Category Archives: Gaming

Game Review: Your Dog Has Been Abducted by Aliens (2012, David Yates)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Your dog has been abducted by aliens!  Can you find and rescue him?

This game is a Choose Your Own Adventure-type game, where you’re given a situation and then have to choose how to respond.  Making the right choice will lead to you eventually rescuing your dog.  Making the wrong choice could lead to everything from you not finding your dog to getting kidnapped by the police.

This a simple and very short game.  The author writes that he spent approximately two and a half hours on it.  By design, it’s not exactly challenging.  A good deal of the choices come down to “Search for your dog” or “Panic and run around in circles.”  In most cases, the correct choice should be obvious.  Even if the game isn’t challenging, it is well-written and it has some funny moments.  Anyone who has ever had to search for a pet will be able to relate to it.  And, if you’re a foreign alien Luddite, this game will give you a chance to learn how not to kidnap a dog.

It can be played by clicking here.

Game Review: 16 Ways To Kill a Vampire at McDonalds (2016, Abigail Corfman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s not easy being a vampire hunter, especially when you’re not even an important member of the group.  Most of the time, you don’t even get to fight the vampires.  You only get to serve as bait.  Yes, you’ve earned the night off.

What does a vampire hunter do on her night off?  Going to movies reveals that the only show playing is Blade: Trinity.  Getting a mani-pedi can only provide so much satisfaction.  So, you go to McDonalds.

And what do you run into at McDonalds?

A vampire!

It’s now up to you to kill the vampire before the vampire kills the cashier and transforms her into a member of the undead.  Because you don’t carry the normal slayer weapons (and its your night off anyway), you’ll have to explore McDonalds and figure out how to use straws, napkins, fast food, and some other items to kill a vampire.  Fortunately for you, there are 16 different ways to kill a vampire at McDonalds.

Kill the vampire and get a happy ending.

Fail to kill the vampire and everyone will know that you were never really ready to be a slayer.

16 Ways To Kill A Vampire at McDonalds is fast-paced puzzle game that’s been written with a lot of heart and wit.  Killing the vampire himself isn’t that hard.  Instead, the fun of the game is replaying it so you can discover all sixteen different ways to do it.  Fortunately, after your first run-through of the game, you are given the option to skip some of the longer descriptive passages so you can get right to exploring McDonalds and seeing what you can do with fast food weaponry.  Don’t take too long though.  When the vampire makes his move, he moves quickly.

Each playthrough can last between five and 15 minutes.  The game can be played online by clicking here.

Game Review: An Act of Murder (2007, Christopher Huang)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Several years ago, theatrical producer Fredric Sheppard bought a house on an oceanside cliff and now, his body is lying on the rock below.  Chief Inspector Duffy has dropped you off at the Sheppard house and told you to interrogate the people in the house, search for clues, and hopefully have the case solved by the morning.  You’ve got plenty of suspects, a handful of clues, and only a limited time to get the job done.  Get to work!

An Act Of Murder is a throw-back to the classic Infocom murder mysteries like Deadline and Suspect.  What makes this game interesting is the high amount of randomization.  Though the suspects and their backstories remain the same, the identity of the murderer and some of the key clues changes every time you start a new game.  Because there’s five separate suspects, that means that An Act of Murder is actually five games in one.  Of course, even if you tell Duffy to arrest the right suspect, you still have to have found all of the clues that prove their guilt.  If you don’t have all the clues, even arresting the right person could still lead to the case getting tossed out of court and you getting thoroughly humiliated.

In the tradition of the old Infocom games, each room is vividly described and each character is capable of variety of reactions depending on what you ask them and when you ask it.  The game also has a very helpful hint section and  a valuable and automatic notebook, which records every clue that you come across and every statement that you get.

An Act of Murder can be downloaded, for free, from here.

(After you’ve played the game and successfully solved the murder a few times, be sure to type XYZZY!)

Game Review: Ghost Town (1995, E.L. Cheney)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In this text adventure, you are a prospector in the old west.  You’re trying to find the old ghost town of Brimstone.  Though the town is deserted, it is rumored that it might be haunted.  It is also rumored that the town might be home to a fortune in gold.

Ghost Town is a fairly diverting text adventure.  The first few times that I played, I didn’t even make it to Brimstone.  Instead, I wandered around the endless prairie and then I got trapped in one location by a snake.

Once you figure out how to actually get by the snake, you can move on to the town.  It turns out that, despite the the rumors that the town is deserted, it actually is inhabited by a crazy lawman and he’s holding a woman hostage.  It’s up to you to defeat the lawman, rescue the woman, and hopefully make it out alive.

