Reviews by Victor Gijsbers

joke

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View this member's reviews by tag: bleak brute-force Combat Comedy connect CYOA dungeon crawl fantasy horror IF Comp 2007 IFDB Spelunking infocom innovative joke linguistic logic one-room parody phonebooth Political politics puzzle random death rogue-like short snack SpeedIF time travel unfair win on the first attempt
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Pick up the pine box and die, by Alan Smithee

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Joke without a twist, June 15, 2008
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)
Related reviews: Short, joke, one-room, phonebooth

(This game was part of BoucherComp. The premise if the Comp was: "No one has ever escaped from Lowell Prison. Why? Because there's only two ways out of here. One is dead in a pine box, and the other is that big wide-open gate over there, which I ask you seriously to please, please stay away from.")

Okay, so this is a SpeedIF game that is based on the infamous Pick up the Phone Booth and Die. It is, therefore, a very short and very sparsely implemented joke. But it is a joke without a twist. It is just PuTPBad plus the premise of the Comp. As far as I could ascertain, nothing else has been done with it.

This game didn't make me laugh, and that is pretty fatal for a one-joke game.

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Conan Kill Everything, by Ian Haberkorn

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Everything? Yes, everything!, January 3, 2008
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)
Related reviews: short, joke, parody

It is a good thing that Robert E. Howard is not around to see what happened to his barbarian, Conan. Though his original stories are by no means great literature, neither are they the violent, mindless trash that later generations have associated with Conan the Barbarian.

Conan Kill Everything takes that later tradition to its logical extreme. Conan has found the evil wizard, and in order to exact his revenge, he kills everything. Absolutely everything.

In order to kill everything, Conan must solve a couple of very standard puzzles. There are some humorous elements, including the speeches of the wizard and the final move which you need to make to win the game; but in the end, the game is totally forgettable. The jokes are not brilliant; the puzzles are not themselves interesting; and it parodies something that is already so far beyond the limits of good taste and serious intention that it does not allow for parody.

Since you can play the entire game in 15 minutes, you still might want to give it a try.

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9:05, by Adam Cadre

6 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Another Day in the Life, January 2, 2008
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)
Related reviews: short, joke

You wake up in bed, ready to go to work. Yes, just an another day in the life... but this very short game has an interesting twist at the end. Replaying is a must.

I recommend this piece, mainly because it's going to take less than 9 minutes and 5 second of your time to enjoy it. I give it only 3 stars out of 5: even a funny joke just doesn't ascend to the same heights as a great story.

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