You joke, but Fox Fowl Feed got mediocre reviews for doing this puzzle.
Haha, I did this on a lark once.
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I somehow never replied to this, but, now that it is back, I find it hard to resist.
There are different buckets I would put things in. I think aversion to specific colors or color combinations can be a valid dealbreaker. Some things get between us and the text. Timed output can be frustrating. Likewise, I see that some people are resistant to making platform-specific efforts to play certain games, and I often find myself feeling that way, too.
I don’t like mazes that are actually mazes, especially those like the one in Zork I that contain unnamed and/or unreciprocated exits. I do like mazes that aren’t mazes, like the weasel warren in Starcross. The problem is that they initially look the same, so that, if I enforce a lot of rules without thinking first, I miss out on Starcross. That would certainly have been a shame.
Some authors write a lot, which, yes, makes demands with regard to my time and attention, but I’ve found that I like some of those authors, so I assess the text itself.
I dislike puzzles that seem familiar, be they towers of hanoi, fox & company, or even the Royal Puzzle in Zork III. But some clever author might subvert my expectations, so there’s no harm in having a closer look before deciding.
There are lots of craft expectations that, so far as parser games go, are hard to overlook: lack of synonyms, for instance, or unimplemented nouns in room descriptions. Even so, I play a lot of forty-year-old games, so I must have a forgiving heart.
I sometimes feel overwhelmed if I have to make many choices at the beginning of a game, but I can be convinced to soldier through if the prospects are interesting.
As a general rule, I try to be critical of an impulse to dismiss things too soon. Who knows what innovation might appear disguised as Something I Have Already Made Up My Mind About? If people only catered to my tastes, IF would have peaked in 1985 with Spellbreaker. That doesn’t sound very good. Thank goodness nobody asked me! Things are so much better than anything I could have imagined.
That review is comedy gold! The ascii is very nice, btw
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The first thing I always do in a parser game is type ABOUT, CREDITS, and HELP to see what shows up. If there’s information about the game, how it was made, or anything important I need to know, great. But if there isn’t, I usually get a bit worried – I think these should be implemented for most games, with the exception of SpeedIFs where adding them could make the author go over the time limit.
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