As text adventures go, it’s basic but it’s not a bad game.  I played it because I thought there would be actual ghosts but instead, it’s just a really evil sheriff.  If you can overlook some misspellings and questionable grammar, this a fairly well-programmed game and one that has more than its share of interesting locations.  It’s a game the rewards both persistence and an eye for small details.

It can be played at the Internet Archive.  Good luck getting past that snake!

Game Review: The Haunted House of Hideous Horrors (2002, David Whyld)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You’re a pizza delivery man!  Mr. Desther has ordered a pizza but when you arrives at his house, he tells you that he has a problem with ghosts.  They’re all over his home and he wants you to get rid of them.  And if you don’t get rid of them, he’s not going to give you a tip.  At first, you’re reluctant to get involved but then he offers you £15.  (That’s $18.88 for our American readers.)  You’ll get rid of the ghosts at the risk of your own life and sanity.  And if you don’t do it, Mr. Desther’s pizza is free!

The Haunted House of Hideous Horrors is a short and simple text adventure.  It was designed for ADRIFT 4.0, which is the easiest IF interpreter to program for.  Unfortunately, ADRIFT’s vocabulary is also extremely limited so playing an ADRIFT game can often feel like an extended session of guess-the-verb.  That’s not as much of a problem in The Haunted House of Hideous Horrors as it is in other ADRIFT games.  David Whyld keeps things from getting too complicated or frustrating, though there is one notable moment when you’re told that you’ve entered a room that contains a dead body but, whenever you try to “look body” or “examine corpse,” you get a “There’s no such thing here” message.

There’s only one way to die in this game but you’re given so much advance warning that, if you die, it’ll mostly be due to your lack of reading comprehension.  Once you get used to the natural limitations of the ADRIFT story engine, this is a simple but enjoyable haunted house game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Download the game and, if need be, ADRIFT for free, get in that house, and earn your tip!

Game Review: Mystery House Possessed (2005, Emily Short)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Mystery House Possessed is an Interactive Fiction game by Emily Short.  It was one of the first IF games to be developed with Inform 7 and it is a classic of its kind.

Your friend Eulalie has died.  As per her instructions, her greedy heirs will be allowed to enter her house and spend the day searching for where she has hidden her diamond necklace.  However, she has also hidden something in the study and, in her final letter to you, she asked you to retrieve it.  She didn’t specify what it was, only that you would know it when you saw it.  And, Eulalie writes, if you happen to find the necklace, that’s cool too!

When you arrive at Eulalie’s house, her six heirs are already present and preparing to tear up the house in their search for her necklace’s hiding place.  It turns out that one of the heirs is a murderer and, unless you can figure out the killer’s identity, everyone in the house is going to die.  Including you!

What sets Mystery House Possessed apart from other interactive fiction games is the amount of randomization involved.  At the start of every new game, not only is a new killer selected but the location of the necklace changes as well.  The movements of the 6 NPCs also change from game to game and you’ll have to keep track of who has picked up each of the potential weapons that have been left around the house.  You might even have to pick up one of those weapons yourself so that you can be ready if the killer comes after you.

It’s a short game, with a clear goal and time limit.  Because of the heavy randomization, it’s also a game that can played over and over again.  Like almost all of Emily Short’s games, Mystery House Possessed is well-written with a careful attention to detail and challenging without being impossible to win.  If you’ve never played an interactive fiction game before, Mystery House Possessed is a good place to start.

 

Game Review: Don’t Fire Until You See The Yellow Of Their Niblets (1999, Dan Shiovitz)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“There is a sharp hiss, as if millions of kernels cried out in pain and then were suddenly silenced. And then it arises — dear god, it arises. Something like Venus arising from the waters, or your fat Uncle Albert arising from his arm-chair, the Yellow Beast of Corn draws itself up from the pile of stalks. The broom drops from your nerveless fingers as you contemplate the apparition that has appeared before you. “Why me, why now, why here?” you can’t help but ask yourself, even knowing that the question is futile. To kill, to kill, that is the purpose of the Nibleted One, and anyone in its path will perish.”

— Don’t Fire Until You See The Yellow Of Their Niblets by Dan Shiovtiz

In this text adventure game, you are working the night shift at Big Foods Super Market.  You have just finished sweeping up the produce aisle and you are looking forward to finally getting off work when suddenly, the Yellow Beast of Corn rises up, looking to destroy you.  This may be because Big Foods has started receiving it’s corn from The Dark Brotherhood instead of Pete’s Produce Wholesalers.

You have three directions in which to run and two aisles in which to hide.  Each aisle features a different way to kill the Yellow Beast of Corn but you’ll have to figure it out quick.  Take too long and the day crew will only find a few pieces of you left in the morning.

