Ratings and Reviews by gene666
View this member's profile
Ancient resource management game, interesting for a while, February 25, 2020There's no story, so it's not interactive fiction or a text adventure, really. At each turn, you can buy land, sell land, plant land, & distribute food. By twiddling these numbers, you try to grow your city. At each turn, some people starve, some move into the city, rats destroy food, & the price of land changes.
It's old. It's cute. It's a reminder of the early programming projects people do (or did) in school in the 1970s or early 1980s.
For what it's worth, I found "hammurabi.c" in the hammurabi.zip file on IF-Archive, compiled that & played that version. Did not play the Hugo version.
Not a full game, but not bad, February 13, 20203 pages (intro, most the game, ending). Not a plot, though has a point. Was interesting enough that I played through it a few times. I'd say the author was getting to know the authoring system (& is doing well with that).
Retro & cute, April 11, 2019I played a Python 3 port of the original BASIC game. It's at { https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/python/tower.py }. I counted 14 rooms. About 6 things to do (arguably "puzzles"), one of them had me stumped for a while. Can finish it in about an hour if you don't hurry.
I encountered two states in which the game was impossible to finish. I believe they were by design.
What's Not So Good:
- No plot. No NPCs.
- Super minimal, colorless room descriptions.
- 2-word parser.
What's Good:
+ Historical interest. (Decades ago, lots of people typed this in from a magazine & ran it.)
+ 2-word parser is adequate for this world.
+ Short & easy, for when you want to get your game on without taxin' yer noggin'.
1-4 of 4