games.

I'd love to get your IP and his and compare the two...

Comment for Life

31 Oct 2003

Considering that this game is a whopping 4 KB in size, I wouldn't have thought errors would *need* pointing out. If you've uploaded a game this small and not checked it thoroughly beforehand - which might have taken all of 10 minutes - then it thoroughly deserves every bad rating it gets.

Review of Uncle's Mansion

10 Nov 2003

Another appalling waste of space. Descriptions were practically non-existent (even when you're standing in front of something you're told it isn't there) and the game just was unable to hold my interest for more than a few minutes.

I imagine even the game's writer would struggle to find positive things to say about this.

Rating:

Review of Team Aurom's fight and other side quests

10 Nov 2003

Well, I finally got round to playing this "game" (for want of a better word) and wish I hadn't bothered.

Non-existent descriptions, no storyline whatsoever and an annoyingly large font that took up half the screen with just a line of text. If there was a blueprint for writing truly appalling games then this would be it.

1 out of 5 (and I'm regretting the fact that an option for giving worse ratings isn't available)

Rating:

Review of Enterprising

10 Nov 2003

Sorry to say but this was dire. Am I playing the same game as the other two people who reviewed it? If so, I must be really missing something because I found it to be terrible.

The standard of writing was the sort of thing a five year old would have been embarrassed at and most of the time it seemed to make so little sense that I found myself unable to keep playing it. The descriptions of the various characters in the game really left me wincing at times. An example:

"No really he's dead Jim, he is in one of those new insta-freeze chambers, your currently looking for a place that can bring him back."

Bad, bad, bad.

Rating:

Review of Mystery Quest

10 Nov 2003

Descriptions were sparse for the most part and the standard of writing wasn't, to be honest, very good at all. It wasn't a complete stinker of a game and was fairly easy to make progress with but I really couldn't recommend it to anyone.

Rating:

Review of Posh's New Year's Eve

20 Nov 2003

Pointless would be the best way to describe this. The "game" (for want of a better word) understands a whopping five commands and you aren't even able to examine your surroundings.

It wasn't even vaguely exciting, although whether this is due to how poorly written the game is or the simple fact that I find Posh about as sexy as a slap in the face I couldn't say.

Rating:

Comment for Neighbours From Hell

28 May 2004

Have you tried using compass directions?

Review of Killer Syringe

01 Jul 2004

A bad start to a bad game left me shaking my head in dismay. Bad spellings mar the game: poisen, corridoor, gaurds... Good grief, haven't people heard of spell checks? Or dictionaries? Or learning the English language before attempting to write a game?

I persevered a bit longer. I wish I hadn't bothered. In one room I was told "Bum and Hat are here". What - an actual bum as in someone's rear end? Or some beggar? Turns out it was a beggar. The game advises me to kill him for no other reason than he doesn't have a gun. Great morals there! Unfortunately I wasn't able to kill him as the "kill" command hasn't even been implemented.

This is the sort of "game" (for want of a better word) where you really have to wonder what was going through the writer's mind when he wrote it.

Rating:

Review of Enterprise

01 Jul 2004

Oh dear god.

Rating:

Comment for Killer Syringe

13 Jul 2004

Sorry if that came across as a bit harsh but when you upload a game riddled with spelling errors right from the very start, you're going to have to expect some criticism. Sure, everyone makes spelling mistakes (I make them myself) but when two of the items in your game - poisen and cocain - are mispelled, it really doesn't do you any favours. Also, if the game's a demo you ought to say so.

Comment for Enterprising

03 Aug 2004

Great review there, Dave! If I didn't know better, I'd swear you were the game's writer under a different name.

Comment for Enterprise

31 Aug 2004

I'm actually amazed that someone can give this game 4 stars. The spelling was atrocious, the grammar was worse and the game was nonsense. It couldn't have been worse if the writer had set out to write a deliberately bad game.

There ought to be some kind of logic with assigning game ratings. 4 is a very good game; this is anything but.

Comment for Middle-Earth (full version)

02 Sep 2004

It's definitely "Rivendell".

Review of Get Out of The House!

20 Sep 2004

I started this game fully expecting to give up within five minutes (a common thing when playing a Quest game) but I actually found myself quite liking it. It's not perfect - a long way from perfect in fact - but it's amusingly written and has some nice touches and seems, for the first time, to be a Quest game that might actually be worth playing.

The storyline makes little sense, although the game does tell you this to begin with. In short: you're in a house and must escape. That's the gist of it. In fact, that's the entire storyline from start to finish. Nothing particularly engaging but then engaging storylines aren't a requirement of text adventures.

The location descriptions are okay for the most part and a few have nice comic touches, but they're also a little jarring in that most of them begin with a short line telling you which location you're in and then, several lines further down, you get another line telling you which location you're in. There's also needless duplication of exits: they're nicely listed at the beginning of the location description so you know which way to go and then described again in the actual body of the text. Some of this might be the fault of the program but it's something that the writer should, and probably is, capable of correcting and really should have done.

Most static (non-moveable) items are described which is a refreshing change from other Quest games I've played, although unfortunately most of these descriptions are lacking in depth and often last for no more than a few words. The description of the TV is quite unusual in that it says "it's a TV� with buttons!!!" but trying to use the buttons or, indeed, examine them gives the default message that they're not there. Is it possible to watch the TV? I never discovered a way.

After I'd been playing the game for a while, I seemed to have accumulated several items that I didn't have a clue what to do with. In desperation, I typed a few commands looking for a hints system. Fortunately, there is a hints system - albeit not a very good one. More often than not, the hint given is next to useless. Typing "hint" when faced with a locked door advises that I might need a key to open it�

Obvious Errors
Trying to examine the table in the dining room hit me with the grammatically-challenged "there's currently no cards anywhere in sight". A strange response to give to someone trying to examine a table.

In the kitchen, I picked up a chair (and was surprised to be told "You find just enough room in your pocket to carry a kitchen chair.") and was advised I could place it atop a table. However, when I tried I was told, quite bizarrely, that I was carrying no such thing! Yet upon checking my inventory, I discovered that I did, indeed, have the chair. I just couldn't seem to get the game to realise that.

The description of the mantle informs you that there are several items on top of it yet trying to examine the mantle produces no further hints and if there are items there, I've no idea what they might be.

I start the game sitting on a couch but once I stand up from it, I'm not able to sit back down. Not an error as such, I guess, but the sort of thing that really should have been covered for the sake of completeness.

Typing "look" whilst in the den shows the room description and finishes off with a few lines about you walking into the den even though you're already in there. The same error blights the bathroom.

