[IF Competition] Nerd Quest

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This is a spoilery post about Nerd Quest by RagtimeNerd. Please do not read on unless you have played the game! (And in fact I have to add some meaningless words here so that the real review doesn't show up on feeds; although frankly it's not the words that are meaningless, and indeed, not even the sentences; I'm reading Carnap at the moment, and he is way too quick in saying that a sentence is meaningless; for instance, "the moon is a city in Germany" seems to me false, not meaningless; but I guess that's what happens when you apply Russell's theory of types to our language about the empirical world.)

As I explained in a previous post, I want to write these comments on the form of advice to the author; not as reviews that end with a numerical mark.

What is good?
  • It's written in Java, which means it is cross-platform compatible. And indeed: it runs perfectly on my Linux installation. Even better: it runs within my terminal of choice!
What could be better?
  • The game. If you want to write your own IF engine, be my guest; but know that you compete against TADS and Inform. If your engine isn't at least nearly as good, people will dislike your game. This engine is not nearly as good; in fact, it is really bad. Hardly anything is understood. The output is ugly. And the game that showcases this engine seemed to be trivial and sparse.
Post-competition release?

No. This author should either spend a lot more time on writing his engine and writing a game to go with it, or (s)he should migrate to Inform or TADS or another existing system and then spend a lot more time on writing a game.

Comments

  1. Anonymous4 October 2008 at 12:04

    I didn't see any spoilers in this post. Maybe you should put the spoiler warning only in posts that actually reveal content of the game?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Victor Gijsbers4 October 2008 at 20:02

    True, but within the competition context, any comment about a game serves as a kind of spoiler. If I say that a game is bad, that will influence people who still have to play it.

    So I think I'll stay on the safe side and consider all these reviews to be spoilery.

    ReplyDelete

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