|
Have you played this game?You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in. |
Playlists and Wishlists |
RSS Feeds New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page
|
|
Game Details
Language: English (en)
Current Version: 2 License: Freeware Development System: Inform 6 Baf's Guide ID: 1919
|
Awards
Nominee, Best Writing; Nominee, Best Story; Nominee, Best Individual NPC; Nominee, Best Use of Medium - 2002 XYZZY Awards
18th Place - 8th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2002)
Editorial Reviews
>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
[Q]uibbles aside, When Help Collides is a clever, innovative, and fiercely funny joyride.
See the full review
Tags
Member Reviews
| Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review |
Four-Part Clusterfuck, March 27, 2011A work of spectacularly ill-advised genius, packed with horrible, horrible design decisions but still pulling off some excellent ideas.
It's really four games, rather tenuously linked. This is not a terrible idea per se: if it had been called When Help Collides And Other Stories, no problem. The trick is that the first, When Help Collides, dispenses the codes required to unlock the other three when you win it. When Help Collides is a clever idea, but the implementation is disastrous: a smorgasbord of unintuitive new verbs combined with very low levels of feedback and a lot of death. But the codes are available from an accompanying file, which meant that it seemed pointless anyway -- except that getting the codes the hard way is necessary to make the games cohere. So. Yes. Horrible decisions piled on top of each other.
Of the remaining three games, Level 50 is a game about heroic-fantasy RPGs, and more or less forgettable; Parched Mesa is a too-brief horror Western; and A Bleach of Etiquette, the notable one. It's an organise-your-training-calendar game about a (somewhat alternate-world) geisha; in a week you have to brush up your skills enough to pass your Geisha Exams, or use patronage to cheat. The writing's strong if terse, and the game's strategic core makes for an engaging, deep puzzle; worth putting on the shelf beside Textfire Golf. It's still heavily flawed: the interface is awkward, it doesn't have enough hand-crafted content, and it's somewhat offensive.
I'm not quite sure what I just played. A meta-game about help systems, February 3, 2016This is a shortish parser game that has a main game and three subgames. You are the help system for several interactive fiction games, but something keeps malfunctioning.
I tried this game with and without the walkthrough, and it was honestly bewildering. You can spend a long time on things that turn out to be completely unimportant. You frequently have to repeat commands multiple times without feedback that you are on the right track. Several areas require you to wait and wait and wait and wait.
The three minigames are interesting; I believe they represent games that you could give help for.
One is a Geisha simulator, where you don't have the regular verbs, and you can only schedule clients and reserve rooms while training for your Geisha exam. This is randomized and hard.
Another is a Lovecraftian western. This one was confusing, but fun.
The last game was really very creative and fun. You are playing Dungeons and Dragons one-on-one with a Dungeon Master, and he becomes the parser. You have a character sheet, and quests, and so on. It was really fun, especially because the Dungeon Master is purposely bad.
Overall, a mixed bag. I feel like others would be less confused than me, but I found this game very confusing. The minigames were fun, though.
An exercise in frustration., February 14, 2012I want to like When Help Collides. Honestly, I do. But it goes far out of its way to make itself unlikeable. I realize that this is largely my problem. The game is well-written, for what it is. It wasn't game-killing bugs or boredom that kept me from finishing. It was the simple fact that the entire game is essentially a puzzle. Figuring out what you're meant to do and how to do it seems to be the primary challenge.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It just frustrates me as a player when a game plants its feet and adamantly refuses to give any indication of... well, anything, really. At the beginning, at least, you can't even get a complete description of the room you're in without bullying the parser.
An example, spoiling only the very beginning: (Spoiler - click to show)You start, after a turn or two of half-exposition, in a TARDIS-like ship, as an anthropomorphized IF help feature. The game tracks your approval rating, based on feedback from the stock adventure characters you can provide hints to with your automated help dispenser. Only there's something wrong with your equipment, making it only give out banal, nonsensical self-help advice.
Each disappointed character lowers your rating, and at less than 40%, game over. The uncooperative PC gets more frantic about the plummeting rating, growing more insistent that something must be done to fix things.
I played through this sequence three times, running out the timer looking for something, anything to indicate what needed to be done, fighting with the PC for something as simple as a thorough room description. Bear in mind, this is not lazy writing or coding, it's an intentional part of the puzzle.
After giving up and consulting a walkthrough, I discovered that the answer to my problem? (Spoiler - click to show)Exit the ship. The PC refuses to do so, twice. This leads you to an entirely new, but equally unintuitive part of the story.
My first timer-based death in that bit was as far as I got. I have no interest in typing in a walkthrough.
Despite all my frustrations, When Help Collides does have some things going for it. The writing is interesting, and the concept is fantastic. I just wish the gameplay was not as experimental as the idea behind it.
The bottom line: Well worth looking into if you're patient, or perhaps just better at thinking like the author than I am. If you want a game that makes Hitchhiker's Guide look downright friendly, you could do a hell of a lot worse.
When Help Collides on IFDB
Recommended Lists
When Help Collides appears in the following Recommended Lists:Distinctive Puzzle Style by Sam Kabo Ashwell
One of the most powerful techniques for rendering a game memorable is to build it around a unusual, interesting and consistent way of handling significant world interaction (or puzzles, if you prefer). It's also a difficult technique to...
Games about interactive fiction itself by MathBrush
This is hopefully my last list. These are games that comment on the nature of interactive fiction or the interactive fiction community itself. The quality of these games varies wildly, and this list doesn't attempt to sort by quality....
Polls
The following polls include votes for When Help Collides:Games that inspired you to MAKE a game. by MyTheory
Whether it was the witty dialogue, the charming atmosphere, or the cleverness of the puzzle - you played "this" game and it inspired you to write your own. Selfishly, I'm looking for my own inspiration, but I am also very, very curious...
Lost Treasures of the IF Comp by Molly
It seems that for every Comp game that's still talked about today (e.g., Slouching Towards Bedlam, Shade, Photopia, etc.), there's ten or so that have been almost completely forgotten; some of them even placed in the top ten or higher....
Links
This is version 3 of this page, edited by Paul O'Brian on 8 May 2022 at 9:13pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page