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Norman's Comp Review's [File 3 of 3]

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Norman Perlmutter

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Nov 16, 2003, 12:17:49 AM11/16/03
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Order of games reviewed in this file:
5 CaffeiNation
5 Slouching Towards Bedlam
5 Temple of Kaos
4 The Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky
3 Baluthar
3 Bio
3 No Room
3 Sardoria
2 Amnesia
2 Delvyn
2 Internal Documents
2 Rape, Pillage, Galore!
1 Curse of Manorland
1 Hercules First Labor
1 little girl in the big world
1 Sweet Dreams

**************THE FIVES*************
The first of these games I just found to be mediocre. The
second and third were much different. They tried to implement
radically new ideas and probably took a lot of work, but in my opinion
they were not much fun because they were very confusing. Still, rather
than totally blast them, I gave them fives for their creativity.

CaffeiNation
Score: 5
Genre: Quasi-realistic
Humor/Seriousness: Humorous

The best thing about this game is its title, which is also the
name of the coffee shop in the game. Caffeination is a typical
humorous IF game, with nothing particularly exciting about it. The
goal is to get coffee. Unfortunately, you have barely any money, and
your boss won't let you leave the office. I usually enjoy humorous
games with a loser as the main character, but for some reason this one
didn't click. Maybe it was the numerous guess-the-verbs and guess-
the-nouns, or else the fact that using the hint system was almost
harder than trying to solve the puzzles without it, or that it has a
location that's almost a maze, with lots of unnecessary rooms. The
game does have a few funny points, but it's really not that great. I
recommend you don't bother with it if you haven't yet, but if the
concept sounds particularly interesting, go ahead and play it.

Slouching Towards Bedlam
Score: 5
Genre: Science Fiction
Humor/Seriousness: Serious

Although I gave this game a lowish score, I would not be
surprised if it does well in the comp, because it is very intricate
and has a deep plot. I personally did not like it, though. It is a
mystery game - something weird is going on, and you have to figure out
what it is. Unfortunately, I didn't feel a strong motive to figure out
what was going on, especially since the game required me to figure out
how to use a lot of complicated machines and to figure out where I had
hidden my personal possessions. The game also contains a number of
obscure references to Latin, Hebrew, and British measurement systems.
Although knowledge of these references is not essential to play the
game, I found them obnoxious. The game also suffers from an excess of
info-dumpery and is much too long. I am not always one to complain of
these, as witnessed by my high rating of Sophie's Adventure. However,
in Sophie's Adventure, the writing was entertaining and easy, even
though the it was longer than 2 hours, I felt like I'd made a lot of
progress by the time my time ran out. In Slouching Towards Bedlam, on
the other hand, you have to read a lot of text before you can even
start to understand the mystery, and the writing, while good, is not
particularly entertaining due to the non-humorous nature of the work.
When I had a half hour left, I had barely made any progress at all. I
then began to rely almost exclusively on the hints, but by the time
the half hour was up, I don't think I had progressed even a half way
through the game.
In conclusion, though this game was not for me, if you're the
kind of person who enjoys figuring out obscure machinery and solving
mysteries, and you don't mind reading a lot of text before you get to
the exciting part of an adventure, you may enjoy it.

Temple of Kaos
Score: 5
Genre: Surreal fantasy
Humor/seriousness: Almost entirely serious

This is an ultra-surreal game. Things do not work in the ways
you would expect them to work. It often uses poetry in place of prose.
The problem with this sort of piece is that to get it right it has to
be almost perfect. Temple of Kaos is not perfect. One especially
notable flaw is the lack of a non-default response when examining
certain items in the room description, items that are key to the
game's imagery. Since this game depends heavily on imagery, the lack
of description is a serious flaw. Also, the game mixes poetry and
prose in an unappetizing way. If virtually every action received a
poetic response, it would have been cool. The mishmash of poetry and
prose is rather grating on the brain. Finally, the game suffers from a
few guess-the-verbs, though not as badly as some of the other games in
the comp. In spite of my criticisms, Temple of Kaos is one of the most
creative games in the comp, which is why I did not rate it lower than
a 5. If you like ultra-surrealist games or games that attempt to
redefine the IF world, I recommend that you play it.


********* FOURS AND BELOW ***********
These games were generally bad, but some of them had some redeeming
characteristics that make them worth playing. In particular, a couple
were ridiculously short, but reasonably well-designed.


The Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky
Score: 4
Genre: Obscenity
Humor/seriousness: Humorous

I think this author is trying to win the golden banana of
discord.
This is by far the most obscene game in the comp. I am not
easily offended by obscenity, in fact the obscenity sort of amused me,
so I didn't mark off any points for it, but there were plenty more
flaws for which to mark off points. The game has no plot and no goal
other than to insult the player character.
The game does contain some math jokes, which I enjoyed, being
a math person.
The game does not last very long . . . I think I spent nearly
an hour on it, but that was only because I found a list of all the
inform library verbs and went through them methodically. For the
typical player, it will probably get boring in less than a half hour.
So, if you want to play something funny and pointless, I can think of
worse ways to spend a half hour, but it's not very high on my list of
recommendations.


Baluthar
Score: 3
Genre: Fantasy
Humor/seriousness: Serious

This is a rather boring fantasy game comp featuring mediocre
puzzles, a few minor guess-the-verbs, and one of the worst NPCs in the
entire comp. The author definitely made a serious effort, but this was
one of those games that I just simply didn't like.


Bio
Score: 3
Humor/seriousness: somewhat humorous
Gemre: Quasi-realistic

This game, like many of the low-rated games, suffers from
ultra-minimalist description, numerous grammatical errors, and a
smattering of nouns and verbs to guess. Many items in the room
descriptions are not examinable, and those that are have minimal
descriptions. There is even one room where the room itself gives a
default description in response to the "look" command and contains
absolutely nothing of interest. The puzzles are not very well
designed, and the writing is not too great, either. Finally, Bio
features a cardboard NPC even worse than Baluthar's. On the plus side,
it's fairly fast-moving game, so it might be a bit fun if you're in
the right mood for it.


No Room
Score: 3
Humor/seriousness: serious
Genre: Quasi-realistic

This is the shortest game in the entire comp. It has no rooms
and one puzzle. Well, actually, it has one room, sort of. The game is
neither wonderfully nor terribly coded. It does not suffer from
guess-the-verb or grammar problems, but it does contain at least one
significant bug.


Sardoria
Score; 3
Genre: Medieval fantasy
Humor/seriousness: Somewhat humorous

The main body of this game is a series of one room puzzles,
each of which has only one solution, sometimes not the most logical
one I can think of. The game suffers from nondescriptiveness and
uninteractivity - there is very little in the environment that you can
interact with. It contains a few major bugs, including one where you
significantly change the nature of an object, but its description
remains the same. Towards the end, a bug kept me from completing the
game, but restoring from a saved position somehow got rid of the bug.
Unfortunately, due to this bug, I did not complete the game until a
couple minutes past the two hour mark, resulting in a score of 3,
rather than 4.


Amnesia
Score: 2
Genre: Fantasy
Humor/seriousness: Humorous
Amnesia is a very amateurish game, full of spelling errors,
with an entirely arbitrary plot and illogical puzzles. But at least it
openly admits its lack of quality, giving it some redeeming value.
The following snipped exemplifies the game's attitude and
problems:

>ask guide about author
I don't know the word "author".

>ask guide about auther
"Oh, he is a complete idiot. "

If this were intentional humor, it would have been funny.
Unfortunately, due to the many other spelling errors, including
trouble with their/there, I believe it is unintentional, and,
therefore, just sad. In the game info (about command), the author
tells us he hopes to get a few bonus points for being the youngest
comp author, still in high school. I was in high school when I wrote
The Cruise, and, although it did contain a few nasty bugs, it was not
replete with spelling errors, so this argument does not bode well with
me.
Nonetheless, the author is being unduly harsh on himself
calling himself a complete idiot. It takes a lot of intellectual
ability to figure out how to program a text adventure at all, let
alone a good one. I think that with some more self-confidence, he
could write something much better than Amnesia, and I encourage him to
do so.


Delvyn
Score: 2
Genre: Fantasy
Humor/seriousness: Humorous

This entire game seems to be an elaborate joke or troll. If
it's a joke, it's an inside joke that I don't get. If it's a troll,
it's just plain bad. The game itself is mediocre, but somewhat funny.
I was going to give it a 4, but then I got to a point where there was
apparently no way to proceed. I was stuck in a certain location, and I
was unable to proceed further or even go back where I'd come from. In
this location, actions did not have the correct logical effect. As
there was no hint system at all to help me, I eventually gave up,
still stuck, and deducted two points because of my frustration.


