Caltrops - The King of Shreds and Patches

Forum Overview :: The King of Shreds and Patches

by Ice Cream Jonsey 03/06/2010, 9:00pm PST

Bananadine wrote:

I gave up on The King of Shreds and Patches and eventually turned to another Cthulhu-y game, Anchorhead. That one is highly rated, and I got about halfway through it without major cheating, and mostly enjoyed doing that although a few stupid things annoyed me along the way, which seems almost inevitable in text adventures because text adventures are very hard to test well and so I guess nobody actually tests them well ever.

Yeah, I'll pick up Shreds again first chance I get, but Anchorhead is a .z5 (or .z8, same thing except .z8 games can be bigger) that works on my phone. I have really been trying to read a little before bed each night and, well, Anchorhead got elected. So all this week I've been playing it. Now, on the phone it's not an ideal platform, but still. It's wonderfully written. Gentry's ability to, at least so far, not fall into you a "You are in" or "This is..." trap for each new room is outstanding. He managed to make it fee like there were real people in the watering hole without there being real people by making me not want to talk to any of them concerning their miserable lives.

I have always avoided playing it because of how you can get it into an unwinnable state. People always seem to say that about Anchorhead. Well, first they say it's the best text game they've ever played, but some also say they could not finish it. The beta testing thing is... that's a huge problem with text games in general. I'm honestly considering contacting a betatest shop and trying to negotiate a fee and have them test my WIP. I don't know.

But then I got stuck so badly that even the walkthrough couldn't help, because the absurdly obscure thing I'd been supposed to do to unlock a particular lock was no longer possible. BUT then I realized that in Windows Frotz you can more or less just paste a walkthrough into the game window and it'll accept line breaks as if they were depressions of the Enter key, so I just spoiled the rest of the game by doing that, because I don't enjoy these games enough to interpose forum conversations into them and consider that to be a part of the experience (but thanks anyway, ICJ, for the info re: that).

I understand. Yeah, it is very weird. To me, it is an acceptable part of the experience if I know the person who wrote the game. It's something I don't mind doing because there are so few text game resources out there. Like, if I am stuck in BioShock, I go to Youtube and try to find a video walkthrough and I actually get mad if the author of the walkthrough spends one microsecond doing something other than solving the tricky part. I have broken my hand because of the videos, I get so frustrated. Okay, that part is a joke.

Speaking of ICJ, I am bemused to realize that Necrotic Drift is the only sizable text adventure I've ever played that I still liked after having finished with it! It was funny, it wasn't too fussy, it didn't try too hard to be aaaaaaart.

That makes my week, btw. The one thing I've been trying to do is make it so that a game of mine gets easier the more you play it. I haven't always done this - in fact, it's just the opposite in some games because I messed up. ND sort of had that right, I think. Halfway through, I just want people to finish it.

(The ending for Cryptozookeeper will just demand that the player hit the enter key. Unless I can think of an easier key to hit. But enter is the biggest key on my keyboard.)