Reviews by SqueeglesMcGee
View this member's profile1-5 of 5
Buggy but playable and enjoyable, December 18, 2019Played this game in its original form (back in the day) and in the non-competition form (today). The story is good, and I always found it cathartic to play not for points but instead to increase satisfaction in life’s joys with the ultimate goal of quitting an unliked job. However, typos (a shrimp in a boiler being described as a shrimp in a bottle) and programming bugs (in relation to a mite, and I’ll say no further) do not lend to a fully rounded 5 star review.
Jim and Eric's Excellent Adventure , December 8, 2019Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret is a fun and well-written, if lamentably short, text adventure. The puzzles are well-executed, and are not overly difficult. I was interested in the auto-correct feature (which took me by surprise with my first typo); though imperfect (it mistook my intentional “glove” for “love”), it is a vast improvement on the standard TADS reminder to use the OOPS command. The gentle nudges to input text when I had sat too long in thought were annoying to this seasoned player, but I was interested enough in the feature itself to leave it enabled to see what else it might nudge me about. And that is a really nice feature for brand new players.
Clever programming aside, the story was engaging and enjoyable. Ultimately I just wish that the game had been longer and that I had had more time to interact with a certain character.
As a beginning TADS programmer, I appreciate having access to the source code and will doubtless dig in to see the details I missed on my first run through.
My standard for what constitutes a good game is, Is it enjoyably replayable? MPNS is, and is also favorably memorable.
Interactive fiction only, lacks replayability, October 27, 2019When this game first came out, it was the first "html-style" text adventure game I had ever played; with the exception of Eric the Unready's hybrid of graphics and text-input, I had never played a text adventure game which involved anything more than inputting text and certainly had never seen a text-only input game use color changes on screen as in Photopia. I remember being favorably impressed at the time, especially since the colors changes are influenced by the story itself.
However, the novelty fades on replaying - even 20 years later, when some of the details of the story had faded from my memory: I am underwhelmed by a game which requires next to no interaction from me. Personally, I enjoy leisurely text adventures with perhaps several different endings and the opportunity to explore, fail, ferret out solutions, and interact with the fictional world. In other words, I like to partake in a story and have an investment in its outcome.
Photopia affords none of this whatsoever. There is no adventure to this story, and there is nothing the end user can do to alter the outcome. The end user is steadily pushed through from scene to scene, with the only choice being a handful of conversation topics, all of which lead to the same certain conclusion. There are few things to actually 'do.' This is much like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book... but all the pages to which you turn ultimately take you to the same endgame/red light.
Photopia's publication seemed, at least to me, to begin a trend in departure from text adventure to a true "interactive fiction" genre, where the author has a story to tell and is determined to have you read it. In retrospect to my first-time playthrough and in combination with my recent replaying, I am confident in saying that while this worked for a one-time storytelling, Photopia does not hold up to repeated replaying.
Extra star given for its discussion of precious metals.
A classic which just needs a little more fleshing out, October 25, 2019This game is one of the first "modern" IF games that I played (probably my first download after playing Adventure), and the story has stuck with me through the years; although I couldn't remember all the details prior to this evening's replaying, I knew there was a part with a certain cute semiaquatic carnivorous mammal coming up which I liked.
The game cleverly allows several different endings, and it is a joy to go back through the game and retry all of them. The puzzles, though challenging, are not impossible. Unfamiliar with the Russian rhymes mentioned in another user's review, but quite familiar with Soviet cinema, I giggled at Montgomery's off-handed mention of the "irony of fate," surely a reference to the title of the 1975 classic comedy (which I have begun insisting that we watch in my home every New Years; Andrei Myagkov is my soul).
My major quibble with the game is that it needs a few more details - for example, descriptions of exits are not consistently available, making parts of the game seem much more difficult than they really are: more than once, I circled an area, not realizing I just needed to go north. (That is not a spoiler.) Moreover, some items described in the body of the room description have no description of their own as a decoration. For example, a non-player character handles a garment, but when you try to interact with or examine the garment, the garment does not exist - "I don't know the word ____." These are minor details, but considering that (1) all descriptions are part of an already-rich and rewarding Firebird world, and (2) Montgomery's humorous descriptions and in-jokes are so accessible, cross-linguistic, and pleasantly ubiquitous, it is disappointing not to be able to dig down into the details to find extra easter-eggs.
Overall, however, I give it 4.5 stars out of 5 - I must round up to a full 5-star review, because even for these missing details, the game is incredibly full and rich, and there are details yet to be discovered. Also, Vasilii's NPC is a delight, and he earns an extra half-star on his own. In another 20 years, I will happily play this game again - indeed, most likely far sooner than that.
Remains a favorite, October 23, 2019This game, a cross between graphic and text adventures, remains one of my very favorites. Its cultural references (to SNL characters, to Mel Brooks films, to beer commercials) somehow do not feel dated and retain a certain freshness; all the while, its own jokes are hilarious and clever, and require the player to occasionally think in puns. The game is not short (which is probably to be expected since it was originally a commercially published game) and its multiple different puzzles and scenes are satisfying in their depth. May not be for younger players since some portions are a little PG-13.
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