Jon Doe – Wildcard Nucleus

by Olaf Nowacki profile

Mystery
2019

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Flawed but fun James Bond riff, October 1, 2021

Jon Doe - Wildcard Nucleus is a British spy/detective story in the James Bond mode, involving murder, nuclear energy, retro computing technology, and slightly problematic gender relations. The writing isn’t quite good enough for me to be entirely sold on the setting and atmosphere. The first character we meet being named Miss Bestbeforedates isn’t a promising start, for example, and there are descriptions that make no sense (there’s a character who must be in his late fifties “according to the cut of his suit and the pattern on his tie” - I didn’t know tie patterns were quite that specific), but it has heart. A rather formidable vocabulary is sometimes in evidence: I came across alopecia and pomadised.

It’s quite playable, with many minor parser snags but nothing that causes excessive difficulty. A rather annoying one appears in a scene that’s otherwise quite fun, when you’re working with a certain model of computer that played a role in the history of IF, and you have to explicitly say TYPE X ON COMPUTER for every command. Even Dunnet did better than that.

There are a few good puzzles. I found at least one that probably should have been hinted better, but there are a couple of satisfying moments when you get good results from a course of action that would be unlikely in real life, but seem natural in the game. However, the puzzle and story end up being a little thin for the game’s length, with a few too many turns spent driving back and forth between several locations in your Jaguar.

On the whole, despite some problems, this was playable and fun, and a good addition to the comp.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Somewhat disappointing parody, December 27, 2019
by Stian
Related reviews: IFComp 2019

Jon Doe - Wildcard Nucleus clearly alludes to the classic James Bond stories, most notably in its opening scene, but generally lacks the humour to be characterised as a good parody. In fact, the absence of humour throughout the game becomes rather noticeable after introducing two silly names in the beginning: Miss Bestbeforedate and Adolf von Bolzplatz (Adolf of the football field). I do get the feeling that the game was intended to be essentially parodic and funny, but that this focus was lost during production.

While the descriptions generally are good and paints a decently vivid picture of retro-modernity, some of the language bears the mark of a rudimentary translation. This, along with several bugs and the fact that little of the described scenery is implemented, made Jon Doe a somewhat disappointing experience. The puzzles are also few and not that interesting – and I still got stuck twice. However, I would probably not have been equally disappointed if it weren’t for the promising premise and the intriguing blurb. Jon Doe has a lot of potential, but requires more work to fulfill it.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Short but entertaining, November 17, 2019
by Denk
Related reviews: inform

This is a little straightforward story-driven parser game. You play the role of Jon Doe, probably the best MI5 agent. You are given an assignment: Investigate the death of an informant employed at a tech company. There are puzzles but they are mostly easy. The game takes place in small areas, which you never return to, so you don't really need to make a map.

I found the writing to be good and sufficient for this kind of game. The implementation was usually good, though a few places, there could have been more responses to the things you can try, especially conversation. However, I managed to complete the game without hints, so it never became a big issue. Overall, I found this to be a very good game.

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- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 17, 2019

IFComprehensive

"You might be interested in this game if: You like Bond parodies but want one that isn’t a slapstick farce."

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- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), October 20, 2019

- jaclynhyde, October 16, 2019

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A James Bond tribute as a text adventure, October 8, 2019

This game puts you in the role of a secret agent who is similar to James Bond. The player drives a Jaguar, encounters beautiful women, uses spy gadgets, and deals with corrupt individuals.

The implementation and polish isn't all the way there. There are several typos in the game, which becomes sort of a joke when the main character mentions 'incrementing evidence' and an NPC corrects them. It's clear the author has an exact sequence of events they want the player to do, but it's not clear how the player is meant to achieve them without the walkthrough. The walkthrough itself seems confused with directions at times.

There's some female objectification here, including ASCII art of what I think is a nude woman but possibly may be something else. It seemed typical of James Bond films, but those aren't exactly a good role model.

Overall, I think that a game this size probably could have benefited from beta testers with experience with IFComp games. There were some testers though, and it's clear they made the game better (the car and elevator especially work well). I think it just needed more work. Great parser games can take hundreds of hours of time, or use coding tricks to limit players' actions and look like they took hundreds of hours to make.

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