The end of the living room description contains "It's your average living room with the normal furniture: couch, shelf, TV. Kitchen, north." Surely the last two words are a typo?

Opening the window in the den gives the strangest message I've ever seen in a game: that my arms have been pulled off and are now lying on the carpet! Strange as this is, it's not half as strange as attempting to open the window again and seeing the exact same command displayed again and again and� Worse still, trying to pick up or examine my severed arms tells me that they can't be seen anywhere. Nor am I able to examine the carpet. Is this something the writer included in the game which was meant to kill the player off? Or is it merely a very poorly written piece of the game? Probably a bit of both. The same thing happens when trying to open the front door as well so either the player has an endless supply of arms, or the game just doesn't keep very good track of what has happened previously.

Awkward Puzzles
Upon picking up the bottle I discovered there was a key rattling around inside it yet was unable to open the bottle. A default message flashed up telling me that I couldn't do that. Why? Beats me. I was also unable to smash the bottle because that command - surely an obvious one when an item is stuck inside a smashable object - wasn't covered.

Conclusion
All in all, Get Out Of The House is a game with far too many rough edges to be called good, but it's nevertheless quite likeable all the same. It's certainly the first Quest game I've played where I wasn't hit with an immediate desire to send it shooting to the recycle and try something else instead. I've listed a large number of errors above - and I came across a fair few that I didn't have the time or the inclination to cover - yet I felt that for the first time there was an actual game worth playing here. It's probably not a good thing to say that it was "good by Quest standards" as that tends to imply that it's only good because all the other games have been so downright awful, but as far as Quest games go, it's decidedly better than average. If the errors could be fixed, it might even be considered "great by Quest standards".

4 out of 10

Rating:

Comment for Get Out of The House!

28 Sep 2004

Sahmn, it was certainly better than either of your efforts.

Comment for War of Hyrule Castle

08 Oct 2004

I'd love to know just what criteria people are using to judge this game. I keep hearing phrases like "The puzzles are sheer genius" and "the layout is very professional" and "first class" which clearly don't apply to this game at all. When I played it, I noticed spelling and grammatical errors and nothing that I could recommend.

Are all these people either the writer under different names or his friends? Or are there really so many people out there who like very bad games?

It might be an idea for the IP address of whoever posts a review to appear alongside their name. I imagine it would show an alarming number of the people who have said great things about it are actually the same person.

Comment for Gumball Gary Leaves The House

06 Dec 2004

You have to admit it's kind of suspicious when really poor games get all these wonderful reviews, mostly from people who have never been heard of before.

Comment for The Last Detective

26 Aug 2005

Considering the game's 10KB in size, I'd be very suspicious about the "two hours" of playing time comment.

Unless it was meant in the sense that "okay, the game's really small but there are so many errors in it you'll be struggling with it for two hours before you get anywhere".

Review of One Robot

01 Jul 2006

Blurb: �You are a robot designed to serve humans, but you turn on them with your two friends and prepare to assassinate the president.�

Not the most enthralling introduction to a game I've ever read unfortunately. It�s never really said just why your robot character has decided to assassinate the president. Boredom? Nothing better to do? Or just something the author decided to put but never actually got round to explaining?

Good points

There weren�t a lot of things I could find about One Robot that I actually liked. While not one of the worst IF games ever written, it had more than a few flaws. On the positive side of things, there were very, very few spelling mistakes, a rarity in Quest games that deserves a mention all of its own. It was also an easy game to make progress with as it lacked any real puzzles and just required the player to move from one location to another and perform remarkably simple task. If not for the fatal bug at the game�s end, you could be through the entire thing from start to finish in perhaps twenty minutes.

Bad points

The descriptions: most are way too short and lack any kind of depth. Frequently I�d see things like

YOU ARE IN BOSS'S OFFICE.
THERE IS BOSS HUNTER HERE.
YOU CAN GO SOUTH.

or

YOU ARE IN DETECTIVE OFFICE.
THERE IS RECEPTIONIST HERE.
YOU CAN GO EAST.

which smacks of lazy game writing. Neither the boss� office nor the detective office might be interesting places, but they need something in them. Aside from anything else, saying things like THERE IS BOSS HUNTER HERE makes for a jarring read.

There was a particularly bad bit later in the game where I found myself in a number of locations called Nibel, none of which had so much as a single description beyond YOU ARE IN NIBEL and the exits listed. The same applied for several dozen locations when I was flying around in a plane called Cheese-Puff 9000 (decent names isn�t one of this game�s strong points) which are labelled as �0,3� �0,4� �0,5� etc.

The game also lacks descriptions for some actions performed by the player. I killed an NPC in one location yet wasn�t told he was even dead nor did his dead body show up. In another, I used an energy bazooka to destroy a gate yet instead of some text informing me what had happened, I instead got a blank line. Was this game written in such a hurry that the author didn�t even have time to write something?

Items: items need to be referred to by their full names, and not just a single word. A frequent problem in games by newcomers to the scene, but still a pain. So if I have, say, the Super Switch Presser 2000, I can�t refer to it as Switch or Switch Presser to save on typing, I have to bash out Super Switch Presser 2000 every time.

The descriptions of the items are poor as well. The Super Switch Presser 2000 is referred to as NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY while the Beam Sword is A LIGHT SWORD THAT DOES SOME DAMAGE. Other item descriptions are every bit as poor.

Guess the verb: another common fault in games by newcomers. At one point in the game I'm required to kill someone (I'm supposedly playing the part of �one of the good guys� but the game requires me to kill this person in cold blood anyway) yet commands like KILL COMMUTER or ATTACK COMMUTER weren�t recognised. Instead, the strangely worded USE BEAM SWORD ON COMMUTER is needed. Elsewhere there was a switch which could only be activated by USE SUPER SWITCH PRESSER 2000 ON SWITCH instead of the more simple PRESS SWITCH or PUSH SWITCH. Even USE SWITCH would have been better.

I also came across a few oddities, the worst being a trio of thugs (all referred to as �thug� incidentally) who calmly stood there while I blasted them away with a chain gun. Due to the weaknesses of the game programming, I was only able to kill them one at a time, yet the remaining thugs never made any attempts to stop me massacring them or tried to run away. What nice and obliging thugs.

Lack of Direction

If there's one major flaw with One Robot, it�s that it lacks any kind of direction for most of the time. You move from place to place, perform simple tasks, and then move somewhere else and perform another task. Most are relatively straightforward and don�t require any kind of figuring out, but seldom is there any kind of motivation behind your actions. You are asked to kill people and steal things without any real purpose being given.

