(4) The Interrogation (based on the Prosecution). Another rule book for a two-player game (similar to the galaxy game - but with less of an intention to be actually played, I guess), which seems to be rather loosely related to the review (in that both involve an interrogation). I was hoping for a parser or CYOA game here, to be honest. The game described in the review sounds great and not entirely unrealistic - but of course, it’s easier to wish for a super-complex crime thriller than to implement it. Anyway, kudos for the idea, the professional design and the soundscape!
(5) Dreamland Revised (based on Dreamland [Wonderland’s Alice]). A really cool parser game. It took me a while to get what is going on and what I’m supposed to do, but that makes total sense in view of the premise: it’s a revised version of the game written by the disappointed reviewer, and it’s addressed to other players who also played through the game and have all the background knowledge. The scenes are fascinating and surreal, and they all extend one of the details mentioned in the review. There is a system of different “visages” that the player can assume, and many of the puzzles involve finding the right one for the given situation (at first, I felt ignorant for not knowing the presupposed visage taxonomies, but I hope that’s just the intended addressing-experienced-players-effect and not a real gap in my knowledge… well, now that I said ‘visage taxonomies’ out loud, I’m pretty sure [emote]:)[/emote]). I think writing about dreams can easily go wrong in a number of ways (pretentious/silly/boring), but that’s not the case here at all. For the statistics, it took me about an hour to play through (I wasn’t expecting to find such a long and polished game in this context), I died once on the way, and I had to use the hint function twice. I thought I found a bug when I dropped my tattoo, but then again, why not, it’s the dreamland after all.
So that’s my new favorite pair of review and game so far!
(6) Darkest Words: Soldado (based on Darkest Words). Now that’s a really tricky review to implement [emote]:)[/emote] I wonder how the (game) author felt about the assignment. I only have OpenOffice, and I can open the game, but it works only partly. The first two introductory questions worked well, but after that, I can see only a fraction of the text, so it’s not really playable for me unfortunately. I get the general idea, though, and I highly appreciate the author’s boldness to actually go for the Excel implementation.
jbdyer, could I suggest that you re-package the whole zip or the individual games? It seems to me that it would be to their advantage if they were all accompanied, in the zips, by the reviews.
(7) Our Bleak-Ass Writing Competition at the Ragged Verge of Spacetime (based on Spelunking the Soul). The metronome game is hilarious. And especially so when I picture Poe and Verne from this comic playing it. (Did you know that Google has a metronome function? I found out when I googled how it’s spelled).
(8) Violets (based on Darling, Yes [Bromeliad]). That’s a tricky review again - it’s easy to describe that a game is heart-wrenching, beautiful, and full of revelations, but to implement it… the game author focuses on the one concrete detail given in the review (accepting violets from Rodrigo). It’s a choice-based game with essentially just one choice (unless I missed something), leading to four different endings. The cheesiness of the story that is implied in the review is made explicit in the game.
(9) Garbage Collection (based on Garbage Explorer). OK, now I can see why matt w mistook my comment about the review for a comment about the game - it also fits. The idea (= the “hasty in-universe explanation of why the author was only able to implement as much as he did in the time he gave myself”) is clever (I lol’d) and the garbage details are lovely. I like that the degree of complexity of the sentences / pieces of garbage varies. I explored quite a pile of trash in order to find out how complex the descriptions can get. [emote]:)[/emote]
Do remember the authors had a set of five to pick from, so going with this review was entirely the author’s choice.
I’m sorry the reviews haven’t gone up yet – I’ve been waiting for an author but at this point I should really just get them up – but I’m working a second job and it’s not leaving much brainpower for the morsel of free time I have left. Soon, though.
This might not be an OpenOffice thing–in Excel I can see the text if I resize the cells. Now, I can’t click on the cells in which the text appears in order to resize them, but if I click on one of the cells you can type in and shift-click on one of the cells at the top (like row 2) then I can select a range of cells, and when I do “Format → Height” I can resize them all. I had to make the height 2.5" to see all of the first long text, though it seems like the next few won’t need to be that big.
