Scoring System ============== All games get 5 for all categories - then points are subtracted or added. Games can get 0 points in some categories. Story - The overall story quality, character development. The game loses points for logical flaws in the story, simplistic characters, gains points for originality, balanced verbosity of text and information, well-rounded backgrounds. Puzzles - The quality of the puzzles. Games get extra points for particularly devious or original puzzles or puzzles that are integrated into the story, and balanced hinting. Games lose points for guess-the-verb puzzles. Technical - Overall technical quality. Games lose for code bugs, missing descriptions, grammatical or spelling errors. Games gain points for interesting technical innovations, good implementations of objects, good prose. Interest - This is the fuzziest category. It is affected by interactivity, as well as all the other factors. In the end, it is just a measure of how long I played the game for. Overall - Just the average of the above scores, unless a score is marked ?. The average is adjusted by +/- 1 point. Magic ----- This game appears to have a neat gimmick. But not much else. Story: 1 Puzzles: 3 Technical: 5 Interest: 0 Overall: 2 Channel Surfing --------------- I note the following 'Passive, flat' and 'smooth' are wholly unexpected attributes for walls and ceilings. Would an 80 inch TV produce harsh black shadows if it was the only light source in a room? If your game is centered around channel surfing, then implement 'surf channels' or 'surf to channel X'. Story: ? Puzzles: ? Technical: 2 Interest: 0 Overall: 1 The Absolute Worst IF Game in History ------------------------------------- Well. It gets extra 1 point for actually being easily winnable. Story: 0 Puzzles: 2 Technical: 2 Interest: 1 Overall: 2 Everybody Dies -------------- That was an adequately well-written story with a nice puzzle thrown in for good measure. But it was a bit too linear for my tastes and the story's moralism was far too overbearing. Still, a good attempt. Story: 5 Puzzles: 5 Technical: 7 Interest: 6 Overall: 6 Recess ------ I have no particular interest in re-living my life as a 10-year-old. I don't know how I would make a good 4-grader game. Possibly, I could not. On the other hand, the restrictions imposed by grown ups to children make such a game much much easier to write. And then you get lazy and you end up with a silly 'get object' series of quests. Furthermore, > COMPLETE HOMEWORK should work. Anyway, extremely boring and the story is really not at all believable. Story: 4 Puzzles: 2 Technical: 6 Interest: 2 Overall: 4 Riverside --------- Opening location: | Cemetary A typo already. | Dull light filters down through the clouds, casting the scene in a | gloomy grey. Does not quite work. Then... >x graves You can't see any such thing. Story: 3 Puzzles: ? Technical: 5 Interest: 0 Overall: 3 Nerdquest --------- OK! A java-based interpreter! As fun as a stuffed 'pinguin'! Story: 2 Puzzles: ? Technical: 2 Interest: 0 Overall: 1 Escape from the Underworld -------------------------- Much like a republican watching the Palin/Biden '08 debate, I managed to get excited about this one as soon as it was evident that the text was free of major grammatical and spelling errors, the sentences made sense and the parser responded to commands that attempted to scratch slightly beneath the surface of the room description. The puzzles are really just basic 'get item' quests. The prose is adequate, but awkward and erratic at times. The main let down has to be the characters. They are far too uninteresting and provide nothing more than the 'quest item request' - and even that piece of information can be quite hard to extract sometimes. Some other things don't make sense, such as: why do they need to separate souls from bodies? Do the damned bodily descent to hell? Does the underworld have dentists? Some other items can only be taken after other things have happened in the game, but without a clear cause and effect relationship. This is annoying. Anyway, a perfectly average game! Story: 5 Puzzles: 5 Technical: 5 Interest: 5 Overall: 5 Nightfall --------- Very atmospheric, good writing. The puzzles are not particularly interesting, but they fit the story very well. The story is is good, but so heavily hinted that you not only get an airbrushed outline, but tiny pencilled-in details by the end, which you see coming from mles away. The entry is good and polished and works very well as an interactive story. However the interactivity is somewhat minimal, although two different paths do exist (and multiple branches towards the end). Story: 9 Puzzles: 6 Technical: 9 Interest: 8 Overall: 8 A Martian Odyssey ----------------- You