The Second Three Hour Comp

Game: The Murder Of Jack Morely
Author: Mystery
Platform: ADRIFT 4

Download: http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/download.cgi?669

Amount of commands actually required to complete this "game": one.

Yep. Just one. I put game in speech marks there because I'm not even sure it qualifies as such. The one command required to move anywhere is "open door"; after that the game just progresses to its conclusion without the player doing anything. Any commands typed are ignored by the game as the storyline plays on irrespective of any action carried out by the player. Confusing? You bet.

It looked like a typical murder mystery to begin with: the police show up at your door and inform you that your ex-husband has been murdered and you, as seems to happen in every murder mystery game I've ever played, are the prime suspect. Off to the police station you go for some interrogation.

Only it's not really an interrogation. As I said before, the game ignores any actions you might want to carry out and instead responds with another piece of storyline in its place. This gets annoying very quickly and would have worked quite a bit better, at least as far as I'm concerned, if the player was given the opportunity to decide what they wanted to do instead of being forced down a very set path. As far as linearity goes, this game is probably as linear as it's possible for a game to be.

Overall it wasn't bad but I couldn't help but wonder if The Murder Of Jack Morely might have been better as a short story.

5 out of 10

Game: Snakes And Ladders
Author: KFAdrift
Platform: ADRIFT 4

Download: http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/download.cgi?669

Er…

Sometimes a game (I'm using that term loosely) comes along and you just don't have a clue what you're supposed to make of it. Basically this is a game of snakes and ladders in text adventure format but lacking any kind of visual aid to let you know what is going on aside from a row of six dots, one or more of which might be blocked out to indicate a snake or a ladder ahead of you. Progress is made by pressing keys to move you along a certain number of squares on the snakes and ladders board but without any way of really knowing what you're going to roll or what might be on any particular square ahead of you, it's difficult to play this game.

As an exercise in porting a board game to ADRIFT I guess it had novelty value but I really couldn't find anything about it to recommend.

Sorry but:

1 out of 10

Game: Veteran Experience
Author: Robert Rafgon
Platform: ADRIFT 4

Download: http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/download.cgi?669

A game by a newcomer and one brave enough to enter it in a competition to boot. Well, well…

What's it about? You're the Veteran, a wrestler who seems to have gone to seed but is still determined to win a world wrestling tournament despite the slight disadvantage of all the other wrestlers being superior to him. How are you going to beat them then? Simple: you're going to cheat…

Strangely this was closer to an actual game than anything else in the Comp: there were puzzles to solve (albeit simple and straightforward ones), things to examine and NPCs to interact with. The writing was nothing special but then three hours isn't a long time to work on your prose so that's no problem.

The moral of the game seems to be a strange one: if you can't win fair 'n' square, cheat your ass off. I got the better of one opponent by beating him unconscious with a crowbar, another I burnt his face off with acid. I dealt with the other in a low-handed way as well and was left thinking afterwards that it might have been a better idea to have an option whereby you can defeat your enemies without having to maim them for life. It's also a bit farfetched that no one would have heard me braining some poor chap or throwing acid at someone else.

But at the end of the day, this wasn't bad at all. It's a long way from being good but as far as three hour comp games go by newcomers, it was certainly a worthy first effort.

4 out of 10

Game: We Are Coming To Get You!
Author: Richard Otter
Platform: ADRIFT 4

Download: http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/download.cgi?669

This struck me as a reasonably good idea to begin with but as soon as I'd started playing the game it quickly lost interest for me.

You play a germ who has the task of crawling around a body and infecting things. Sounds interesting? Well… not really but it's certainly different enough to make you pay attention.

Unfortunately, it's also a frustrating game to play. The intro informs you that you can "infect" things and that you should crawl around the body and infect as many things as you can. My first command, therefore, was "infect throat" which told me that I could not infect a whole area at once. So I went for something smaller: "infect tube". This hit me with an error message that it didn't understand what I meant! A bad case of programming there, particularly as the game advises you to "infect" things. There should at least have been some kind of default error message for when you try and infect something the writer hasn't covered.

There were other annoying parts that I felt could have been improved on and even in a game written in just three hours, some of the oversights were hard to overlook. One location has an ear canal full of wax (clearly this isn't a game you want to play while you're eating your dinner) which needs to be removed. "Remove wax" doesn't work as the game interprets this as an attempt to remove the wax as if it was actually been worn! Trying to take the wax hits you with an unhelpful message saying that you can't but not actually saying why.

I finished We Are Coming To Get You! easily enough once I'd got the basics of the game figured out yet I was left with the feeling that this could have been a whole lot better.

3 out of 10

Game: Zombies Are Cool, But Not So Cool When They're Eating Your Head
Author: Mel S
Platform: ADRIFT 3.9

Download: http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/download.cgi?669

Winner of the Weirdest Named ADRIFT Game Of All TimeTM, this isn't quite as much fun as you might think from the title.

Zombies Are Cool… (I'm not going to type out the entire title every time) is a parody of Shaun Of The Dead which was itself a parody of Dawn Of The Dead. A parody of a parody? Hmmm…

At the start of the game I was wondering if, despite the title, this was some kind of cowboy game as the main character has apparently just woken up after punching his horse and then drinking a bottle of scotch. But as soon as you venture from your house and head into a shed, you find yourself plunged well and truly into a bizarre zombie game.

It's an easy game as well. Ridiculously so. There was only one bit that stumped was when I hadn't thought to re-enter the shed and pick up a certain item I needed. I wound up in a street full of zombies and without a weapon to hand to defend myself with - although my friend, Stu, had a rifle which he didn't seem very inclined to use. Other than that, it's likely you'll be through the entire game in little more than five minutes. A bit of guess the verb might slow you down - "use chainsaw on zombies" works but "use chainsaw" doesn't - but as there are only two items in the game and their uses are pretty obvious, you should be through this in no time.

There is some amusing dialogue which made me chuckle, the best being an interchange between the main character and Stu right at the end of the game:

Stu steps in through the broken window. "Well, it looks like we might survive this zombie holocaust after all."

You nod. "Yep. Zombies are pushovers. I mean, I've killed old people that were harder to defeat."

Not as much fun as the Evil Chicken games but worth playing all the same.

5 out of 10