Forum Overview :: Zork I: The Great Underground Empire :: IF I have liked

[quote name="skip"]Since ICJ never plans to finish <a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=72047">telling us his top 10,</a> here are some that I have opinions on. Games I like: Photopia - Second text adventure game that I played and the reason I still play them intermittently. Runs on rails essentially, but I still like it. Aisle - Another early one for me but it's one where it's so short that playing through multiple times doesn't feel like a slog. Clever idea behind it too Galatea - Playing around with the idea of NPC individuality. Violet - Same, but with actual puzzles Moonlit Tower - Directionless, but the imagery and writing are great. 9:05 - Clever idea Shade - Same author as above and another clever idea. Games that were okay: The Play - The game is short and fine for what it is, but suffers from the typical Twine problem of just being a CYOA game with much more limited choices. These games tend to be so short and insubstantial and have a story that's subservient to the author's politics or agenda. Still, this one pulls it off better than most if only for having a far better presentation. Electro primitive girl - That being said, the ones that work tend to have interesting view points or strong enough writing to carry it without veering completely into pretentiousness. Alabaster - I like Emily Short's stuff, but her "fractured fairytales" theme got kind of quick and Alabaster is easily the least interesting of them. Lost Pig and Fail-Safe - Good in retrospect but some parser problems prevented me from liking these as much as everyone else while I was playing them. Games I didn't like: Pick up the Phone Booth and Die - An overrated injoke. I-0 - Maybe it was more interesting when it first came out? I found it overrated. anything by Porpentine - I don't know why cyberqueen and howling dogs get so much attention from the indie crowd. The prose is too purple and the plots are too thin. Zork - I tried playing it many, many years ago after reading some rant about how this was a game from the era when "games made you think". I had no idea what was going on and ended up wandering around confused before closing it. Maybe I'll retry it if I ever catch up in my gaming backlog. Sabbat - Snake dongs. It might actually work for its imagery if I had a better sense of why I hated myself or the world so much. Rat Chaos - Another Twine darling. They're all findable on <a href="http://ifdb.tads.org/">IFDB</a> has a list of <a href="http://ifdb.tads.org/viewcomp?id=oymvom4wrawhd4hr">top 50 IF games</a> that I'll one day get around to finishing. I also like the <a href="http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/XYZZY_Awards">XYZZY awards</a> for finding new games. The <a href="http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/The_Annual_IF_Competition">IF Comp awards </a>are more hit or miss since they're only supposed to be judged by 2 hours of gameplay.[/quote]