The Unmentioned

I've played most of these IF games before, so this wasn't really new for me.

Pick up the Phone Booth and Die I finished within three turns, because I remembered how to win. The first time I played this game, it frustrated me for a good half hour before I finally figured it out; of course, it was also my first IF experience, so that's probably no surprise. Whoever came up with it is a little sadistic--'nuff said.

9:05 (Dr. Jerz: I had trouble getting the game to work on the page you linked to, so I just went straight to Cadre's page) is another game I played during my studies freshman year, but I didn't remember it too well, so it was more fun. I got about halfway through the game when I suddenly remembered the plot twist that was coming up (but I finished up the game to get the good ending and refresh my memory, anyways). What a cool, eerie sensation.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Now here's a game I didn't play previously (the main reason why I chose it; though the cheesy-sexy name didn't hurt). I started out with the usual: picking up everything I could and exploring. The narrator in this game was pretty amusing ("Something, possibly this very sentence, tells you that it would be dangerous to travel east or west."), and was really the only thing that kept me playing long enough to get bored and take a suicidal turn around the bend in the hallway.

One interesting thing that I did notice right at the beginning of this game, however: there's really no indication as to which sex the character is, and thus I instinctively chose the "Gents' Room" when the character "felt an urge," rather than the "Ladies' Room." However, on a quick replay of the opening of the game, I pretended I was a gal and ended up encountering a different result when I entered the "Gents' Room" afterwards. Funny, how our gender identities are so deeply encoded in us.

(On a side note, I did an extended entry about the role of gender in interactive fiction quite a while ago.)

Deadline was one of the other games I chose to play, mostly because I enjoy detective stories and in small part because the title made the game sound urgent and more exciting.

A lot of places to go in this game, but not much to do in those places (at least, most of the cool stuff I wanted to do, I couldn't do--like digging up the gardener's roses while he stood there "gesticulating"). It took me a good ten minutes to figure out that I was supposed to enter the house first to get some background information; I spent those ten minutes wandering around outside the house, playing with things and bothering the gardener. I guess that is the risk the game designer takes when leaving the player without the typical exposition or opening clues found in most IF games (which Dr. Jerz examined briefly on his website).