Ratings and Reviews by Divarin
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classic text adventure, May 7, 2011Not meaning that this game in particular is a classic, only that the nature of it is typical of what you'd expect in a 1980's-1990's text adventure: 2 word parsing, limited carrying capacity, limited responses.
The biggest pain is when you make a mistake at one point and don't pay for that mistake until much later on in the game. This, coming long after you've saved and overwritten the previous save, then makes the game un-winnable without restarting from scratch.
But as I play this game I'm reminded that this is how these types of games always used to be and I may have gotten a bit spoiled by modern day IF's which tend to move away from puzzles and (in some cases) even being a game at all and try to just tell a story.
In short, frustration is the inevitable result of a challenge and without a challenge there is no real sense of accomplishment. So, once I recover from my current frustrations with my last failure (Spoiler - click to show)If you want to free up inventory, don't just DROP NITRO, apparently the character takes the word DROP far too literally I'll try again.
interesting, May 6, 2011obviously not an interactive fiction, but an innovative, hackery, I would stop short of saying abusive use of the z machine.
not really fun as there are better racing games, and it isn't a text adventure so the fun factor isn't really relevant here.
However I like ASCII Cars just as a demonstration/proof of concept of what is possible using the z-machine emulators.
It's like emotional sudoku, May 6, 2011This is a short game that you can probably finish in about 15-20 min if you see what's going on.
I compare it to sudoku because it has the same property that if you think about what moves you make A) it's fun, B) you arrive at a solution much sooner. but you can also win the game without thinking at all by trying different combinations. If you were an unthinking computer you might try an exhaustive backtracking algorithm which always finds the solution but isn't much fun.
Being a human, and understanding emotions and the connections between them and the elements in the game, you can make more logical choices.
I personally feel the game has a subtle pro-Christian message, though being an atheist myself that neither increased or decreased my opinion of the game, but in the end (Spoiler - click to show)it's all about forgiveness. This, whether Christian or not, is a good moral to any story.
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