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

Rating: ****

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (19 Dec 2001)

SpeedIF08.zip (149.38 KB)

TADS executable

speedIF_8.html (6.96 KB)

solution

When you find yourself in public wearing nothing but a shirt, and nobody seems to mind, it's a safe bet that you're in a dream sequence. This particular dream quest straddles the boundary between the odd (a vending machine that dispenses shoes) and the crude (a urination puzzle) as you struggle to obtain pants. Contains red herrings. The ending thrusts you into an unrelated plot - apparently, this is the first chapter of an unfinished larger work.

Rating: ***

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (19 Dec 2001)

midpoints.zip (54.37 KB)

Z-code 5 executable (version: 1)

Standard fantasy scenario: fetch artifacts to lift curse on kingdom. Tolerable prose, good sense of expanse. Unplayably buggy under both DOS and Linux: save/restore doesn't work under Windows, and in both versions some crucial items and characters, including the historian who's supposed to tell you about your quest at the beginning, are unmentioned in the room descriptions and undetectable without consulting the walkthrough. This is probably a bug in the JACL interpreter rather than the game scripts, but the game scripts are not compatible with more recent versions of JACL.

Rating: *

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (21 Dec 2001)

1req.txt (498 bytes)

Readme

eldor.jac (164.18 KB)

JACL source code

eldor.ps (18.69 KB)

JACL source code

jacl.con (28 bytes)

JACL source code (configuration file)

jacl.elf (58.37 KB)

Linux executable (version: 1996 competition release, requires libc5)

jacl.exe (102.11 KB)

MS-DOS executable (version: 1996 competition release)

jacl.pif (545 bytes)

Windows shortcut file

walkthru (1.98 KB)

Walkthrough

A pleasant and reasonably easy jaunt through the countryside of a sort of Edwardian fantasy world at a time when there's no great treasure to unearth or evil wizard to defeat. You're a landed gentleman in pursuit of seven escaped horses, each named for a significant quality of character (Courage, Defiance, etc.) I was impressed with how good-natured it all is: all the NPC's are friendly and eager to help, pretty much all the areas are described as pleasant, picturesque, or elegant (to the point where this constitutes a weakness in the prose), and everything the player does exhibits goodwill and strength of character.

Rating: ****

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (29 Dec 2001)

chasing.zip (58.86 KB)

Alan executable (version: 1.1)

chasing.acd (141.00 KB)

Alan executable (version: 1.0, original competition entry, also need chasing.dat)

chasing.dat (98.00 KB)

Alan executable (version: 1.0, original competition entry, also need alan.acd)

solution.txt (920 bytes)

solution

A game with an old-school feel, set a haunted manor during the 18th century, with a backstory involving smugglers and betrayal. Rambling and full of deadly spooks. Half the screen is devoted to text, the other half to a map drawn in text characters. Full-sentence parser that doesn't understand pronouns. Has some satisfying mechanical puzzles, some cryptic instructions to follow without a lot of feedback on whether you're following them correctly, a few spots where you have to refer to objects that aren't mentioned explicitly, and one crucial piece of godawful noun resolution where it doesn't recognise the adjectives given in the output text.

Rating: ***

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (29 Dec 2001)

skull.zip (65.66 KB)

MS-DOS executable (version: 3.1)

skull.sol (8.65 KB)

solution

This is not a complete game. It isn't even a complete demo. You can play it for about a half an hour until the point where the Unlikely Hero recovers the ampoule of Secret Formula from the Evil Genius's Laboratory, but then you run out of things to do and the game doesn't bother ending. There is one interesting thing about it, though: you can toggle the tense. Everything is in the past tense by default, but you can change it to present tense at will. If you want to see how to do that kind of thing in TADS, check out the source code. Beyond that, it's a fairly typical, if truncated, puzzle game.

Rating: ***

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (29 Dec 2001)

pastense.zip (263.18 KB)

TADS executable (version: 1), TADS source code

A satirical exploration of the mid-80's British adventure game scene, with scenes set at the offices of various game companies as well as inside their games. Minimalist, with only a few interactive objects - the real point of the thing is to wander around and chuckle at the jokes in the room descriptions. Unfortunately, you probably won't get a lot of them unless you're British and were into adventure games in the mid 80's. Features occasional stroked-in illustrations.

Rating: **

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (29 Dec 2001)

delta4.zip (747.60 KB)

Spectrum executable

zenobi48k.zip (7.11 MB)

Spectrum executable (in the subfolder "GI Games/Fergus M")

More of what Quest for the Holy Joystick offered, except somewhat more focused and with a score system based mostly on exploration. Nigh impossible to solve without a walkthrough.

Rating: **

Reviewed by Carl Muckenhoupt (29 Dec 2001)

delta4.zip (747.60 KB)

Spectrum executable

zenobi48k.zip (7.11 MB)

Spectrum executable (in the subfolder "GI Games/Fergus M")

zx.zip (2.88 MB)

Spectrum executable