THE DINNER PARTY
by Blue Meanie

Review: Evil Bacteria

As much as I hate knowing that someone is using a Beatles reference in regard to pornography, Blue Meanie has indeed crafted a fine specimen of a game in The Dinner Party. While it's the standard "do your sister plus a few other people" plot, the scenes are interesting and the game is well written, with a few easy puzzles thrown in for good measure.

The Good Points:
First of all, this game has puzzles that I can actually figure out. It took me a bit (I suck at IF) but I managed to complete them all. This in itself is impressive, since most puzzles in AIF are either too difficult or uninspired to bother with, or too badly written or too ludicrous for normal people to solve. The Dinner Party doesn't have this problem, and if you get stuck, you can always ask the NPCs for a hint or two. While the plot itself has been done to death, the NPCs are fairly interesting characters to deal with, and there are a large number of them. You can do a variety of things with each character, and the scenes are well written and lengthy enough to be worth the effort. The Dinner Party doesn't disappoint; the sex scenes are some of the best you'll find in AIF. The puzzles aren't perfect, but they're certainly not bad; most are straightforward enough that you shouldn't have any trouble with them, and I've always liked having to earn the sex scenes, rather than just having them handed to you. Besides, if you get stuck on any of them, you can usually skip it, since most of them aren't necessary to complete the game.

The Bad Points:
There are really only two things I don't care for in this game: helping your sister with her homework, and the overall pace of the game. Helping with her homework requires a very unintuitive use of the computer you find in the game, and several times the game jumps from sex scene to sex scene without anything to interrupt the pacing. Remember, the largest erogenous zone is the brain, and to ignore the brain is to bore the brain.

Overview:
Altogether, The Dinner Party is one of the better AIF games to be offered, combining a skill with words and a wide cast of characters. Your attention will be held throughout the game, but there are a few parts that get kind of repetitive, since you just skip from one sex scene to the next. Of course, this is true in most AIF, so it's hard to consider this a severe negative, and overall, it's a damn good game.