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Fake game listings for games that could have been, April 6, 2024This game has a genuinely funny title, which I like.
In ATGIWHMFSIIHTTWIDNOWTANN, you are provided a list of game seeds the author was interested in. You can click each one to see the seed itself, either visual or text, which honestly was great; in the actual seedcomp planting round, you have to download the text prompts individually which can get really annoying, so copying the structure of this game to make a ‘hub game’ could be really nice.
Anyway, once you select a subset of these, you can push a mysterious-looking ‘alchemize!’ button. Now, there are a lot of seeds here, so there would be hundreds of combinations. But the game automatically culls things to combos the author thought of, so clicking one box deletes most others.
I was delighted to see that the function of ‘alchemize!’ was to make a fake ifdb page for the game! It comes complete with summary, reviews, and votes on those reviews.
It was really fun seeing what someone’s perception of IFDB was as expressed through the various voices they invented. It was pretty funny seeing things like two-word negative reviews that got a single 0/1 helpfulness vote.
I found it interesting that the fake reviews quoted or summarized large portions of the game explicitly. I know the reason for that was to communicate to us, the people reading this, what the games would have actually been like. But actual reviews tend not to include so much stuff (like a ranking of characters in a game), probably because people read reviews before playing and don’t want to get spoiled. It made me wonder, what if we did include more stuff like that? In spoilers, of course.
The one thing I didn’t really like was the color choices. The fake IFDB page had black text on a dark grey background (I tried two browsers just to check). I could read it but only barely, so I went into the console and edited the text to be easier to see. Might just be a me-getting-old thing, though.
Very fun to see IFDB represented this way.