Conclusion

Not a terrible game, but certainly well below average, One Robot features dozens of empty locations that seem to be there for no other reason than to make the game seem far larger than it really is. There is nothing to do in the majority of them and even the ones with NPCs and items are mostly bland and featureless. If all that wasn�t bad enough, I reached a dead end in a location called Observatory (1F) (and that�s the entire description for the location if you're interested) with nothing to do and no exits. The game advised me to hit the switches but as I�d already done that and got nowhere, it looks like I�d come across a fatal bug.

There were enough problems in the game to justify it getting a 1 out of 10 but as that�s a score I generally reserve for totally unplayable messes (which this isn�t) I�ll be generous and bump it up a notch.

2 out of 10

Rating:

Review of Lands of unknown

04 Jul 2006

Blurb: �This is an adventure game in which you awake in a cave not knowing who or where you are. This game has many endings so you should play it more than once.�

Unfortunately, there were so many things wrong with the game that it�s difficult knowing just where to start. Aside from the usual errors that seem to plague almost every Quest game I've played � items mentioned in room descriptions can�t be examined or interacted with in any way, shape or form (and the few that can be examined often feature such poor descriptions you wonder why the author even bothered), obvious commands (like OPEN CRATE when faced with a locked crate or SWIM in the ocean) aren't covered, poor standard of writing � it lacked any kind of depth. The writing was basic in the extreme and the entire game seemed to have been put together in a spare half hour one day and probably not even tested afterwards. There was no storyline to speak of, with you simply waking up in a room with no memories of how you got there (the amnesia theme never seems to go out of fashion) and then moving from one place to another without any indication of why you're doing this and doing that, other than that there's nothing else to do.

There are many ways of dying in the game, and in typical newbie fashion they're the kind that are impossible to predict beforehand. While wandering around the location YOU ARE IN HILL SIDE (yes, that�s what it said), I saw a dessert (sic) over to one side. Wondering just why there was a dessert over there, I went over to take a look and got hit with this: YOU ARRIVE AT THE DESSERT. YOU WALK THROUGH IT. YOU WISH YOU WOULD HAVE BROUGHT SOME WATER ALONG. YOU ARE LOST. YOU DIE OF HEAT STROKE. And then I died. Ho hum.

Another bug (there were many) was with the strange wording of an item�s name. Some raw meat. With, for some reason, a full stop tacked onto the end of meat, so when I tried to GET RAW MEAT or EXAMINE RAW MEAT I was told I couldn�t.

That was about as much as I could take of Lands Of Unknown. Poorly written, buggy, no kind of direction other than a case of wandering from one place to another purely because there's nothing else you can do, being killed off entirely without warning, exits disappearing once you go through them� So many things were wrong with this game, it would need to be completely rewritten for anyone to get any kind of enjoyment from it.

My advice to the author? Get someone to test your next game before you release it. Try to include an interesting storyline. And if you're going to kill off the player, at least give them a warning.

1 out of 10

Rating:

Review of Hungry Goblin

05 Jul 2006

Blurb: "Feed the hungry goblin. This is a demo and not very big yet but is actually a complete unit. Treat your aim as "get into the tavern". Game runs out there!"

Descriptive Level
Descriptions were a little more verbose than most Quest games, but only a little. The game might go from a reasonably decent (by the standards of the last few Quest games I've played anyway) location description such as

YOU ARE IN A NARROW TUNNEL.
THERE IS A POINTY STICK HERE.
YOU CAN GO EAST, WEST, UP OR DOWN.
THERE IS A FAINT SMELL OF GOBLIN HERE. THE TUNNEL SLOPES UP TO THE EAST, WHERE THERE IS A SMALL GLIMMER OF LIGHT, AND DOWN TO THE WEST, WHERE IT GETS DIMMER.

to something like:

YOU ARE IN A CAVE ENTRANCE, BY A SWAMP.
THERE IS A FEARLESS DRAGON-SLAYER AND A CAMPFIRE HERE.
YOU CAN GO EAST, WEST OR DOWN.

Now the first makes an effort to add a bit of depth to the game (and succeeds), the second doesn�t.

Spelling and grammar-wise, the game has few faults. The writing isn't especially polished and only rarely has any real effort been expended to make it any more readable, but there's nothing especially horrible here.

Plot
Sparse. In the extreme. You're a goblin, you're in a cave and you're hungry. That�s it. You wander from place to place, finding food, eating it, and then hunting for some more.

It�s possible to die regularly. The hunger factor (an unpopular theme in IF precisely because it�s such a pain) kicks in after a while and kills you off if you haven't eaten anything. Unfortunately, the game doesn�t actually tell you this is going to happen beforehand, so it�s likely you'll need to die to discover it. If you're going to kill the player off, particularly in a game written with a system that doesn�t have an UNDO command, you ought to warn the player beforehand that it could happen. Eat food and your hunger timer decreases a little, giving you a bit more time to find some more food, although it�s kind of strange seeing my little goblin drop dead of hunger two minutes after he�s stuffed himself on some venison.

Interaction
Better than average for a Quest game. There were a few honest to god puzzles here in relation to some of the objects, and I even managed to use a few of them to perform simple tasks. On the negative side, the game uses the same kind of bizarre wording that seems prevalent in Quest games. If you're carrying, say, a stick and need to pick up, say, some venison with it, you can�t type the simple and straightforward GET VENISON WITH STICK but instead USE STICK ON VENISON. Still, as this is the kind of thing I've come across in more than a few games before (Quest games and otherwise), it didn�t require too much of an effort to figure out what I needed to do.

Another refreshing thing, and so rare in Quest games in general, is that items and NPCs don�t necessarily need to be referred to by their full name to be recognised. So the fearless dragon-slayer can be referred to as slayer and will still be recognised. I wish a few more authors did this.

Stability
The game didn�t crash on me (thankfully) and I didn�t run into anything that was definitely a bug, although the hunger timer certainly needed some work. A proper timer shouldn�t increase itself when a typo is entered, or when you're saving or loading the game.

Originality
Well, I've never before played a game where I was a goblin who needed to eat every few minutes or die of hunger, so in that sense the game was original indeed. At the same time, it wasn�t a particularly good idea, and after dying a dozen times in almost as many minutes from hunger, the novelty was beginning to wear mighty thin.

Overall
An amusing little, albeit frustrating, game if you have five minutes to spare. If it was improved with a bit of background, some better location descriptions, and maybe even a hint or two to steer the player in the right direction, it might not be a bad game at all.

