I am aware of his work. I taught a workshop for teachers, but several years ago now. He’s done some really neat stuff.
Thanks very much for the kind words about Vampire Ltd! Uh, if anyone is going to give my game to middle schoolers, please let me know so I can make a more age-appropriate version for you.
1 Like
Just plese don’t rewrite it so much that it sounds like “Twilight” fan fiction. 
I may not be the best person to advise what is appropriate for children. I was browsing the adult section of the library when I was in middle school, and would encourage my daughter to do the same.
Adding to the subject of “junior editions” decades ago my aunt was in a community theatre production of “Grease”. They were already working from the official school version (which replaces all the hard curses with softer ones) but when performing for a local middle school decided to replace Rizzo’s pregnancy scare with a throat sore she got from kissing a boy. I don’t know they dealt with the ending, Sandy giving up her “good reputation” to be more attractive to a particular boy. There’s a story with questionable values.
1 Like
I watched the Grease movie for the first time recently and my first reaction to the Sandy arc would have been that it was questionable if it wasn’t so very confusing.
It isn’t even that she’s excited by all his forbidden, bad boy qualities. She just… watches him do a car race with a flat expression and then decides to get hot? Then they dance around at a carnival?
“I’m like a broken typewriter.”
“What do you mean?”
“My throat is scratchy, i have a headache, and I’m pretty fatigued.”
(I grew up in New Jersey and it wasn’t until I moved to Portland that I realized that not everybody thinks of Grease as one of the finest movie musicals—no, one of the finest pieces of cinema—ever made. I can’t believe so many people are so wrong!)
Well, maybe from 1978-2002 before Chicago came out.
Add Guys and Dolls and get pizza for everyone and I think we got a film fest!
Coming near the end of the judging period, I don’t know how much more I’ll have time to play. I’ve played nearly forty games, which is a ridicuous number, and still not even half the games in the competition.
Played “Turbo Chest Hair Massacre” a parser game by Joey Acrimonious. Set in a strange dystopic future world beseiged by a cryptically described alien threat, the PC’s main concern (none the less) is to remove a single hair from her chest which vainly offends her, and prepare for a date with her girl friend. All the while, she is already living with a cyborg companion who dotes on her. The methods available to remove the chest hair are creative and dangerous. I needed the hints for most of them.
There were elements of this game which reminded me of “Violet” by Jeremy Freese: the successful characterization of several different “people” using a unique indirect voice, and the destructive slapstick violence of the puzzles. I found the puzzles a little underclued, but I was well rewarded for completing them by the
laugh aloud double-entendre laced end scene.
Postscript: eighteen minutes later I figured out the symbolism of the alien threat. Jeez I’m slow…
2 Likes
I felt motivated to reach the benchmark of forty games reviewed, so I played “Mother Tongue” by Nell Raban late last night, just before the ballots closed. The game is short, so this will be a short review. “Mother Tongue” would pair nicely with “Congee”, another short entry in this year’s competition about the immigrant experience. In “Mother Tongue”, the player interacts with his simulated Philipina mother through a simulated text messaging chat. Ma would like you to learn some Tagalog, her native language. The player can react as feeling genuinely interested in learning Tagalog, or can react as someone who is respectful enough of his mother to play along. Either way you play it, you might learn a little bit of Tagalog grammar and vocabulary in the process.
I liked the text message format for this. I hadn’t seen that before in a comp game. Ultimately I would have liked for this to be a little longer and explore the mother child relationship more deeply.
1 Like