Game Review: And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One (2021, BJ Best)

Posted on October 6, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition. All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One is one of the best text adventure games that I’ve ever played and since the joy of discovery is one of the best things about this game, I don’t want to spoil too much of it in this review. In this game, the time is the distant past. You are Emerson and you’re fourteen years old. Your best friend is a girl named Riley. Riley will soon be moving all the way to Wisconsin. As the game begins, you bicylce over to her house. As it rains outside, you two play the games on her computer.

Will you try to beat Infinite Adventure, a series of seemingly simple games where you have to solve puzzles to advance to the next adventure? Will you once again play the Wizardry knock-off, the one where you kills monsters and find junk? Will you try out the educational game that Riley’s mother is testing? Or will you get really brave and risk the sordid world of strip poker? It sounds simple but there’s a catch. All of the games are connected and your future and Riley’s future will be determined by the decisions you make.

This is an ingeniously clever game and it will spark nostalgia for the days when everyone owned a bulky personal computer and crude graphics were the only thing that was needed to spark a player’s imagination. But it’s also a game about friendship, love, and growing up. It’s also not an unnecessarily difficult game and your patience will be rewarded. I got one of the good endings and I’ve never felt happier about how an IF game ended. The film is full of great characters, from Riley to the people who you meet while playing the games on Riley’s computer. I can’t wait to play this one again and see what I may have missed the first time around.

Play And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Previous One.

Music Video of the Day: Oh God, I Wish I Was Home Tonight by Rod Stewart (1980, directed by ????)

Posted on October 6, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

On August 1st, 1981, MTV premiered. Over the course of 24 hours, 166 unique music videos were played on MTV. Yes, there was a time when the M actually did stand for music

Proving that the music gods have a sense of humor, MTV followed the sublime video for Blondie’s Heart of Glass with yet another video from Rod Stewart. This performance clip is one of the 16 Rod Stewart videos that were played through MTV’s first day of broadcast.

Enjoy!

The First Videos Shown on MTV:

Mute Witness (1995, directed by Anthony Waller)

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

Billy (Marina Zudina) is an FX makeup artist who is working on a movie in Moscow. The movie is a cheap slasher, directed by Andy (Evan Richards), who is dating Billy’s sister, Karen (Fay Ripley). One night, after shooting on the slasher film has ended for the day, Billy stumbles upon another film crew shooting what she initially thinks is a porno. Instead, it turns out to be a real-life slasher film as the film’s star is brutally murdered while Billy watches. Though Billy manages to escape from the killers, the police refuse to take her claims seriously. Working with a private detective named Larsen (Oleg Yankovsky), Billy tries to prove that she saw what she saw while also trying to avoid being killed the snuff film crew and the Russian mob.

Mute Witness is an intense, clever, and suspenseful thriller from the mid-90s. It has never got as much attention as it deserves, despite an intriguing premise, a sympathetic protagonist, and an international setting. The film was shot on location and Moscow proves to be the perfect setting for a chilling story about greed, corruption, and murder. When Mute Witness was filmed, the collapse of Soviet communism was still a recent event and there were still a lot of questions about what type of country the new Russia was going to become. The Russian mob was still a relatively new concept to many people. In Mute Witness, post-Soviet Moscow is a dark and menacing place where no one is who they say they are. It’s a city where people can easily disappear, money can buy immunity from scrutiny, and where the horrors of a slasher film can’t begin to compete with the horrors of reality. Though the film was made when Boris Yeltsin was still in charge of Russia, it feels very much like a prediction of the Putin era.

Alec Guinness makes a cameo appearance in Mute Witness. He only appears in one scene but he makes an undeniable impression. His scene was filmed in Germany, months before the rest of the film was shot. (Due to his busy schedule, it was the only time that Guinness was available.) Guinness reportedly did the scene as a favor to director Anthony Waller and offered to do it for free. Genuine class, indeed!

Though Mute Witness was overshadowed by the success of Scream, it was still enough of a critical and cult success that Waller was offered a studio picture. Unfortunately, that film turned out to be An American Werewolf in Paris. Waller has only directed two films since American Werewolf in Paris. That’s a shame as Mute Witness was an auspicious debut and stands the test of the time as one of the better horror thriller to come out of the 90s.

