Done! It’s now pinned until November.
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There are still about 14 IFComp games with no reviews or ratings on IFDB.
If anybody has reviewed one of these, or if anyone is looking for things to play and review, public-facing reviews like that are always appreciated!
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I always wait until after a competition/festival is over before transferring any reviews over to IFDB. Some of the thoughts I write here on the forum are not reviews, more loose comments and observations. Some others have to be edited. Even those that I think are good as-is have to wait until after the Comp because I feel that IFDB is a sort of Official Review Place and I don’t feel comfortable placing reviews about an event-in-progress there.
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I just used conditional formatting to track which reviews of mine were written recently. I realize that people can see this just by looking in topics, but it might also be handy to see “hey, which reviews of my entry are recent?” or “hey, which reviews of entries I want to play/judge/am confused about are recent?”
Obviously this doesn’t help people without access to the author’s forum in my case, but it opened up a couple of questions.
- is this worth it? For the review authors, entry authors, or for judges? It’s not terribly inconvenient to write up, and I wouldn’t want to oblige anyone to, but I’d like to put it out there. (Also, if anyone would be willing to check the spreadsheet history and update it accordingly, that would be extra cool.)
- would it muddy up the whole “conditional formatting” list? There’d obviously be a lot of possibilities though it wouldn’t actually be terrible to generate … we’d just cut/paste formulas for the date.
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Hmm, I just noticed that my review numbers weren’t adding up, and realized that’s because the row for Anne of Green Cables seems to have been deleted from the spreadsheet? From a quick glance at the version history, it seems like it was there as of September 28, but I’m not sufficiently up on Google Docs to know how to cleanly restore it (also it’s my bedtime!) But figured I’d flag in case some good Samaritan can fix things.
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I went through and re-added a row for it with 5 reviews that I found from:
- Brian Rushton
- Bruno Dias
- Doug Egan
- Josh Grams
- Mike Russo
If there are any others that should be added back, anyone should feel free to add them!
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According to my records, that’s it. Thanks @DeusIrae and @DemonApologist!
Edit: No wait! A nice one from Captain Hastings! I’ll add it.
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I’m the same. I broke my own rule yesterday but I was at a loose end a bit of easy review-porting was a good use of ten minutes. PS Yes I know you can embargo them.
-Wade
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I wasn’t sure my own posts were well-developed enough to be worth counting as reviews and adding to the total, so I’d held off on listing them—but if other authors are comfortable with it, I’d be happy to leave the links up and add further ones as they come. :–)
Many thanks to everyone who’s been maintaining and fixing the spreadsheet!
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Less than a week to go in the comp, and some games still only have three or four reviews! If anyone’s doing a last-minute reviewing push, those might be good ones to focus on. Last year, every game got at least five.
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Taking a quick look through the spreadsheet, the following titles only have 4 reviews:
Mr. Beaver
Murderworld
Pharos Fidelis
Space Mission: 2045
Your Very Last Words
The following have more than 4 reviews, but only 4 public reviews:
Under the Sea Winds
Pharaohs’ Heir
Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer, The
Imperial Throne
Day in a Hell Corp, A
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Re the games with few reviews that I have reviewed … I’ll try to avoid sounding endorsement-y, but I want to motivate people who are on the fence, or poke them in the right direction to say “hey, I can get through this and review it meaningfully.” Alternatively, don’t take my lack of commentary as “boy this is too hard to bother.”
Disclaimer – I tested Mr Beaver, and don’t be intimidated by the 1300 points. The author is not out to confuse the player & many of the points are for straightforward actions, to ease you into the flow. The GUI or parser option helped me test it efficiently.
I tested Kidnapping too. It is not a huge game. Once you figure how to get started, the mechanics aren’t a mystery. I brute-forced a password sequence at the end (<100 possibilities), because I was clueless to a hint. I laughed once the author told me what I missed.
Under the Sea Winds is not a big game, and it’s in Adventuron too! It has a walkthrough.
Hell Corp is not a huge game.
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Great idea! I’d add that Pharos Fidelis is a bit long, but it goes quick IME. Imperial Throne is short and fun to mess around with even for just a little while. Pharaoh’s Heir is likewise pretty zippy. And Murderworld is big, but I thought the six hours currently listed on IFDB is an overstatement, it was more like three and a half or four for me.
Space Mission probably has few reviews since I think it only worked for about the first week of the Comp - since then there’s been an issue with the LLM account that runs it, so doubt we’ll see many more reviews for that one.
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Cool … I’ll keep the rally going by looking at ones with 6 total reviews.
I’ve listed my “get through expediently/avoid pitfalls without hopefully missing too much” thoughts on the ones I looked at. I may lean towards reviewing these in addition to the ones authors requested in the private forum, to hit my goal of 40 reviews of entries I did not test. (I mean, I could review the 15-minute games, but those generally get really good coverage!)
- OVER 6 6
- By All Reasonable Knowledge 6 6
- Crescent Sea Story 6 5
- Detritus 6 5
- Grove of Bones 6 6
- HEN AP PRAT GETS SMACKED IN THE TWAT: This didn’t take very long. It has less timed text than the previous. I hit what I think is an infinite loop and I think there’s a strategy guide thread so people can avoid that ending.
- Hobbiton Recall 6 5
- Just Two Wishes: I got a quick ending here and would like to see more. Figuring what the wishes are was very amusing.
- Let Me Play!: I found this picked up significantly after Act 1 after it got through its basic questions. I did some exercises as the text flashed across the screen. Don’t choose “end it” options, or it’ll start over without you being able to save it.
- Penthesileia: this was longer than Errand Run, but not as hugely long as Fable, with a more manageeable character list.
- Rain Check-in: the main obstacle to reviewing may be people worrying they missed a few endings, since it’s not very long.
- Retrograding 6 5
- Secrets of Sylvan Gardens, The 6 5
- Transformations of Dr. Watson, The 6 6
- Us Too: I already have a list of stuff to fix for a post-comp release, so if I get no more reviews, I won’t mind. Let’s get reviews for first-timers instead.
- whoami 6 6
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Only Mr Beaver and Pharos Fidelis have 4 reviews now, if anyone has a last minute burst of reviewing energy within them!
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Please save Mr. Beaver. 
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If it helps anyone manage their dwindling comp review time, Pharos Fidelis presents around 26k words of narrative text per readthrough, so the time it takes is almost entirely dependent on personal reading speed. Readers have reported times ranging from 45 minutes to 6 hours at the extremes, with most landing in the 2-3 hour range.
If my opinion matters at all here, though, (maybe it doesn’t?) I think I would still rather people engage with the project out of intrinsic interest or curiosity, rather than a grim sense of obligation to scrape the bottom of the list for the sake of doing so.
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With the usual “don’t force yourself to review game X” caveat, we could get up to 9 as the median for reviews if people concentrate on entries with 8 reviews. We have 51 below/at the median and would need to get to 42.
This may seem like a silly goal, but I think back to the Paradox of Choice. TLDR is with too many choices, we can freeze up. So let’s just pick a number.
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I’ve seen quite a few people struggling with those pesky extra points. If you want me to hint you towards some of them, just ask (in private). Only if it’s allowed during the IFComp time, otherwise ask me when the competition is over
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So, last minute questions:
- when do we say “OK, no more reviews to count?”
- before doing so, do we want to check for any reviews floating in the wild? E.g. with “Willy’s Manor” ifcomp -site:intfiction.org
I noticed the short game hadn’t had any episodes in a while, sadly, and trawling through bluesky/twitter turned up nothing. Anyone have anywhere else to check?
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