Anyway, I don’t know if this works in OpenOffice, but it might be worth trying.
(Also, thanks for the kind words about Garbage Collection! Coming up with some varied sentence structures and lengths was my main goal so I’m glad it came across.)
Ah, thanks! It worked - but I had to change the document settings first. Peter, maybe that works for you, too: Tools --> Protect --> “unprotect” sheet (I’m not sure about the exact terms here because I have a German version of OpenOffice).
After that, I could change the height of the cells as described by matt.
Yay! You have located my game and I’m glad it entertained you!
And thank you in general for playing through the games. There are some ridiculously inventive things in this event, and it makes me feel fuzzy to see them recognized.
Hm, unfortunately, Darkest Words still does not work properly, even after adjusting the cell height. I must have done something earlier by accident that made the game start, but now I cannot reproduce it anymore, and I have the same problem that Peter Piers described:
After looking into the source code, it seems that the problem is that some cells are empty that shouldn’t be, e.g. Sheet2.A8/A30/A40. If I fill in anything there (e.g. a dot), it works. Is it possible that there is supposed to be a space or something like that, and OpenOffice falsely interprets it as empty?
I’m also having trouble with Mayfly. When I open the html file, I see a black screen and a text input field where I can type something, but pressing enter doesn’t do anything. It’s the same in Chromium and and Firefox. Am I failing the first puzzle, or is something wrong?
Anyway, in the meantime I’ve played another game:
(10) Gaia’s Web (based on S.hip of Theseus). Wow!! This is even longer and more complex than Dreamland Revised. I’ll use spoiler tags so I can say a bit more about the content here.
I didn’t know that “S.” / “Ship of thesaurus” is a real thing before I read Emily Short’s review - so it did not bother me whether the game makes reference to it or not. I solved the first act without help, but rather chaotically, without knowing exactly what I was doing. And with the time pressure, it almost felt like real work (so I’d say it is a successful simulation of the player-surveilling job [emote]:-)[/emote]). This part is an amazing implementation of the game’s real-life-intruding aspect described in the review.
I liked the second part more, although it took me a long while to halfway get what was going on and what my goal was. I found the scene fascinating, and the puzzle interesting and unusual. I had to look up one command in the walkthrough, but in retrospect, the solution was logical and fair. The fact that using Inform testing commands is a part of the puzzle here is something that I would call “ridiculously inventive”, borrowing cvaneseltine’s term (at least I suspect that it’s highly original - but I’m still new to IF).
In the third part, the same thing happened to me that Emily Short mentions in her review: After all the headpopping in the previous part, that’s the first thing that I tried here, and it immediately gave away the solution, so I did not have to solve the puzzle properly here.
The fourth part is… a cute distraction? I like wordplay, but as a non-native speaker, I was only able to solve two or three puzzles here myself and had to look up the others.
The fifth part involves a classic twist - it fits so well here that it would have been a waste not to use it.
OK, now I realized I didn’t say much about the contents after all, but I’ll just leave the spoiler tags. For me, Gaia’s Web doesn’t top Dreamland in terms of the fun factor and atmosphere (I would have needed more guidance or time to really understand and enjoy the game mechanics), but it’s certainly the most inventive and ambitious game so far. Hats off.
Hmm, I can play Mayfly in Firefox. I have a folder that contains another folder called Lib, backend.js, frontend.js, style.css, and tronix.html. Do you have all those in the same place? Also the file structure on a mac might be different than on Linux, I really don’t know how it works.
Thanks for the information that its not due to the browser - I looked into it some more, and it turned out that it was an issue with case sensitivity. I renamed the folder “Lib” to “lib” and it works now.
I’m looking forward to playing!
