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apus.acd
competition release; also requires "apus.​dat"
Requires an Alan interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
apus.dat
competition release; also requires "apus.​acd"
Requires an Alan interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.

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The Adventures of the President of the United States

by Mikko Vuorinen

2003

(based on 10 ratings)
3 reviews

Game Details


Awards

21st Place - 9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2003)

Editorial Reviews

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

It's been a long time since I've played a Mikko Vuorinen game. The last one was his 1999 comp entry King Arthur's Night Out, which bizarrely recast King Arthur as a henpecked husband in a domestic farce. Some people, like Adam Cadre, apparently found this hilarious, but it mostly left me cold. Still, I was pleased to see Vuorinen's name on a comp entry this year, and playing TAOTPOTUS felt like a reunion with a seldom-seen relative -- even though its behavior was often exasperating, I couldn't help feeling a certain fondness for it, both because of its reliably predictable traits and because of my sense of shared history with it.
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SPAG
[...] The game's basic idea has potential and the room-country design is refreshing, but the game falls to its technical problems. If the author would've given some more time to actual programming and to the room descriptions, this would've been a quite entertaining game. (T. Henrik Anttonen)
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Number of Reviews: 3
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Nice big idea, impeachable details, January 4, 2023
by Andrew Schultz (Chicago)

The idea behind the game is wonderful--the President escapes from his boring job in the White House and visits various countries. Only the big ones, plus Finland and Sweden, get a room. The puzzles are apolitical and silly, and they are generally funny once you figure them out. APUS also gives many funny default responses and "You can't go that way" replacements.

Unfortunately, it's not big enough ("South America's not interesting,") and it neve builds on the gags. The few puzzles that veer from recognizing gently amusing stereotypes are poorly cued. While there's no guess-the-verb, there's plenty of trivial commands semi-logically changing the environment, or the effect of other trivial commands.

There's such a contrast between what you do to leave the White House (nothing unclean, but imagining ANY recent President doing this makes me giggle) and explaining that the White House is pretty boring, and you're bored, except for some generic details, that the game feels grossly unpolished.

This is too bad, because I don't think an American could make a game like this, with such a neat title, and stay apolitical. And yet, the author couldn't be expected to know that a West Wing would make the opening puzzle a lot better.

So, more countries and better descriptions--the potential's there, as I enjoyed many quips and default command responses--would've made this game memorable for more than the title and opportunities missed. Not that I regret playing it. I enjoyed filling in the details I wished the game had, but others may just get exasperated.

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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Short and funny, April 25, 2009
by Otto (France)

The Adventures of the President of the United States is a funny game you can play in 15 minutes. It's highly caricatural and can remind of some old point n click adventure games (you can travel through various countries with just the normal compass directions). Some puzzles are not hinted enough I think, and you have to carefully examine everything to get new clues and open new possibilities.

I didn't manage to finish it though, even with the walkthrough, because an object I was supposed to get wasn't at the expected place (Spoiler - click to show)(the opener in Russia), so I suppose it was just a bug (maybe replaying it with a different configuration may solve this).

It was enjoyable and diverting anyway.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
As president, travel over the whole world, August 1, 2017
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

In this game, you play as the president of the united states, and every room is a country of the world.

It was quite entertaining to see that I could travel to Mexico to the south and Canada to the north.

The writing and implementation was a bit spotty, though, and it was hard to guess what to do next.

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The Adventures of the President of the United States on IFDB

Recommended Lists

The Adventures of the President of the United States appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Favorite ALAN games by Anya Johanna DeNiro
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Polls

The following polls include votes for The Adventures of the President of the United States:

One City or State or Country per Room by Andrew Schultz
I'm interested in works where you have one city or state or country (or city-state) per room. David Welbourn noted that this may apply to a significant sub-area of a work, too, and in this case I'd like to allow Greg Boettcher's Nothing...




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