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The Absolute Worst IF Game in History

by Dean Menezes

Fantasy
2008

(based on 30 ratings)
10 reviews

Game Details


Awards

35th Place - 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2008)

Editorial Reviews

SPAG
It is [...] a waste of time- I was going to write a "painful" waste of time, but it's not even that. Painful, metaphorically speaking, maybe gets you in the hospital with lots of beeping machines, strange patients, and free cable. This is just a papercut. (by Nate Dovel)
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
could be worse, November 23, 2008
by Jeremy Freese (Evanston, IL)

And, as a result, is not worth looking at. Although I view it as more of a conceptual experiment than the pure troll endeavor others do. I mean, it is an interesting question, what would the worst IF game be like? This game would represent a coherent view of the answer under the constraint that it had to be something one could code in under fifteen minutes.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
What., November 18, 2008

There is a maze. You enter the maze and wander around randomly until you either win (with a standard victory message) or die (as above - standard death message). That's all. That's all there is. Do not waste your time. There is nothing amusing or interesting about this so-called "game".

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
A review and a request, May 4, 2012
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

I'm not big on pointing out a bad game is very bad. Eventually, there are only so many ways to say it. So why does this game merit a review, as a 5- or 6-room maze?

I managed to map it, or I think I did, by seeing (Spoiler - click to show)if the room I went to had a description or not and undoing a whole lot. This is an interesting exercise in logical deduction--and if you like this sort of thing, it's worth doing once if only to say 'Hey, I'm better at this when the Zork I thief maze scared me and I actually had ITEMS to leave around.' It is not as potentially hair-pulling as some guess-the-verb games without walkthroughs. In theory. However, GtVs have plot and humor, and you can see what the author is thinking later, and you can pretend he really meant to X or Y.

So my practical side is satisfied that this game is just awful. But my solve-everything side noted that Googling showed you apparently CAN get to the last room and get that item. But straightforward logic doesn't seem to work. Or maybe you have to visit rooms in a certain order. So I feel half-guilty writing a review for a game like this because it may make someone else try the same thing I did.

Yet at the same time I think anyone who likes to play with fire (or the occasional bad game) doesn't deserve to suffer more than five minutes through. If there is anyone out there with a walkthrough, or who remembers, "Oh, you do this," it'd be community service to post it.

But please don't try to play the game again if you don't!

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The Absolute Worst IF Game in History on IFDB

Polls

The following polls include votes for The Absolute Worst IF Game in History:

The worst IF ever? by theqbasicwizard
I'm wanting to do an episode for the podcast that deals with only the worst possible IF games ever programmed? You know the kind that if you would have played it for another minute longer, that you would have never played another IF ever...

Absolute worst IF by NOM3RCY
There's a surprising lack of a "worst IF" poll. I felt that I had to make it. We've all played the classics, the Colossal Caves, the Zorks, the Anchorheads, the Slouching Towards Bedlams. What are the games that you should never play?

Games with misleading titles by Cendare
I was thinking about "Nothing But Mazes" and how it, in fact, contains things that aren't mazes. What other games have titles that don't quite reflect what's inside?




This is version 6 of this page, edited by MathBrush on 8 February 2017 at 4:53pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page