Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

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AAS Masters, by Stephen Granade

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Fool's Errand, June 30, 2011
by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle)
Related reviews: hoax, april fool's, combat

AAS was an extended April Fool's joke, a quickly-developed IF platform intended to be deeply horrible for both authors and players to use, full of every bad design decision conceivable. It provided a lot of entertainment to those involved, but is not one of the more enduring IF jokes. AAS Masters is the final installment in the prank, one of the longest games written in AAS and certainly the most playable; it is, nonetheless, a snarky injoke authored in an intentionally awful system, and will probably be of little interest to anyone who wasn't involved.

Structurally, the game forefronts the platform's crude and ill-balanced combat system; you explore a big sparse map, defeating members of the (fictitious) AAS community in order to reveal their identities. Granade manages the not insignificant task of crafting a fair, playable AAS game, and the result is something likely to take no more than fifteen minutes.

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