NORMVILLE HIGH
by BBBen

Review: A. Ninny

Out of the thirteen games submitted for this year's mini-comp (and twelve reviewed here), I felt this one best accomplished its goals and at the same time stayed within the spirit of the comp, that being a small game quickly establishes the story's background, plot line, characters and the motivations for those characters, and at the same time provides an outlet for the author's vision of his character's sexual exploits. To me, a game like this is what the mini-comp is all about. It doesn’t feel like a fragment of a greater game, nor a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am quickie.

I wasn't really bothered by the lack of puzzles, or that most of what you do up until the sex starts is read as events unfold. I think the reason I wasn't bothered is that I could relate to the characters and I wanted to see them get together. So that BBBen took me almost straight there without a bunch of mucking about with guess-the-verbs or poorly thought-out puzzles was reasonably welcome, especially on my first play-through. On subsequent plays, however, I found it did get to be thin, simply lacking stuff to do.

As far as the sex goes, the sex writing was fairly good, and I was pleasantly surprised that the sex scene was varied and you could move from place to place for different actions based on where you were in the house. One thing I missed was a greater variety of verbs, for instance you could 'lick tits' but not 'kiss tits' or 'suck tits,' but that is nitpicking at this point, especially since nipples were differentiated from tits (almost never seen and I wouldn't have known about it without the readme) and feet were also implemented as a sexual body part.

Normville High scores and mini-reviews:

Concept: 7.5: Well thought-out and complete storyline that was at least fairly realistic.

Characters: 9: Definitely the strong point of this game. I actually really wanted the PC to get together with Sam.

Technical: 7.5. The game is fairly complete but lacks sufficient sex verbs. Also, it is not technically ambitious, hence a reasonably, but not extremely high score.

Playability: 7. Same issue as technical, but I lowered the score since the game has almost nothing to do until the sex scene starts.

Hotness: 8. The sex was more complete than most games, both in terms of the immersiveness of the descriptions and the variety of body parts and settings.

Enjoyment: 8.5. This game scores highly because it very nicely fulfills the requirements and spirit of the competition, and the sex is hot.