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SpeedIF08.zip
Contains CHEF.GAM
Requires a TADS interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

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You are a Chef!

by Dan Shiovitz profile

Humor
2000

(based on 49 ratings)
11 reviews

Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Writing - 2000 XYZZY Awards

Editorial Reviews

Baf's Guide


One of SpeedIF's gems. Pure nonsense, but nonsense of a highly enthusiastic and infectious sort. Very small and easy.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

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Member Reviews

5 star:
(3)
4 star:
(9)
3 star:
(19)
2 star:
(10)
1 star:
(8)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 11
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Not funny, January 29, 2009
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)

You are a Chef! is solidly within the "look, I have written a really bad game!" school of comedy. We can see this from the very first line: "HELLO CHEF!!!!!1". The string of exclamation marks ends with a '1' because the fictional 'n00b' author put his finger off of the Shift-key a little too early.

The main problem with this approach to comedy is that an intentionally bad game is still a bad game. To take badness and elevate it to another level is possible, but very hard; and I doubt that taking a straightforward approach to it is the way to go. See Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective" for a non-straightforward, and much more successful, example. There, a separate "commentary" track is used to make fun of the source material. In You are a Chef!, we are just playing the very bad game.

Nor is the sheer absurdity of the events enough to make the player chuckle. Absurdity is only funny if there is some method behind it. Random objects falling from the sky simply do not qualify as a good joke.

Perhaps the dreariness of the game is best demonstrated by this exchange:

Iron safe falls from the sky!
It lands on top of clown and breaks open!

>x safe
In the iron safe you see a MYSTERY INGREDIENT.

>take ingredient
Taken.

>x it
I cannot tell you! It is a mystery!!


If you thought that was funny, please play this game.

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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Zany, November 27, 2007
by Tracy Poff (Hamlin, West Virginia, United States)
Related reviews: Speed-IF 8

This is a pleasant and zany little piece of SpeedIF. It's positively nonsensical, but so enthusiastically so as to be quite amusing. There's no real puzzle--walking about typing 'take all' would be sufficient to solve it--but it's brief enough that it's oddness alone is enough to sustain it. How can one not love a game that opens with "HELLO CHEF!!!!!1 You must make FOOD! You have a list! First to food wins!"?

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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Very, very silly, November 26, 2007
by Kake (London, England)
Related reviews: Dan Shiovitz, ***, Speed IF

It's silly, it's fun, it has a monkey in it, and the goal is to make soup. What more could you want? (It's Speed IF, so don't expect it to be typo-free.) Effectively puzzleless.

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See All 11 Member Reviews

You are a Chef! on IFDB

Recommended Lists

You are a Chef! appears in the following Recommended Lists:

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Polls

The following polls include votes for You are a Chef!:

Brilliant trolling games by Not Troll
Some games are just that bad, some are so bad it's good, and a few are obviously trolling. Yet, are there games that troll so much that they start to be brilliant? Or even those that seems to be trolling that turn out to be brilliant...

Best Short Games (5-60 minutes) by Sasha Davidovna
I'm pretty new to IF and am having a lot of fun, but in between a toddler and a job and other real life stuff, I'm having trouble finding time to finish many of the longer games I want to play. Can you please recommend me some fun and/or...

The Most Humorous Scenarios /Characters in IF by Canalboy
I was recently re-essaying Castle Ralf and if you "Cogitate" in a certain location there is a seemingly authentic sequence which appears to be formatting your C: drive. As this was a DOS game from 1987 it must have frightened the...

See all polls with votes for this game




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