antimony

Well, the first batch coming out of the shuffle is Very IFComp. One short-cute parser puzzler, one Dramatic Web Game About Dark Subjects, and an old-school puzzler in a format I'm not sure I can play. In we go!

( Reviews/Spoilers for Extreme Omnivore, The Mysterious Stories of Caroline, and Treasure Hunt in the Amazon )

Well, life got away from me, but I've played a few more games -- reviews inside the Read More for Within a circle of water and sand, Tower, Bullhockey, and smooch.click.
( Read more... )

Next batch, a bunch more short web games. Let's Rob A Bank, Let's Explore Geography!, Instruction Set, +=x. And two longer games: Bogeyman and Escape from Dinosaur Island.

( Reviews and spoilers inside )

antimony = antimony. Same username(s), same me. I'm not intending to delete my accounts, and I don't feel the need to back up ancient melodramatic posts, so my configuration will stay the same. I check my friendslist/readingcircle both places.

Ugh, why does searching for recipes bring up so many freaky patriarchal-devotional-mommy-wifey blogs? (And why do they have to have actually good recipes but if I made them the creep might wear off on me.

Ew. But I do think I know what I'm making for the work dessert potluck that is a) simple to make with one hand bandaged, b) fits in a 9x13 because I have a carrying bag for 9x13s that is easy to take on the T and c) actually tastes good and is not a repeat of what other people are bringing (i.e. not chocolate), at least not the last time I checked.

(The answer: key lime bars, since the internet (wifey blogs and big corporate food entities agree!) says that you can, in fact, put a standard key lime pie recipe in a 9x13 pan and end up with key lime bars that you can cut and serve in a reasonable fashion. The hardest part will be separating the eggs. I was originally going to do lemon pound cake, because it's super-simple, but I'd have to carry it and that's a pain.)

I guess I updated on FB but not here -- Tigger was very ill, and we lost her a week ago. Today we scattered her ashes in the yard.

Salem seems to have entirely bounced back from her health crisis, which is good, although we're still a little worried about the Italy trip, even if we have an excellent pet-sitter and a friend coming to give her some company.

( Here she is, a few years back, excited to explore the construction we were doing on the house. )

Had the plague that is going around; it was vile, and dphilli1 got it almost as badly, which is unusual. It's mostly departed, leaving only the fact that I managed to spittake/cough tea all over my laptop keyboard, rendering it inert (and the laptop cranky in various ways).

So, new laptop time. Everything is in the wrong place and strangely flat. Wah. I will be back to my usual lurking ways shortly, although since I never post much of anything I'm not sure anyone noticed I was less lurking.

And here we have it; the last few games of the Comp.

( Sigmund's Quest )
( Krypteia )
( Jesse Stavro's Doorway )
( Paradox Corps )
( Begscape, also contains more thoughts on With Those We Love Alive )
( Origins )

And now to score stuff; I am one of those folks who curves scores; I always give 10s to my favorite game(s) even if I don't think they're perfect, and I generally use the whole range; I will be giving a 1 this year. Basically I put them in order from Best to Worst and then start assigning numbers. The number of really small games in the Comp is throwing me a bit; how do I rate a very good, completely bug/issue free, very short game compared to a mostly very-good long game with one or two issues? Not sure, but I have a tentative list.

I think these reviews may be coming off crankier than I am; I'm a software quality engineer and thus my reaction to "here, try this" is to list flaws. It's what I do. That said, this was not my favorite batch of games, so this batch is pretty harsh.

( One Night Stand )
( The Black Lily )
( Following Me, also has spoilers for The Urge )
( Hill 160 )
( Tower )
( Inward Narrow Crooked Lanes )

Next up: Creatures Such as We, Hunger Daemon, Enigma, HHH.exe, The Entropy Cage, Ugly Oafs, Laterna Magica.

I feel like perhaps I should say more on how I rate games; I've scored a bunch of these competitions before, but the last time was in 2000 or so. And I haven't played much IF from the years in between; I've missed many chapters in innovation, both technological and artistic, and so I don't always know where a competition game is doing something new and where it's doing something that was done better in 2008 but I haven't seen before. I am not worrying about that, and am scoring on whether I liked it.

Also, I have two platforms to play on: an aged Mac laptop running OS X 10.5.8 and the corresponding version of Safari, and a version 1 iPad, also running its corresponding Safari. Both can be bogged down by very basic websites, and both are a little flaky. I've been playing most of the web games on the iPad while commuting on the T, and the interpreter games at home after I write down notes on the web games. (I have, at the point, played almost all the web games, but actually editing my notes hasn't caught up.) (And the numbering sequence of these reviews reflects the original shuffle list I had; if I was at home I played the next interpreter game on it, but I was playing web games as I felt like it.)

( The Contortionist )
( Fifteen Minutes )
( The Urge )
At this point I got tired of doing the cutesy summaries, plus the next group included some games that felt like the author's first IF, and being snarky about the shortcomings of a first game isn't something I want to do, because all of them had something good about them and I'd like to see their authors keep writing.

Though the next game wasn't one of them; in fact, it wasn't the first game from this author in this competition.

( Zest )
( Unform )
( Raik )
( Missive )
( And yet it moves )

Next up: The Secret Vaults of Kas the Betrayer, Tea Ceremony, Transparent, AlethiCorp, Arqon, Icepunk, Excelsior.