3 out of 10

Rating:

Review of escape 2

08 Jan 2008

The description for this game reads, and I kid you not, �this is honestly a great game�. My, but I love an author who is modest. So then, is this a great game? Honestly?

Well, here�s the description for the first room. Read it through and see if you think it�s �great�:

YOU ARE IN LIVING ROOM.
YOU CAN GO NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST.
YOU ARE IN THE LIVING ROOM.
THE DEATH BEARES HAVE TRAPPED YOU IN.

Hmmm� twice I'm told I'm in the living room. Then I'm told that the �death beares {sic}� have me trapped. Death beares? Are they similar to normal bears only deadlier on account of the extra E? Total mystery to me, I'm afraid. Despite the aforementioned death beares having me trapped, they can�t be examined, or fought, and don�t seem very inclined to start attacking me. That�s quality game testing right there and no mistake.

But wait! There�s more! I decided to play around and see what else I could do in this �honestly great� game. The room lists four exits, so I tried each of them, expecting to be moved into another location (this being generally what happens when you move in a direction). But not here. Oh no. Here we have:

> W
YOU SEE A PICTURE ON THE WALL.

> E
THERE IS A RADIO.
ON THE ARIAL IT AHS A NOTE SAYING:
TURN 180*

> S
YOU SEE A SMALL TAPPESTRY.

> N
YOU SEE A BARRED AND LOCKED WINDOW

So� in this game the directional commands seem to work like an examine command. Probably just as well really as the author, in his infinite (lack of) wisdom hasn�t seen fit to include descriptions of most items. Then again, the text is littered with so many spelling errors that trying to examine things would probably have me in tears anyway.

If all that wasn�t bad enough (and yes, it is definitely bad enough), there�s the game�s habit of telling you what to do next. You talk to the safe and a key appears. The game advises you to take it. You take the key and the game advises you to use it. Really takes the fun out of solving these �puzzles�, doesn�t it?

That was it. That was all I could take. To say the game was bad would be the understatement of the year. To say it was a steaming pile of camel droppings would be� well, an insult to steaming pile of camel droppings. It�s just *so* bad it�s a mystery that even the author could think it was worth releasing, let alone describing it as a great game.

Oh, and did I mention that the only capital letters used throughout the entire game are the ones included by Quest by default? Yep, the author apparently doesn�t think capital letters are worth including himself. Then again, he didn�t include a storyline or anything resembling gameplay either so I guess capital letters where they're needed was perhaps expecting too much.

Avoid this one like the plague.

Rating:

Comment for escape 2

09 Jan 2008

Just out of curiosity, is there anybody apart from yourself who actually thinks your games are good?

Review of Doomed!

11 Jan 2008

The last game by Gamer (great name for a game writer by the way) unimpressed me so much I just had to try another. Has he improved since the masterpiece of game writing that was �The Tavern�? Has he managed to write a game that could accurately be described as �not that crap�? Has he � heaven forbid! � written a proper item description? Welllllllllllllll�.

The premise of this game is every bit as gripping as the premise of �The Tavern�: it seems an evul man has taken over a house and is planning to end the world. You can tell he�s a nasty piece of work by his refusal to conform to normal spelling conventions and be merely evil. A bad guy who thinks he�s evul is really someone to watch out for.

So� into the house you go to confront the evul man. At one point you're told to press a key or �people will dye�. I hesitated at first, wondering how many people would �dye� if I didn�t press a key. None as it happened. A full five minutes went by without anybody �dyeing�. Reassured by this, I pressed a key, breathed a sigh of relief when no one �dyed�, and proceeded to play the game in earnest.

One room has a clock in it which I am informed is odd. Actually I'm informed it�s odd twice, which goes to show just how odd it really is. This odd clock is, indeed, odd. Despite being of clock size, it�s impossible to take but when the minute hand is examined, you can be shot 1000000 times by a gun. (Which probably explains your inability to take it. 1000000 bullets must weigh a tonne.) Pretty good gun, I have to admit. Even though it shot me, I'm singularly impressed that any manufacturer of weapons can load it with 1000000 bullets. Even more so, I'm impressed that the gun goes ahead and shoots me 1000000 times, despite the fact that the first few shots surely killed me. Still, it�s good of the game to count that I'm shot exactly 1000000 times. Being shot 999999 times just wouldn�t be the same.

However, and here's where the game really starts to shine, if you examine the hour hand of the clock, a frying pan falls out of the ceiling. Haha! This seems to be one of those houses where frying pans aren't stored in the kitchen but in the ceiling which are accessed via manipulating the hands on clocks loaded with 1000000 bullets. Makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Pity it�s an invisible frying pan, though, as even though it falls from the ceiling upon examining the hour hand, it never shows up in the game. Bummer.

As a puzzle, this one is top notch. It�s impossible to figure out beforehand, will kill you if you select the wrong option, which, of course, you can�t possibly reason out, and if you get it right, you're rewarded with absolutely sod all. They sure don�t make puzzles like this anymore.

Remember the comment I made before about item descriptions? Curious to see whether they�ve improved? No? Well, me neither actually but I�ll tell you about them anyway. The fridge is described as �it�s a fridge�. The stove, on the other hand, the author has spent considerably longer on and has fleshed out the description to �it�s a dirty stove!� I have admiration for this lengthier and far more insightful description. Adding the word �dirty� allows me to more accurately picture the stove in my mind, and the exclamation mark on the end just hammers home what a dirty stove it really is. Then again, this is the stove of an evul man, so it makes sense that he�s too busy trying to make people �dye� to worry about keeping his stove clean.

Unfortunately, I didn�t manage to encounter the evul man and save people from a fate worse than �dyeth�. He is, I am informed, behind a locked door, but by the time I reached this stage of the game, my sanity was dangerously close to breaking (this was the second game by the same author I had played in the space of 24 hours), and it was a case of either quit playing right then or suffer some kind of hideous seizure. I might even� gulp� have �dyed�.

Overall, I'm tempted to say it�s not as bad as �The Tavern�, but that�s a bit like saying that a mass murderer with 927 deaths to his name isn't quite as bad as a mass murderer with 928 deaths to his name. On a technical scale of competent game writing, with 1 being an absolute stinker and 10 being the kind of game that�s so amazing you'd cry if you ever managed to get hold of it, this would rank about� minus 5. Maybe minus 6. But definitely not a minus 7.

In terms of sheer crapness, it�s another 5 out of 5 corker.