Internal Documents
Score: 2
Genre: Quasi-realistic
Humor/seriousness: Somewhat humorous

Internal Documents is possibly the least descriptive game in
the comp, excluding the games with homebrew parsers. It contains a
large number of empty, unnecessary rooms. Some of these rooms are just
plain empty, others are defined by a single object which appears in
the very short room description but cannot be examined. Like a couple
other games in the comp, Internal Documents also features a hole that
"can't contain things." The puzzles are not very well designed,
either. Overall, this game has little to recommend itself to the
player.


Rape, Pillage, Galore!
Score: 2
Genre: Mythological, (parody?)
Humor/seriousness: Humorous

This is the only homebrew parser game to which I gave more
than one point. It is also by far the least interactive game in the
comp. That is why I scored it higher than the other homebrew parsers:
it doesn't try to do something with a homebrew parser that could be
done much better with an IF development tool. It appears to be a
parody, but I'm not exactly familiar with what is being parodied.


Curse of Manorland
Score: 1
Genre: Fantasy
Humor/seriousness: Somewhat humorous

The author of this game uses the convention that one move
equals something like 40 minutes, because after every 24 moves, the
protagonist has to sleep. Given that most authors use one minute or
less per move when implementing such a system, this 40 minutes per
move convention greatly hurts the quality of the simulation.
Furthermore, every few moves, instead of responding to your action,
the game tells you how cold you are, and this still counts as a 40
minute expenditure, if I remember correctly. A more competent game
would respond to your action and tell you that you're cold within the
same move. I don't know if this is partly due to a flaw in AGT or
entirely to a flaw in the author's programming skills. The puzzles are
badly designed, with the first one involving a guess-the-phraeseology
of the worst sort. Eventually, I got to a point where the walkthrough
told me to do something specific, but the game would not respond to
that specific command, at which point I gave up.


Hercules First Labor
Score: 1
Genre: Mythological
Humor/seriousness: Fairly serious

According to the readme file (herc1info.txt), the author
apparently implements a 2 word parser out of nostalgia. Since I was
not an IF player in the days of the 2 word parser, the game evokes no
nostalgia in me - just a sense of poor simulation.
The readme file further informs me that the game contains 50
rooms and 58 items. That averages out to barely more than one item per
room, which is bad. I didn't just read the walkthrough; I played the
game, too. The puzzles are bad, and the writing is unremarkable.


little girl in the big world
Score: 1
Genre: Fantasy
Humor/seriousness: Somewhat humorous

Another homebrew parser horror, this game probably has the
most limited vocabulary of any game in the comp, except Rape, Pillage,
Galore! It is also very short. The game suggests the existence of
several side puzzles, but I can't figure out how to solve them, nor
does the walkthrough tell me how to solve them - I think there is no
way to solve them at all.


Sweet Dreams
Score: 1
Genre: Fantasy
Humor/seriousness: I don't remmeber

The gameplay of this graphical adventure consisted of
navigating my player character, a little girl, around a bunch of
rooms, right-clicking on anything and everything I thought might
possibly be useful, and trying each option in the right-click menu in
turn. Wow, excitement city! Then I got to a point where for some
reason I was stuck - I tried to go in all different directions, but
the picture of the little girl just stayed in one place - some bug in
the interface. Then I gave up and gave the game a score of one.

Richard Bos

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Nov 17, 2003, 5:12:36 AM11/17/03
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normanpe...@sev.org (Norman Perlmutter) wrote:

> No Room

> It does not suffer from guess-the-verb or grammar problems, but
> it does contain at least one significant bug.

I wasn't able to find one. Could you elaborate?

Richard

Stas Starkov

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Nov 17, 2003, 3:52:45 PM11/17/03
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Sorry for my bad English -- I'm Russian.


"Norman Perlmutter" <normanpe...@sev.org> wrote:

[SNIP]

> The Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky
> Score: 4
> Genre: Obscenity
> Humor/seriousness: Humorous
>
> I think this author is trying to win the golden banana of
> discord.

Do you really think that a lot of people would be willing to rate this
game quite high? I don't think so -- most of them will give a "1". (The
Comp results supports that.)

> This is by far the most obscene game in the comp. I am not
> easily offended by obscenity, in fact the obscenity sort of amused me,

To tell the truth, I like obscene (but not vulgar) humor. Somehow it
makes me laugh hard. During my study in university, I often encountered
one person who routinely said something extremely obscene and offensive,
but, after a moment of stun, I was laughing -- his humor was so
bizarre and out of context that it was impossible to resist.

> so I didn't mark off any points for it, but there were plenty more
> flaws for which to mark off points. The game has no plot and no goal
> other than to insult the player character.