Game Review: Closure (2021, Sarah Willson)

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

Closure is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition. All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

In Closure, you play the best friend of Kira. Kira has just broken up with her longtime boyfriend. Because she wants to find, for sentimental reasons, a photograph that was taken of the two of them during happier times, she breaks into his dorm room to search for it. When she can’t find it, she texts you. She sends you a description of the dorm room and asks you for advice. You can text back with command like “search the desk,” “look in the closet,” and “leave the room.”

The last command is one that I sent a few times because I’m not a teenage girl and I guess I had the stereotypical male response to Kira’s problem. Sad over a breakup in college? Leave the dorm room, suppress all of your emotions and your feelings, drink until you pass out, wake up with a monster hangover, keeping going out and turning off every girl you meet by constantly talking about your ex, and, after everyone finally tells you that they’re getting sick of hearing about it, move on with your life. That worked in college (or, at least, everyone always pretended that it worked in college) but it wouldn’t make for a very good or emotionally rewarding IF game.

Closure, however, is a good IF game. Once I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to talk Kira into leaving the dorm room, I helped her investigate and solve the mystery of why her boyfriend had dumped her. At first, I thought the texting approach would make for an awkward game but it actually ended up working pretty well and the game ends with a good message about moving on and yes, closure. It also ends with a suggestion of things that you could tell Kira to try the next time that you play the game. This is a simple but rewarding game, one that can be played more than once.

Play Closure.

Music Video of the Day: Heart of Glass by Blondie (1978, directed by Stanley Dorfman)

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

On August 1st, 1981, MTV premiered. Over the course of 24 hours, 166 unique music videos were played on MTV. Yes, there was a time when the M actually did stand for music.

After airing the video for A Message To You, Rudy, MTV re-showed the video for In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins. This was followed by the 71st video to makes it MTV premiere that day, Heart of Glass by Blondie.

I was actually surprised to discover that this video hadn’t been featured on this site before because, to me, it just epitomizes an era. But I was actually even more surprised to discover that MTV only aired it once on August 1st. MTV found time play and re-play 11 Rod Stewart videos throughout the day but they could only find time for one airing of Heart of Glass?

Though it’s now one of the band’s signature tunes, Heart of Glass was controversial when it was first released. Many felt the Blondie, which had come to prominence as a part of the punk movement, was selling out by going disco. The song, though, is actually very punk in spirit, even if it does have a disco beat.

This video was directed by Stanley Dorfman, the British music video director who also created the deathless Top of the Pops for the BBC. Because of the appearance of Studio 54 in the video’s opening moments, it was originally rumored that the video was shot there. Instead, it was filmed at a club that closed down shortly after filming. When asked, Blondie’s Chris Stein couldn’t even remember the name of the club but thought that it might have been called Copa.

Finally, shortly after it was first released, the song was featured on an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati and the band felt that show played a huge role in making the song a hit. They even sent the show’s producer a gold record as a way of thanking them. That gold record could be seen in several episodes, hanging in the bullpen.

The First Videos Shown on MTV:

The Crush (1993, directed by Alan Shapiro)

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

Darien or Adrian? Adrian or Darien? Who does Alicia Silverstone play in The Crush? It depends on which version you saw.

When the movie came out in theaters, she was named Darien because she was based on a real girl named Darien who writer/director Alan Shapiro claimed was obsessed with him. When the real-life Darien saw the movie and saw that she was portrayed as a psycho stalker, she was understandably pissed off and she sued Shapiro. As a result, when the film was re-edited for TV and later released on video, Darien suddenly became Adrian.

Whether Silverstone’s playing Adrian or Darien, the movie is still fairly lackluster. This movie came out when Alicia was still known for playing the lead in several sexually-charged Aerosmith videos and it features her doing the whole Lolita thing, which was very popular in the 90s. She becomes obsessed with her neighbor, Nick (Cary Elwes). Nick tries to be nice but when it become obvious that he’s not going to risk going to jail even if the the girl next door does look like Alicia Silverstone, Adrian/Darien starts trying to make his life Hell. She also tries to kill Nick’s girlfriend with a bunch of bees. Nick’s girlfriend is played by Jennifer Rubin, who was one of the best of the straight-to-video actresses of the 90s.