Rating:

Review of The tavern

11 Jan 2008

I must have been bored because recently I played an awful game and then, a few days later, I found myself wanting to play another. Now I could have been guaranteed a real stinker by picking one of the Sword Master games, but instead I decided to take a gamble and try a game by a new author. This ran the risk of me stumbling upon a decent game by mistake and being forced to write a review that was positive instead of negative, but I figured my chances were about 90/10 in favour of getting a truly awful game and about 10/90 in favour of getting one that was half playable. As it happened, this game fell firmly into the 90/10 category.

My god, but it�s bad. It�s not quite as bad as the Sword Master game I played recently, but it�s a definite 1 out of 10 stinker on any credible scoring system. Here is an author who at least has a reasonably good grasp of capital letters and knows that it�s generally a good idea to start a sentence with one. He�s not quite as experienced with full stops and putting letters in the correct order to make proper words but I�ll let those minor problems pass for now and move to his real strength: item descriptions. Yes, some games bombard the player with line after line of carefully detailed text, painting in their mind a vivid picture of the item in question in order that they can fully visualise it. Not here. Oh no. Here we are told that the bed �it�s your bed� and the bedside table �it�s a bedside table�. Brilliant! First rate! I can but only wonder at the sheer amount of time and effort that went into creating those masterpiece descriptions. The game weighs in at a hefty 5kb and methinks that as much as 0.5kb was expended on these truly stupendous item descriptions. Maybe 0.6kb.

(Funnily enough, this review weighs in at about 5kb as well which means I wrote about as many words telling you what the game is like as the author did in writing it.)

However, we are also bizarrely asked, upon trying to examine the bookshelf, which bookshelf we mean �the bookshelf or the bookshelf?� A quick perusal of the room indicates only one bookshelf but clearly I'm blind as the game insists there are two. Upon selecting one, my eyesight-challenged player is told �it�s a bedside table�. A bedside table that also functions as a bookshelf? That�s genius! I'm intrigued at the very idea and keep trying to picture it in my mind: is it a bedside table which is effectively nailed to the wall and then books are placed atop it? Or a bookshelf with legs that sits on the floor? The mind just boggles.

Later I try to read a book. I am particularly impressed by the level of spelling and grammar in this scene which tells me �seu rodo nothat desperate� which, if you squint, and if you have severe mental problems and are incapable of reading the English language, almost makes sense. Use of the book impressed me further as there's a puzzle involved here. No, seriously. I'm not joking. It really is a puzzle. It seems you need to throw the book at the door which causes the door to explode as the book is really a bomb! My god! What an inspired idea! Pity I need to USE BOOK ON DOOR to throw the book at the door instead of THROW BOOK AT DOOR but in a game that has been as rigorously tested as this one (I'm guessing upwards of five minutes were spent on the testing process alone) it�s easy to overlook such minor problems.

I should probably also mention that the book is really a super book. Yeah, y�see even after you�ve thrown it at the door and it�s exploded and you�ve been moved to another location, it�s still in your inventory! Well, it�s an exploding book so quite clearly the normal laws of physics don�t apply here.

By this time, I had satisfied my curiosity that this was indeed an awful game. I'm tempted to point out in one long sentence punctuated by commas the sheer number of things that the author had failed to cover � like you can�t open doors, you can�t read books, you can�t open cardboard boxes, you can�t put items on top of items that have surfaces, you can�t knock on doors, you can�t take certain items even though there's nothing stopping you, you can�t lie on the bed, you're told to take the pistol even after you�ve taken it, the first room description is repeated because the author has just tacked his own description onto the end of Quest�s default, it�s not �rumage� it�s �rummage�, there's no bleeding storyline � but that would be just mean, so I�ll finish off by saying that if you're in the mood for an untested piece of tripe that even the game�s author is probably embarrassed about (and if he isn't, he damn well should be), this is the game for you. While it doesn�t reach quite the depths of sheer godawful crapness that the recent Sword Master game did, it�s a worthy addition to the huge array of Quest�s games that can effectively be described as �stinkers, best avoided�.

On the crapness scale, this game is awarded a resounding 5 out of 5.

Rating:

Review of Assassin

15 Jan 2008

With my thirst for appallingly crap games satisfied � thanks muchly to �Sword Masters: Get Out Of The House�, �The Tavern� and �Doomed!� who definitely satisfied by thirst for a long, long time to come � I decided to turn my attentions to better games. Good games? Well� better than the previous three I mentioned anyway. Here I went to the top games on the Quest archive and saw this little gem peering out at me amidst all the other little gems. It cried at me to download it and write a review telling everyone it really wasn�t all that good. I was only too happy to oblige.

I was impressed with the attention to detail in the accompanying READ ME which begins with �welp� and then informs me that it�s not called a standard READ ME file because there are �fillions� of them around already. Fillions, eh? That�s a lot. After amusing myself with these bizarre typos, I decided I�d put it off long enough and went to the game itself.

I ran into problems quite soon. On my first command in fact. I was prompted to type HELP, did so, and found myself looking at a little pop-up window (nasty idea!) which was full of black text. On a black background. Hmm� In one way, this is an effective, if slightly unconventional, way of ensuring as many people as possible quit your game as soon as possible and thus don�t become even more disappointed with the game�s many other problems. On the other hand, it doesn�t pose much of a problem to those of us with a cut & paste command and an empty Word document. Now I'm not sure if this was the author�s fault, Quest�s fault or simply me changing the default colours of Quest and blindly assuming that it wouldn�t be daft enough to try displaying black text on a black background. Even more impressive is the way one of my next commands � X ROAD MAP � produces another pop-up window, this time a white one with� nothing inside. Even cut & paste didn�t help me here.

Visually-challenged player characters seem to be a favourite in Quest games from what I have seen and here is no exception. In the hospital, I am advised to take a brochure from the front desk, however the game then advises me that I CAN�T SEE THAT ANYWHERE. I'm told the same thing when trying to examine the front desk. However � and here the authors have begun to get into their stride � there *is* a description for the coat rack. Nice. On the down side, the jackets hanging on the coat rack are invisible but I guess one description for an entire location is a step up from the standard I've come to expect.

The game goes out of its way to bug me. Location descriptions will be different depending on whether you just entered a location � in which case you see a nice long description � or whether you're in the location and just typing LOOK � in which case you see a very short description. Often you need to exit the location and then re-enter it to see the full description as apparently the game interprets the LOOK command as �don�t show me everything I can LOOK at, just the basics�. Still, on the positive side of things, the authors have decided not to include descriptions of anything you can see in the longer descriptions so it�s not like you're really missing anything.