Don’t Fire Until You See The Yellow Of Their Niblets is a game that was specifically designed to be played in less than a minute.  Figuring out how to destroy the corn monster is not difficult.  Instead, the challenge is making sure that you get to the aisle with enough time left to put a plan into action.  It’s a fun game and you may have already guessed that it’s not meant to be taken too seriously.

Don’t Fire Until You See The Yellow Of Their Niblets can be downloaded from here.  You’ll also need a TADs interpreter to play the game, which can be downloaded, for free, from TADS.org.

Video Game Review: Vacation Gone Away (2002, Milibus)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Vacation Gone Awry is an old-fashioned text adventure where you wake up on the first day of your vacation in Germany and you discover that your family has disappeared!

Searching your three-room cabin doesn’t do much good.  Your wife and your daughters are nowhere to be found.  Even looking under the bearskin rug doesn’t reveal the trap door that I had been led, by years of playing text adventure games, to expect.  Finally, I went outside, got in the car, and decided to just drive away.

Right, it’s not going to happen.  Your family may have abandoned you but you abandoning them is not an option.

If you do go back to the cabin, you will eventually discover what has happened to your family.  Like many of the puzzles in Vacation Gone Awry, the solution to this problem is to specifically look at everything.  That may sound easy but the cabin is do detailed that it can be easy to get distracted.  I wasted ten turns in the cabin’s bedroom, trying to open my wife’s makeup bag before I finally accepted that it wasn’t an important clue.

Once you discover what has happened to your family, you are free to once again get in your car and attempt to drive into town.  However, while driving, this happens:

It seems that aliens have accidentally lost a piece of their spaceship and now a group of research scientists are on the verge of opening it up and killing everyone in the vicinity, including you and your family.  You have no choice but to make your way through a blizzard, find the research station, and stop them!

Your enjoyment of Vacation Gone Awry will depend on how much patience you have for searching locations and solving puzzles.  This is one of those text adventures where no door can simply be opened.  Instead, you have to figure out how to unlock it.  Finding the solution will often depend on not only carefully reading the descriptions of the location but also taking a closer look at things that you may have already examined.  Especially when compared to more recent works of Interactive Fiction, Vacation Gone Awry is puzzle-driven instead of plot-driven.

It’s challenging but, if you’re a puzzle person, there is enjoyment to be found in the game.  Vacation Gone Awry is available for free on several sites.  I played it at the Internet Archive.

Good luck saving your family!

Video Game Review: Hamburger Hell (1986, J.P. Jansen)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In this game, you are working in a fast food restaurant.  Your goal is to make as many hamburgers as possible.  The more hamburgers you make, the more money the restaurant makes and the more your boss likes you.

Sounds simple, right?

Think again!

In this restaurant, it’s not just about knowing when to flip the burger.  Instead, you have to climb to the top of a ladder and push each ingredient down a level, one-by-one.  (That’s you, at the bottom of the third ladder.)  Making things extra difficult is that there’s a ghost running up and down the ladders.  The more hamburgers you make, the faster the ghost becomes.  If the ghost touches you, you die.  You come right back to life the first four times.  But after the fourth time, this happens:

This is an intentionally dumb but very addictive game.  You can play it at the Internet Archive.

Eat well and watch out for that ghost!

Video Game Review: The Count (1979, Adventure International)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You have just woken up in a bed in a Transylvanian castle.  Why are you there?  You’re on a mission.  What type of mission?  It’s Transylvania and the game is called The Count.  You figure it out.  You’ve got three days to figure out how to kill Count Dracula or you’ll suffer a fate worse than death.  Make a mistake and you might become a vampire during the night.  Try to leave the castle early and you’ll get torn apart by the angry villagers.

The Count is a very early text adventure game, one of the many that was created and designed by Scott Adams in the days when having a personal computer was considered to be a luxury instead of a necessity.  The Count has everything that you would usually expect from an Adams game: minimalist descriptions, silly humor (“The signs says ‘POSITIVE NO SMOKING ALLOWED’ signed Count Dracula.”), and puzzles that often take more than one run-through to solve.  It also has a simple two-word parser that, for modern players, might require some getting used to.

Historically, The Count is important because it was one of the first games to have a fixed time limit.  Timed challenges have always been my downfall, as anyone who has ever watched me play any of Spider-Man‘s side missions can tell you.  Solving The Count is not as challenging as catching Howard’s pigeons but it will still probably require a replay or two.

Like all of Scott Adams’s game, The Count has been adapted for other Interactive Fiction interpreters and can be downloaded for free..  The 1982 re-release, which came with graphics, can be played at the Internet Archive.