appear to be on Mars, exploring. On a rocket. You are told to "Take some photographs, they'll pay for the cost of this junket." >take picture You can't see any such thing. >take photo You can't see any such thing. In general, it is difficult to get the game do what you want. Multiple incosistencies arise. | The air is thin, but the months spent in acclimatization chambers back | on earth, learning to breathe air as tenuous as that of Mars, finally | prove useful. But I am wearing a suit?? Then I a meet a martian doing something awfully silly. This game is hilarious, perhaps unintentionally. Quote of the day: "You rub the injured member ruefully." The author apparently also has a 'troubled imagination'. | All of a sudden, along comes a fantastic being, looking rather like a barrel | trotting along on four legs with four other arms or tentacles... Various other things happen, but they are of little consequence. Mars was a waste of time. Story: 3 Puzzles: 3 Technical: 3 Interest: 3 Overall: 3 Afflicted --------- The ABOUT notes raise my hopes for this game, apart from the slightly disheartening warning to save often. The environment appears fully implemented as far as descriptions are concerned. The character's knowledge reaches peculiar depths: "A street sweeper comes down 19th Street on the third of every month" is either the result of very refined and astoute observational skills and memory or of a street-sweeper-spotting habit. Her possession of a notebook is further supporting evidence for the latter. Then I note that you can get in this restaurant by breaking in... from either the front or the side window. What fun! Also, for some reason I thought we were a woman but we apparently are a man. What I also liked: negative scoring! But this: >x shelf A warped plywood shelf below the prep table provides space for the grill cook to cast off his soiled cooking implements. And when I find a soiled cooking implement in there, it is marked down. Why? So, anyway, I find the foot of some disappeared woman. In a cauldron. I break the window. The police come. They arrest me. There is no foot mentioned. When this happens again later, it works out nicely though. In any case, a nice funny game. A few very minor technical problems. Story: 7 Puzzles: 6 Technical: 8 Interest: 9 Overall: 7 Freedom ------- I don't know what to think of this game. The descriptions are sparse, barren, almost desert-like. There is no plot other than a to-do list. And unfortunately, the line "The light turns green! The cars rev and start forward, and you barely manage to make the west sidewalk before being run over!" does not really manage to evoke what the author might have intented. Story: 2 Puzzles: 2 Technical: ? Interest: 2 Overall: 2 Opening Night ------------- The game presents an interesting topic, and does so in a poetic manner, though not overbearingly so. I like the text and the context, though I found the puzzles to be somewhat .. cartoon-like? Charlie-Chaplin like? But that must've been on purpose. On the other hand, I did get stuck and the puzzles didn't really make much sense. So I walkthroughed my way through. Story: 7 Puzzles: 5 Technical: 5 Interest: 6 Overall: 6 Piracy 2.0 ---------- I cannot examine all that I could. The prose is mostly technically correct, but slightly awkward. I like the backstory, and the game is paced nicely. The puzzles are moderately difficult, but they are also hampered by the lack of adequate coverage of possible commands - more synonyms would be nice. At some point in the game you have a rather explicit choice between five (apparently) possible endings. In fact, however, the number of possibly endings is considerably larger, and they all appear to be making sense. I ended up drifting aimlessly in space, but hey, at least I escaped. Overall a very well thought-out puzzler, with a nice atmosphere and plot, outcomes that make sense.. but it would need a bit more attention to detail for it to be truly outstanding. Story: 7 Puzzles: 9 Technical: 7 Interest: 10 Overall: 8 Violet ------ A cute little premise... The premise is used to heavily hint the player as to what to what he should do. On the other hand, the premise is _also_ deeply frustrating. It reminds me of those movies where the protagonist is an utter idiot and fails to complete even the most elementary of tasks. Furthermore, the heavy hinting seems to have lulled the author into a false sense of security with respect to implementing peripheral and/or plausible commands. The game loses points for missing obvious commands such as 'who is julia' and 'find coffee', especially since it _is_ a one room game. Some other obvious solutions are not implemented. Story: 8 Puzzles: 5 Technical: 7 Interest: 7 Overall: 7