In an attempt to elevate this game to the lofty �not that� instead of �a steaming pile of� on the Crap-O-Meter, the authors have taken great care to customise some of the room descriptions. Now Quest has an annoying habit of churning out default room descriptions that sound like a robot wrote them: all very mechanical, to the point and with every last ounce of warmth or depth thoroughly murdered. This problem is then often made worse by the author of pretty much every Quest game I've ever played deciding to repeat this description in the actual body of the text. So you'll often be told the same thing twice which doesn�t do wonders for the game�s chances of ending up with anything more than a 1 out of 10 on the �is it any good?� scale. Here at least some effort has been expended to try and flesh out the descriptions to give the impression that they were written by real living human beings and not some faceless android. It succeeds� sometimes. Not all the time but at least it�s a start.

Of course, at other times, in an effort to convince people that bad games are cool, the authors have decided to plonk wonderful location descriptions like the following ones down:

W. ELM STREET PARKING.
YOU CAN GO NORTH.

And

PRINT STREET PARKING.
YOU CAN GO NORTH OR SOUTH.

Oh yes, filler locations. The bane of all that is good and proper in a text adventure. Whereas most people these days try and construct their games so that every location has a purpose, some still seem to enjoy the idea of filler locations. The purpose of these is simple: they have no purpose. They're just there. Why, the author wonders, should I have one location of use next to another location of use? Why, the author then wonders, shouldn�t I have 17 empty and pointless locations between them? Why, the author concludes, don�t I fill those locations with� nothing at all? And so he does. And that�s why we have filler locations. On the plus side, they give the game the distinct impression of being a lot bigger than it really is without the author having to go to the effort of writing any more actual game. On the down side, they nudge it firmly out of the �not that� category and into the �a steaming pile of� category.

Then again, a lot of the locations in the game seem to be merely filler locations as there isn't actually anything to do in them. Take, for example, the second location I visited: the Laundromat, which is described as:

HERE IS THE LAUNDROMAT.
YOU CAN GO SOUTH.

The lengthier description you see when you first enter the location mentions several other things of interest, but, as with most of the things of interest in the game, the authors seem to have decided that they're not interesting enough to warrant a description. So no examining the Laundromat itself, no examining the washers, no examining the front counter or the mint on the counter. No taking the mint. No using the washers. In fact, try as I might, I couldn�t find a single thing to do here. Hmm�

As the game progressed, I found myself recruited by the local mafia. The recruitment process was an amazingly complex and long drawn out one, no doubt designed to root out potential undercover cops and ensure the mafia heads remain safe, and involved me entering a tavern, being asked by a chap called Vinnie if I wanted to dehumanise people, and then � lo and behold! � I was a fully-fledged member of the mafia. Yes, it was certainly complicated this induction-into-the-mafia lark. Impressed with myself at the ease at which I had infiltrated this highly secretive gang of professional criminals, I went out on my first mission: I had to kill Red Jacket. That�s actually an item of clothing worn by the victim and not the victim himself, by the way, though as the game won�t let you refer to the victim by anything other than Red Jacket, I found myself thinking of him in this way. Mr. Red Jacket, I thought to myself, your days are numbered and then I proceeded to blast away at him with my pistol.

Or tried to anyway. Only just when the game seemed to have managed to lever itself out of the �a steaming pile of� category and into the �not that� category, it went and hit me left, right and centre with an unholy torrent of guess the verb problems:

> SHOOT MAN
I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMAND. TYPE HELP FOR A LIST OF VALID COMMANDS.

> SHOOT MAN WITH PISTOL
I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMAND. TYPE HELP FOR A LIST OF VALID COMMANDS.

> SHOOT RED JACKET WITH PISTOL
I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMAND. TYPE HELP FOR A LIST OF VALID COMMANDS.

> SHOOT RED JACKET
I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMAND. TYPE HELP FOR A LIST OF VALID COMMANDS.

> USE PISTOL
YOU CAN'T USE THAT HERE.

> USE PISTOL ON RED JACKET
YOU PULL THE GUN SILENTLY OUT OF YOUR JACKET AND FIRE. THE SHOT HITS THE MAN IN THE NECK AND HE FALLS TO HIS KNEES AND THEN FALLS OVER.

By the time I finally hit upon the correct command to pull this off, I was more than ready to shoot myself in despair� only I couldn�t figure out the command so shooting poor Mr. Red Jacket was the only choice left to me. Impressively, Mr. Red Jacket did a rather remarkable disappearing act after I shot him and I was unable to find his corpse. Had he perhaps not been quite dead even though I�d shot him in the neck? Had he stumbled away and hidden somewhere out of sight and the game just decided not to tell me? Had he simply vanished into thin air at the moment of the bullet�s impact? I had visions of the pistol I was firing being so inhumanly powerful that it could obliterate a red jacketed man with a single shot. This, I felt, would be a seriously cool weapon to have.

Whatever the truth of the situation, Mr. Red Jacket was clearly not a red jacket-wearing man that anybody really missed as I approached him in broad daylight in the middle of the street and shot him dead with my pistol and no one seemed to be particularly concerned. Or even noticed it had happened. I even stood around afterwards wondering if the cops were going to show up and arrest me for this heinous crime, but clearly they weren�t bothered either. Then again, with no corpse around (handy things these disappearing corpses!) there was little they could get me on save having a smoking gun in public.

On my way back to the mafia headquarters, still with a smoking gun in my hand, I am questioned by a police officer who isn't, to be kind, the brightest spark. She questions me about the shooting on Elm Street (apparently they found the invisible corpse after all, clever cops) and, even though I'm standing there with a loaded gun in my hand, she lets me go when I say I didn�t hear anything. My god. I know standards in the modern police force are said to be slipping, but *this*�

As you might have gathered from the fact that I played this far into the game without either a) slitting my wrists or b) firing the game into the recycle bin at slightly less than the speed of light, I didn�t hate Assassin quite as much as the previous three Quest games I�d played. Actually no, that�s not strictly speaking true. To say it�s a good game would be wildly misleading. In truth it�s pretty darn awful, but there's just something so bad about it that it�s almost good. It�s like a horrible car crash of a game that you know is going to be something you don�t want to see, but it�s purely *because* it�s so horrible that you keep on looking at it. I have to admit, I had a good chuckle at the idea of someone being recruited into the mafia by simply wandering into a tavern and answering a simple question. Even more chucklesome was the police officer questioning me about a shooting and not even seeming suspicion of the smoking gun in my hand. But even that was topped by my next assignment which involved me heading to the park and reading a note that had a mafia sign on it� in plain view of anyone who happened to wander past! The note even advises me � this being the note that�s been left out in plain sight � to acquire for myself a bomb and blow up a possible police base. While I'm at it, I might as well head along to the police station and turn myself in. It'll be quicker for me that way.