Reading several other reviews, I've noticed that a lot of people were
wandering about a purpose of the game. No, I'm not the author of the
game, but yes I gave the game "9". You can call me sick now. But let me
explain my thoughts (see below).

[SNIP]

> The game does not last very long . . . I think I spent nearly
> an hour on it, but that was only because I found a list of all the
> inform library verbs and went through them methodically. For the
> typical player, it will probably get boring in less than a half hour.

[Spoilers ahead]

I agree, but this boredom pushed me to rate the game so high. That's
why: Yes I laughed on the jokes that become more and more offensive --
it's not so easy to find a way to be sworn and somehow be far from the
person who swears at you. The narrator jests at the idiot (i.e. PC)
who's just physically incapable to think "well" and that's somehow
funny... if shown from the funny side. And obviously narrator is very
tired of the idiot who can't even complain. But then... game become
boring and I wasn't able to progress or win. So, instead of playing I
started thinking... And suddenly I understood that actually it's not so
funny to be an idiot or to take care of the idiot; and if I'm an idiot I
CAN'T DO NOTHING WITH THAT -- I can't win, I can't quit the game, I
can't change anything, and I don't understand that something is wrong!
So, when I laughed earlier in the game, I laughed at my own (not the PC)
stupidity. It was me who was so obscene and offensive -- _I_ was the
horrible narrator. The game showed me myself like in the mirror. The
game forced me to think -- and that worth the high score.

I want to say "thank you"to the author of the game. Am I the only one?

Norman Perlmutter

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Nov 17, 2003, 5:55:15 PM11/17/03
to

Minor spoilers . . . .

You can put the rods into the lemon and then eat the rods and the
lemon with the command "eat lemon." The game does not realize that you
put it into an unwinnable state, nor does it comment on the PC having
any trouble eating the metal rods.

Norman

Norman Perlmutter

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Nov 17, 2003, 6:52:31 PM11/17/03
to
On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 01:52:45 +0500, "Stas Starkov"
<st...@mail.rb.ruANTISPAM> wrote:

>Sorry for my bad English -- I'm Russian.
>
>
>"Norman Perlmutter" <normanpe...@sev.org> wrote:
>
>[SNIP]
>
>> The Fat Lardo and the Rubber Ducky
>> Score: 4
>> Genre: Obscenity
>> Humor/seriousness: Humorous
>>
>> I think this author is trying to win the golden banana of
>> discord.
>
>Do you really think that a lot of people would be willing to rate this
>game quite high? I don't think so -- most of them will give a "1". (The
>Comp results supports that.)
>

I didn't expect a lot of people to give it high ratings, but I
was quite surprised that it finished second to last. I thought there
would be a few people who would give it ones for obscenity, and the
rest would rate it in the 4-5 range because it's a somewhat funny
game, but nothing particularly special, with very few ratings of 2 or
3. I found it similar to Stiffy McKane: The Undiscovered Country from
a few years back in that it was incredibly obscene. Since SMTUC was
explicitly an attempt to win the golden banana, I thought Fat Lardo
might be an attempt at the same..
There are several reasons why Fat Lardo got blasted, whereas
SMTUC had a halfway decent score (though The Gostak beat it for the
golden banana). For one thing, SMTUC was written by a respected member
of the IF community. It also had an obscenity warning, and it was more
creative.

>> This is by far the most obscene game in the comp. I am not
>> easily offended by obscenity, in fact the obscenity sort of amused me,
>
>To tell the truth, I like obscene (but not vulgar) humor. Somehow it
>makes me laugh hard. During my study in university, I often encountered
>one person who routinely said something extremely obscene and offensive,
>but, after a moment of stun, I was laughing -- his humor was so
>bizarre and out of context that it was impossible to resist.
>

I am similarly not offended by obscenity. I think many people,
upon seeing that the game was obscene and insulted the player
character, translated this into an insult of the player. I don't see
it this way at all. I think the author was just trying to be funny,
and he has a very obscene sense of humor. Since I have some friends
with obscene senses of humor, I found the game funny.
As a bit of an aside, I particularly liked the math jokes,
because I am a math person.
I also liked the game because I like the simulationist aspect
of IF - how it makes me believe I'm really in an imaginary world.
This means that I like games that respond to a high percentage of my
commands. This is why I disliked, for instance, Internal documents,
but liked Fat Lardo a bit better. Fat Lardo was very descriptive. It
painted a vivid picture in my mind of this funny, if strange and
obscene, world.