At first, I didn’t believe that the places are really created procedurally, because the first bar was called “First Regret” and the second one “Second something”. But a restart proved that that was just a coincidence! It’s not possible to visit all the bars or to do much in them, but that’s already clear from the imaginary meta-information in the readme-file; and the implemented part is sufficient to get a taste of what it would be like to play the game that review depicts. I think it’s a clever move to indicate the procedural generation of bars explicitly, to emphasize the game’s core feature.
I would have loved to be able to order at least a beer somewhere, though [emote]:-)[/emote]
(12) Mayfly. Er… whoa!
After the issues that I had with starting the game, at first I thought that the things that start happening after a while are also a bug. But it’s intended… right? And I didn’t even lick the poisonous mushrooms until the second playthrough! Am I just going mad over the course of the day?
I couldn’t figure out whether what I typed in the end is reused somewhere in subsequent playthroughs as the review implies - is it?
(13) The Final Labyrinth of King Minos (based on Iron–Blooded?). I’m not sure if I mixed up something - somehow I do not see a relation to the review here? But I’m happy to see another CYOA - in general, there is a pleasant mix of parser games, choice-based games, and totally different games here. If I understand the story correctly, I am Minos, and I am dead, but I somehow rise from my grave…
…and I encounter a modern-day archelogist and lecture her about the old days?
The labyrinth is pretty… linear. However, the fact that going back is what makes the story go on adds a bit of a twist.
With regard to Gaia’s Web, while you certainly shouldn’t be able to headpop at that time (an unfortunate bug), I’m not sure it allows you to skip the section. Events should play out as long as you’re a Titan, regardless of what you do. Recognition at this point was always optional; it just reveals information that adds a little more meaning to the twist ending.
Thanks for the comment, Neil. I played that section of the game again, and I understand better how it’s designed now. When I played it for the first time and compared what I did to the walkthrough afterwards, I got the false impression that recognizing everybody was what triggered the end of the scene, and I thought I had missed a part of the story because of the headpop bug/cheat.
(14) The Last Rites of Doctor Wu (based on Iron–Blooded). A Twine game, which picks up the fictional fandom idea from the review nicely. I liked the writing, and would have liked to read a bit more of it (the game is quite short).
(15) Sub Way. Another set of rules rather than a digital game - great, so far I liked all of those. Here, the author payed really close attention to all the details in the (pretty cool) review. I especially like how convincingly the impression is created that augury is totally commonplace in the world the review and game are from (“read the ox liver as you would a sheep’s”), and how the author picks up the reviewer’s implication that Prussia still exists there (“Königsberg Spielezinefest”). The idea that a huge game / parallel world basically proceeds in real time, and you can access it at specific points in time sounds like a cool shared experience, like an esoteric and exciting MMORPG.
(16) Synchronicity. A complex and interesting choice-based game. The Let’s-Play-aspect is a clever way to transcend the limits of the text-based game and evoke the imagination of a larger game universe. But, man, …
…I fell for the text-glitching effect again! The same thing happened to me yesterday with Mayfly: ‘Uh, the text is falling apart, what a buggy program.’ In synchronicity, the story even makes explicit reference to the effect (“Is that my monitor? Or is that the game?”), but I somehow still managed to think it must be a bug until I read about the “glitch text generator” in the final acknowledgements (in Mayfly, I did not believe it is an intended effect until the text started to rotate a bit in addition to involving weird characters). I’m starting to doubt my sanity. Is text distortion a very common effect in browser games? Next time, I’ll be prepared!
OK, I’m through! Many thanks again to everybody. I enjoyed all the games!
My favorites:
Dreamland (Revised)
A Game Played by Galaxies
and Spelunking the Soul / Our Bleak-Ass Writing Competition at the Ragged Verge of Spacetime
S.hip of Theseus / Gaia’s Web
My you-have-to-check-out-this-crazy-stuff extra recommendations:
Gaia’s Web
Darkest Words: Soldado
Mayfly
What is going to happen again in the last round? More games or texts or both? Is it shuffled again, or do the original authors respond to the implementation of their review?