Unfortunately, by this stage I had begun to have the sneaking suspicion that the game wasn�t really very good. This was built up by a number of factors, but the main one seemed to be simply the feeling I had had right from the start that it was, well, a bit crap. I was tempted to carry on playing till I finished the game, but even though this was a step up from the masterpiece of interactive fiction that was �The Tavern�, it�s still not the kind of game I really wanted to be playing for any great length of time. It�s nearly got the makings of a half decent game here, and comes close to being amusing at times � though never intentionally � but there's a definite feeling that it�s only been half finished. Why the empty locations? Why the multitude of items that can�t be examined? Why are the mafia and the cops in the single figure IQ bracket?

On the Quest archive, the game boasts many scores of 4 and 5 (out of 5) and reviews which claim great things about it. Unfortunately, there must be two different versions of the game and I, cursed with bad luck as I am, picked the stinker to play. Anyone out there who has played the masterpiece which warrants 4 and 5 (out of 5), could you please send me a copy of the game as the one I downloaded would be extremely lucky to get a 2 out of 5.

So, in conclusion, I can think this one is safely out of the �a steaming pile of� category and into the �not that� category on the Crap-O-Meter, but it�s still kind of hard to recommend anyone play it unless they're actively seeking out bad games for one reason or another.

2 out of 10

Rating:

Review of Cabin Fever

01 Feb 2008

As with Dr Froth�s previous Quest game � the IFComp entry Gathered In Darkness � Cabin Fever is a huge step up from the average Quest game. All the items mentioned in the location description can be examined, there are precious few (though still more than I would liked) spelling mistakes and the whole thing comes across as a proper game such as might have been written with any other IF system. It certainly seems light years removed from the last few Quest games I played. It even has an honest to God introduction.

There are problems with every game, but the ones here are relatively minor in the scheme of things. The default font colour has been set to green, which is every bit as nasty in Quest as it in Adrift. Fortunately it�s possible to override it and set it to something slightly less nauseating. As mentioned above, there are spelling mistakes, but thankfully relatively few. The ones I encountered stuck out more because of how rare they were, but at least the author has at least taken the time to give his game a proofread or two. The only real flaw in game design is, unfortunately, one that affected the author�s previous game as well: namely the location description which is displayed the first time isn't the same one as shown when you type LOOK. This time, only one relevant item is actually missed out, but as this is one that is needed to be referred to in order to make any real progress, it�s still a definite flaw. My usual style of play, particularly in games that have room descriptions which stretch to more than a line or two, is to briefly glance over the description then start randomly trying things out, examining items and opening and closing stuff, to see what�s what. When the room description has scrolled off the screen, I bash LOOK to bring it back up and carry on from there. By the time I ran out of things to do and was reaching the head-scratching stage, I�d completely forgotten all mention of the closet in the initial description and didn�t see it until, after remembering the author pulling a similar trick in his other game, I scrolled back up through a dozen or more screens of text and found what I was after. As far as I'm concerned, LOOK should *always* display the full room description; a cut down version just isn't the same unless everyone playing the game happens to be blessed with a photographic memory.

But those are all pretty minor points in the scheme of things. On the positive side, and by positive I mean REALLY REALLY POSITIVE, is the fact that � finally! � someone has decided to write a Quest game and disable the side panels. Hooray! Of all the things in Quest that I dislike, the side panels are top of the list. Actually, they occupy the second and third places on the list as well, which goes to show just how much I dislike them. While they sometimes contain potentially useful information, they also make authors lazy and they're something of an eyesore. I particularly dislike playing a text adventure where most of the commands seem to be actionable by dragging one word and dropping it on the other. That isn't a text adventure. It�s a graphical game with text. So well done to an author for disabling them. Hopefully he won�t be the last one to do so.

Dr Froth has a tendency to overwrite, or, rather, to write a little *too* dramatically for the subject matter in hand. I remember a phrase from Gathered In Darkness where I was told that the player�s �scream was murdered by his fear�. Granted, that was a darker game by far than this and the overly dramatic writing suited it better than it does here. In Cabin Fever, when the player trips over and a jigsaw box goes flying and the pieces scatter across the floor, we�re treated to such a wildly over the top description of it that you could be forgiven for thinking that an event of world-shattering proportions had just occurred. But no, the player just dropped a jigsaw.

The bulk of the game after this involves the finding of the various jigsaw pieces. Not a terrible puzzle by itself, but it becomes a little tedious in that it involves examining things you�ve probably already examined beforehand. Before I found and dropped the jigsaw, I�d been over pretty much every part of the game�s single location (yes, it�s a one room game) looking for a means to make progress and now I found myself faced with a puzzle that effectively had me going over the same territory again. This time I had a purpose whereas before I was just searching for a purpose, but it still felt like I was repeating myself.

While the early part of the game, there are few bugs, or nothing that could really be counted as a bug. Unfortunately, bugs begin to creep into the later parts. The room description is often replaced by the last action the player carried out, thus concealing pretty much everything you want to look at and the only way to recall what�s right before your eyes is to use the ever handy scrolling back up the screen trick. When you're expected to find items by examining everything you can see, this makes an already frustrating puzzle even more of a chore.

For the earlier part of the game, the puzzles were fairly simple and straightforward. The later ones were less so, and were often made unnecessarily complicated by the guess the verb problems and the game not allowing what I would have thought were perfectly acceptable solutions to puzzles. The puzzles seem to have only one way to complete them and that way isn't always the first one you'll think of. At one point I have to put out a fire which is burning. I'm in a cabin which is surrounded by snow so the logical thing to do would, in my opinion, be to open the door, grab some snow and use that to extinguish the flames. Alas, the game disagrees. Opening the door just repeats the same description from before; it doesn�t allow me to take any of the snow outside. More annoyingly, this very same description indicates that a block of ice has been thrown into the cabin but as this was obviously a one time event, despite it being possible to be informed of it multiple times, the ice isn't something that can be used for putting out the flames. As for guess the verb problems�

What should have been a relatively simple task involving retrieving a jigsaw piece from a crack in the floor instead became a nightmare. It�s one of those puzzles where you know what needs to be done to solve it, but getting the syntax exactly right can have you tearing your hair out. It�s like, for example, the correct phrase required to open a door is OPEN THE DOOR. While the parser should understand that OPEN DOOR, UNLOCK DOOR, OPEN DOOR WITH KEY and so on and so forth mean the same as OPEN THE DOOR, the game simply won�t let you open the door unless you manage to hit upon the exact phrase. The puzzles here are further complicated by Quest�s stubborn refusal to admit that I had items which I knew full well were in my possession:

> GET PIECE
YOU NEED TO FIND A WAY TO LIFT THE PUZZLE PIECE CLOSER TO THE FLOOR BEFORE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO TAKE IT.