(Unlike Alicia’s other pre-Clueless starring turn, The Babysitter, The Crush was not straight-to-video but probably would have been if not for those Aerosmith videos. The Babysitter is also not very good but it’s an unsung classic when compared to The Crush.)

The Crush is one of those movies that got a huge push when it came out. MTV was all over it and the commercials were edited to make it look like a steamy thriller starring the girl that every boy had a crush on in 1993. I can’t remember if the movie got an R-rating or a PG-13 but I do know that my friends and I were bummed out when we were told we weren’t allowed to see it. Later, we rented it on video and discovered, not for the first time, that we were misled. The movie itself is really tame and Alicia’s miscast. She actually seems too level-headed to be the type who would try to kill Jennifer Rubin. Cary Elwes goes through the whole movie with a pained expression on his face, like he’s wondering how he went from The Princess Bride to this. Kurtwood Smith plays Alicia’s father and he was always good as a bad parent. It’s also always good to see Jennifer Rubin, even if her role here doesn’t allow her to show off the wicked playfulness that made her a late night Cinemax favorite. She definitely should have been a bigger star.

The main lesson to learn from The Crush? If you are going to portray an acquaintance as a murderous psycho, at least be smart enough to change the name. It will save you a lot of money and trouble.

Game Review: You Are SpamZapper 3.1 (2021, Leon Arnott)

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

You Are Spam Zapper 3.1 is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition. All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

Sometimes you play a game and it totally takes you by surprise. That’s what You Are Spam Zapper 3.1 did to me.

This Twine game takes place in the early 2000s. You are Spam Zapper 3.1. Your job is zap spam emails and keep them from getting into your human’s email inbox. Sometimes, the job is easy. Many of the emails are obviously fake and it’s easy to know that they should be zapped. Sometimes, it’s more difficult. Do you zap all of the ads or just some? What do you do when humans use weird symbols in their emails? Is it an emoji or is it a virus?

When I started playing, I thought the entire game was just going be reading email that were meant to parody the type of junk that we all used to get back in the early days of the the new century and laughing at how the internet used to be. There is a lot of that in the game but, as you read the emails, another story develops about your human and their friends and their attempts to communicate in a world that’s becoming depersonalized by technology. Do you get involved in your human’s life and with the lives of their friends? Do you reach out to the other plug-ins, who all have their job to do whenever the human turns on their computer? Or do you just do your job and zap anything that looks suspicious?

You Are Spam Blocker 3.1 is a memorable mix of comedy and drama that will take most players by surprise.

Play You Are Spam Blocker 3.1.

Music Video of the Day: A Message To You, Rudy by the Specials (1979, directed by ????)

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

On August 1st, 1981, MTV premiered. Over the course of 24 hours, 166 unique music videos were played on MTV. Yes, there was a time when the M actually did stand for music.

The 70th video to play on MTV was The Specials’s cover of A Message To You, Rudy. A Message To You, Rudy was originally recorded by Dandy Livingstone in 1968. The original version didn’t get much play but the Specials version, which was produced by Elvis Costello, was a different story, reaching the number 10 spot on the UK charts. This video features The Specials performing the song and it’s one of the few times that black musicians appeared on MTV during the channel’s first day of broadcast.

Enjoy!

The First Videos Shown on MTV:

Cover Me (1995, directed by Michael Schroeder)

Posted on October 3, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

A serial killer is stalking Los Angeles, killing the models who have appeared in an adult magazine. Because they’re not very good at their jobs, neither Sgt. Bobby Colter (Rick Rossovich) nor Detective J.J. Davis (Paul Sorvino!) have come up with any leads that could lead them to the murderer. Facing a dead end, they come up with a brilliant idea. Maybe a cop could go undercover as an erotic model! Fortunately, Bobby just happens to be dating a surprisingly attractive cop named Holly (Courtney Taylor). You have to love it when a plan comes together.

