GAME: Scandal On The Seven Seas
AUTHOR: Faraday
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 3.9 http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/adrift.cgi
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 29th May 2007
WALKTHROUGH: n/a
DOWNLOAD: http://newsletter.aifcommunity.org/minicomp2007.zip


For the most part, this seemed more of a regular IF game than an AIF one. You're a pirate captain (from what I gathered anyway) and you're set to board an enemy vessel and have your wicked way with its delightful (female) captain. The first part of the game involves a sea battle when you try to subdue the vessel. I had trouble with this, mainly because none of the commands I needed to use were listed for me and so I ended up trying half a dozen different things before chancing on something that worked. As it happened, these were mentioned in the game's accompanying README file, but as I navigated to the folder where the game was from within the ADRIFT Runner, this didn't show up and I wasn't aware of it until much later. What followed seemed to be a case of simply keying in the same command repeatedly until I won. And win I did. I replayed it several times and found it very easy to win the battle but difficult to lose it.

The next part involves subduing the captain, 'Cutlass' Liz herself. This was remarkably easy. A single THRUST command and she was done for. From replaying the combat, your success against Liz seems entirely at random but I always managed to defeat her no matter what I tried.

From there it's to the captain's cabin and a delightful little sex scene with Liz. And what a nice change it made to actually have a simple and straightforward sex scene which wasn't a series of guess the verb problems where you're trying to figure out which part of the body to lick/caress/grope/fuck/suck first. If only a few more games were like this.

On the down side: too much randomness. The game can be won or lost entirely due to random factors. Sometimes one command will work, other times it won't. Replaying the game to try different things was frustrating because keying in the exact same set of commands from before led to me dying frequently, whereas keying in commands that had lost the game to me previously worked fine. Typing POINTERS to see what needs to be done next is a bad idea, especially when what you're presented with is something you're never likely to guess on your own.

Arousal: nearly at full mast.