> STICK GUM TO LINE
YOU DO NOT HAVE WHAT YOU NEED TO ACCOMPLISH THAT.

> ATTACH GUM TO LINE
YOU DO NOT HAVE WHAT YOU NEED TO ACCOMPLISH THAT.

> TIE GUM TO LINE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> TIE LINE TO GUM
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> PUT LINE IN CRACK
YOU CAN'T PUT THAT THERE.

> PUT FINGERS IN CRACK
YOU DON'T HAVE THAT.

> REACH INTO CRACK
I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR COMMAND. TYPE HELP FOR A LIST OF VALID COMMANDS.

> GET PIECE WITH FISHING LINE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> GET PIECE WITH LINE
I CAN'T SEE THAT HERE.

> USE LINE TO GET PIECE
YOU DON'T HAVE THAT.

> USE FISHING LINE TO GET PIECE
YOU DON'T HAVE THAT.

> USE LINE
YOU PULL THE SOPPING WET, STICKY MUSH OUT OF YOUR MOUTH AND WRAP IT AROUND THE END OF THE FISHING LINE. THIS WILL BE HANDY IF YOU DROP YOUR CAR KEYS THROUGH ONE OF THE CRACKS IN THE FLOOR OR SOMETHING.

Better worded error messages would have been a positive boon here. Being told that neither the jigsaw piece nor the fishing line are here when I know full well they are is a problem. Being told I don�t have the fishing line when it�s right there in my inventory is even more of one. To make matters even worse, Quest seems to produce misleading error messages when a command is entered that it doesn�t understand. When I tried to stick the gum to the line, I'm guessing it didn�t understand the word �stick�, yet rather than simply tell me that it implies I don�t have the necessary items.

Overall I felt my character�s motivations in finding the pieces and putting the final part of the jigsaw together seemed a little hard to swallow at times. To begin with, they're reasonable enough. You're stuck in a cabin in a snow storm and the jigsaw provides a way to pass a few hours of time. But later, when sinister things are afoot and it seems my very life might be in danger, the idea that I'm still more interested in putting the jigsaw together than trying to save myself just struck me as wrong. When I start seeing and hearing things that can�t possibly be happening, my first inclination is to run like heck and get out of there� not stick around and have one last crack at that darn jigsaw puzzle. At the very least, the game should have stopped me leaving the cabin with an excuse better than it�s not very nice weather out there. No, it�s not. But I'm likely to die if I stay here so surely a bit of snow isn't all that bad by comparison�?

I won�t say whether Cabin Fever has a happy ending or not as indicating what happens right at the end would spoil the nice little twist in the tale, though the identity of the person in the jigsaw is hinted at pretty strongly and it�s not hard to imagine that something unpleasant is lurking not too far ahead. All in all, I think I preferred Gathered in Darkness to Cabin Fever, but this certainly ranks as the second best Quest game I've played.

6 out of 10

Rating:

Review of Where's Annabel?

01 Feb 2008

This one had an introduction at least, though the author�s spelling and grammar haven't improved much since Escape From The House. Nor has his ability to know where capitals are and are not needed. And he�s still a long, long way from writing something even vaguely playable�

Quest has the strange habit of displaying the items (both ones you can pick up and immovable ones) in bold type before the main body of the text in the room description, which is a bad idea to say the least and compounded here by the author then going on to repeat most of what you have already been told. So the first room description reads:

You are in the main Garden.
There is a closed Well, some Yellow Flowers, some White Flowers, some Red Flowers and some Blue Flowers here.
You can go west.
You are standing in a small garden. There is a large well here and it is overgrown with colourful flowers

As I've already been told there's a well and some flowers here, is it really necessary to incorporate them into the room description as well?

What age the game is in set I couldn�t say. At one time you are given gold coins, which led me to assume it was way back in the Dark Ages, but at the same time you're given a photograph so it�s clearly not a medieval game. Unfortunately the author doesn�t seem willing to elaborate on things. Then again, little about the game is clear. For a start: who is the player? The background to the game is that someone called Annabel has gone missing (this is detailed in the remarkably clumsy introduction) and you have to find her, yet whether you're a police officer, a freelance detective or something else altogether is never indicated. Part of me suspects even the author doesn�t know.

I didn�t last long with Where�s Annabel? Mainly because it was just so bad I was on the verge of quitting before I�d even finished reading the introduction, but also because of the remarkably small amount of commands it understands and the frequent bugs. Not to mention some of the worst guess the verb problems I've ever come across. A good example of this would be:

You're given a photograph of Annabel. Now with a photograph, the logical thing to do would be to SHOW it to people, right? Ah, but the game doesn�t understand the SHOW command. It does understand GIVE funnily enough but won�t let me give it away because I need to keep hold of it. USE PHOTOGRAPH when speaking to an NPC called Baggie produces an unhelpful message that I can�t use it here. At this I got stumped and started typing in silly things just to see if I could hit upon the solution by sheer luck. And I did. The command required?

USE PHOTOGRAPH ON BAGGIE

Ah, of course. What an amazingly obvious command. USE PHOTOGRAPH ON BAGGIE is so much better than SHOW PHOTOGRAPH.

Okay, enough with the sarcasm and enough with the game. Avoid this one like the stinker it is. (1 out of 10)

Rating:

Comment for hotel

24 Mar 2008

Gamer, they might not be quite as bad as the swordmaster games, but they're still drivel. You'll only get good reviews when you start writing good games. If you're unhappy about getting bad reviews, you've only got yourself to blame for writing such tripe in the first place.

A good game isn't written in a few hours. You have to make a genuine effort with it.

Comment for hotel

04 Apr 2008

You sure take criticism well, Michael. Personally, I really hope you do go ahead and finish a game. The tantrums when people tell you how bad it is will be one of the year's highlights.

Comment for Ultimate Escape

16 Apr 2008

"Every one's probably sick of my games by now"

Hell yes. When you write as many games as you do, and they're all equally bad, it's hard not to be sick of them.

Comment for Ultimate Escape

17 Apr 2008

They're all crap if you've written them because you don't know the first thing about game writing.

And learn to spell "appalling". All your games are so it's a good idea to know how to spell the word.

Comment for Ultimate Escape

20 Apr 2008

My lack of "speach"? Hahhahahahahahaaha.