>> so I didn't mark off any points for it, but there were plenty more
>> flaws for which to mark off points. The game has no plot and no goal
>> other than to insult the player character.
>
>Reading several other reviews, I've noticed that a lot of people were
>wandering about a purpose of the game. No, I'm not the author of the
>game, but yes I gave the game "9". You can call me sick now. But let me
>explain my thoughts (see below).
>

You're a bit strange in your taste, perhaps, but not sick.


>[SNIP]
>
>> The game does not last very long . . . I think I spent nearly
>> an hour on it, but that was only because I found a list of all the
>> inform library verbs and went through them methodically. For the
>> typical player, it will probably get boring in less than a half hour.
>
>[Spoilers ahead]
>
>
>
>
>
>I agree, but this boredom pushed me to rate the game so high. That's
>why: Yes I laughed on the jokes that become more and more offensive --
>it's not so easy to find a way to be sworn and somehow be far from the
>person who swears at you. The narrator jests at the idiot (i.e. PC)
>who's just physically incapable to think "well" and that's somehow
>funny... if shown from the funny side. And obviously narrator is very
>tired of the idiot who can't even complain. But then... game become
>boring and I wasn't able to progress or win. So, instead of playing I
>started thinking... And suddenly I understood that actually it's not so
>funny to be an idiot or to take care of the idiot; and if I'm an idiot I
>CAN'T DO NOTHING WITH THAT -- I can't win, I can't quit the game, I
>can't change anything, and I don't understand that something is wrong!
>So, when I laughed earlier in the game, I laughed at my own (not the PC)
>stupidity. It was me who was so obscene and offensive -- _I_ was the
>horrible narrator. The game showed me myself like in the mirror. The
>game forced me to think -- and that worth the high score.
>

Umm, I don't quite understand your reasoning there, but I'm glad you
liked it.

>I want to say "thank you"to the author of the game. Am I the only one?
>
>

Sure, what the heck, I'll join you in thanking the author. The game
gave me a few good laughs.

Norman

Adam Thornton

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Nov 17, 2003, 7:01:59 PM11/17/03
to
In article <3fb95c20....@news.accesstoledo.com>,

Norman Perlmutter <normanpe...@sev.org> wrote:
> There are several reasons why Fat Lardo got blasted, whereas
>SMTUC had a halfway decent score (though The Gostak beat it for the
>golden banana). For one thing, SMTUC was written by a respected member
>of the IF community. It also had an obscenity warning, and it was more
>creative.

I hope the first wasn't significant. I hope the third reason was most
of it. SMTUC, whatever its flaws, was not a one-room game--although it
was much shorter than most of the other comp games. It used multimedia
effects more than anything else in that competition except for Carma,
and there was actually quite a bit of fairly subtle coding that went
into it. I don't know if anyone ever used the (provided) source code
and found it instructive, but there are some slightly funny bits in
there too. For example, Stiffy's stiffy is an excessively--even a
fascistically--pure bit of OO coding, gone, somehow, horribly, horribly
wrong.

Allow me to quote from the commentary on that code:

! Because turgidity is private (oh, don't we wish it were, for
! Captain Makane!), you must therefore go through the
! appropriate access methods (heh) to manipulate (heh) it.
!
! These methods:
! setStatus(x): sets turgidity to x (-128 <= x <= 127).
! An argument outside these values will be silently clipped (ow!) to
! -128 or 127.
! changeStatus(x): adds x to turgidity
! getStatus(): returns turgidity
! inflate(): adds one to turgidity
! deflate(): subtracts one from turgidity

Alas, expedience trumped sound programming practice, and the
animations--and especially trying to sync sound to them--turned into an
ugly kludgey mess of global variables and action-at-a-distance. If I
ever try something like this again, I'll probably use GWindows.

Adam

Kevin Buhr

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Nov 17, 2003, 10:14:00 PM11/17/03
to
normanpe...@sev.org (Norman Perlmutter) writes:
>
> I didn't expect a lot of people to give it high ratings, but I
> was quite surprised that it finished second to last. I thought there
> would be a few people who would give it ones for obscenity, and the
> rest would rate it in the 4-5 range because it's a somewhat funny
> game, but nothing particularly special, with very few ratings of 2 or
> 3.

I gave it a 1, and the sum total of my notes was:

- extremely annoying humour
- grammar errors
- why would you enter this in a competition?

Obscene? I didn't really notice or care. Insulting? Well, yes, but
only in the sense that the author had so little respect for my time
that he or she expected me to play a one-room concept game that served
as nothing but a showcase for painful patter stuffed to its linguistic
seams with Wit(TM), patent pending.