At first, Holly is hesitant but, realizing that there’s no other possible way to get the killer off the streets (because it’s certainly not like Bobby or J.J. could actually do any police work on their own), she agrees to pose for some pictures. Soon, she’s appearing in the magazine, working as a stripper, and discovering that she enjoys her new uninhibited lifestyle. Meanwhile, the killer has noticed her. The killer, by the way, is Dimitri (Stephen Nichols), who frequently disguises himself as a woman and who is driven to kill by his mother. Dimitri’s identity is revealed early on in the film so this doesn’t count as a spoiler. Cover Me is a mystery but it’s a mystery where everyone figures it all out except for the people who are supposed to be figuring it out.

Cover Me was one of the many direct-to-video films that found a home on late night Cinemax in the 90s. These films were advertised as being “erotic thrillers,” though there was usually little about them that was either erotic or thrilling. Cover Me was produced by Playboy and distributed by Paramount, which means that Hugh Hefner probably used to show up on set, wearing his sea captain’s hat and asking the strippers if they wanted to come back to the mansion and help him look for his Viagra. Because it’s a Playboy film, Cover Me has higher production values than the typical 90s erotic thriller but it’s still interesting that a company best known for publishing an adult magazine would produce a film about a killer targeting nude models. In the 70s, Playboy produced things like Roman Polanski’s adaptation of MacBeth, a cinematic triumph regardless of how one feels about Polanski as a human being. By the time the 90s rolled around, they were producing slightly less classy versions of Stripped to Kill.

Still, Cover Me is better than many of the other erotic thrillers that came out during the direct-to-video era. That doesn’t mean that it was a good movie, of course. There’s a reason why “Skinemax” was go-to punchline during the 1990s. As opposed to many of the other movies of the era and the genre, Cover Me has a talented cast that tries to make the best of the material that they’ve been given. I don’t know how Rick Rossovich went from appearing in The Terminator and Top Gun to starring in something like Cover Me but he delivers his lines with a straight face, which could not have always been easy. Paul Sorvino, Elliott Gould, and Corbin Bernsen are also on hand, all playing their parts like pros. (Between L.A. Law and Psych, Bernsen was a mainstay in these type of films, almost always playing either a pimp, a pornographer, or a strip club owner.) Finally, there’s Courtney Taylor, who is actually pretty good in the role of Holly. Though the role really only calls for her to be sexy, Taylor still plays it with a lot of conviction. Taylor’s performance is natural and likable and she sells even the most clichéd dialogue. Just as when she starred in the fourth Prom Night film, Taylor is always better than her material. Unfortunately, Courtney Taylor appears to have stopped acting around 2000.

Cover Me was shot at the same time as an early CD-Rom game called Blue Heat, where I guess the player would step into Holly’s shoes and try to solve the case. Because the company that developed the game went out of business before the game was published, Blue Heat didn’t come out until two years after Cover Me. I’ve never played the game but, from what I’ve read online, it was a point-and-click game where you could go to various places in Los Angeles and search for clues and interrogate suspects. The game came with multiple endings, depending on the decisions you made. Did anyone ever play this game? Let me know in the comments!

As for Cover Me, it’s not great but it’s also not terrible, which is high praise when it come to late night CInemax.

Game Review: This Won’t Make You Happy (2021, Mike Gillis)

Posted on October 3, 2021 by Jedadiah Leland

This Won’t Make You Happy is an entrant in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition. All of the entries can be browsed and experienced here.

You are standing outside the Caves of Despair and you’re feeling sad. Maybe it’s not a good idea to go into the Caves of Despair, then. Maybe you should stand outside and check your phone. Take a look at Twitter. Check out your dating apps. Play a game … you know something? Caves of Despair are looking pretty damn good right now.

Inside the Caves of Despair, there are gems! That shouldn’t come as a surprise to any Interactive Fiction veteran. How many games have we played where we were supposed to be happy just because we found a gem or a diamond in some musty old cave? This Won’t Make You Happy is one of the few games with the courage to directly address the absurdity of wasting your imaginary life on not only gems but also protecting them from obnoxious gnomes.

This Won’t Make You Happy is a meta game that comments on the shallowness of hunting for gems and paying attention to a narrator. It’s the type of game that will probably annoy people searching for a more traditional IF adventure but I liked it because it addressed several issues that I always wondered about whenever I played any of these games. For instance, who is the narrator and why are we following his orders? It’s a quick game and there’s enough funny moments that it’s worth replaying.

Play This Won’t Make You Happy.