It's rather like being cornered by some guy in a bar who wants to blow
cigar smoke in your face while detailing his sexual exploits. It
might be a cigar of the highest quality, and the guy might be a hell
of a storyteller, but you still want to get the fuck out of there as
fast as humanly possible. (If only "xyzzy" worked in *that* situation.)

I don't really like one-room concept games (I gave "No Room" a 2), and
I'd rather not see another one unless it's at least a tenth as good as
Shade. I particularly resent it when people slap together little toy
games like Lardo and think it's fine to enter them in the Comp. If
Lardo had been an epic journey of a fat idiot and his rubber duck
crossing the street to get donuts, it might have been a whole
different story, so to speak.

On the other hand, I'm finding that the more games I play the less I
like the mimesis-raping "author chat" that is becoming ever more
popular as a cheap substitute for actual humour (cf. Amnesia, which
earned my other 1).

Lardo managed to cater to my combined dislike of one-room toy games
filled with author blather and so earned its 1 without managing to
personally insult or offend me in the least. Perhaps if I actually
*was* a fat, stupid guy with a rubber duck, it would have really hit
home (and so earned a 3 for emotional impact).

--
Kevin <bu...@telus.net>

Richard Bos

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Nov 18, 2003, 4:21:19 AM11/18/03
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normanpe...@sev.org (Norman Perlmutter) wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 10:12:36 GMT, r...@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl (Richard
> Bos) wrote:
>
> >normanpe...@sev.org (Norman Perlmutter) wrote:
> >
> >> No Room
> >
> >> It does not suffer from guess-the-verb or grammar problems, but
> >> it does contain at least one significant bug.
> >
> >I wasn't able to find one. Could you elaborate?
>

> Minor spoilers . . . .
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> You can put the rods into the lemon and then eat the rods and the
> lemon with the command "eat lemon."

Oh dear. How creative <g>.

> The game does not realize that you put it into an unwinnable state,

I'm not sure this is a bug, since the author provided a message for
eating the lemon in the first place, without mentioning the unwinnable
state.

> nor does it comment on the PC having any trouble eating the metal rods.

This, however, _is_ a bug.

Richard

Quintin Stone

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Nov 18, 2003, 7:16:20 PM11/18/03
to
On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Stas Starkov wrote:

> > I think this author is trying to win the golden banana of discord.

> Do you really think that a lot of people would be willing to rate this
> game quite high? I don't think so -- most of them will give a "1". (The
> Comp results supports that.)
>

> ....


>
> Reading several other reviews, I've noticed that a lot of people were
> wandering about a purpose of the game. No, I'm not the author of the
> game, but yes I gave the game "9". You can call me sick now. But let me
> explain my thoughts (see below).

I can see his point. You yourself gave it a 9, after all, even though you
think most people would give it a 1.

/====================================================================\
|| Quintin Stone O- > "You speak of necessary evil? One ||
|| Code Monkey < of those necessities is that if ||
|| Rebel Programmers Society > innocents must suffer, the guilty must ||
|| st...@rps.net < suffer more." -- Mackenzie Calhoun ||
|| http://www.rps.net/ > "Once Burned" by Peter David ||
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Stas Starkov

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Nov 20, 2003, 12:41:13 PM11/20/03
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"Quintin Stone" <st...@rps.net> wrote...

> On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Stas Starkov wrote:
>
> > > I think this author is trying to win the golden banana of discord.
>
> > Do you really think that a lot of people would be willing to rate this
> > game quite high? I don't think so -- most of them will give a "1". (The
> > Comp results supports that.)
> >
> > ....
> >
> > Reading several other reviews, I've noticed that a lot of people were
> > wandering about a purpose of the game. No, I'm not the author of the
> > game, but yes I gave the game "9".
>

> I can see his point. You yourself gave it a 9, after all, even though you
> think most people would give it a 1.

Look at the results: http://ifcomp.org/comp03/results.html

69 of 118 players gave the game "1"... 2 players gave "6", 5 -- "7".
Only one gave "8", only one (me) gave "9", only one gave "10".
Std. Dev. = 1.94 (while game ("Sweet Dreams") with hightest
Std. Dev. = 2.26 actually won the golden banana of discord). So?

Quintin Stone

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Nov 20, 2003, 1:06:06 PM11/20/03
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My point was, I can understand his original belief that the intent was to
win the golden banana. No one actually said Fat Lardo *did* win it.

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