[IF Competition] Rover's Day Out

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I'm all out of spoiler space.

I'll google "spoiler space" and paste in whatever comes up at the first hit. Hm. Google tells me about the first hit: "Deze site kan schade toebrengen aan uw computer.", which means "This site can damage your computer." MaybeI won't click the link, then.

Tralalala. Did you people know that this is my last IF comp game this year? I've played them all. That's my very first time, and I'm proud of it. That I did it, not that this is the first time. And I couldn't have done it without all of you: it was the prospect of reading your reviews that was the prime motivation!

Okay, it's time for Rover's Day Out. Which I did not finish, since it was the most pointless and boring game I have seen in this entire competition. Well-implemented, mostly, although there were a few bugs of this variety:
> open storage cabinet
I only understood you as far as wanting to open the cabinet-proxy.
Also, pretty well-written. But why would anyone wish to write a game where I have to get up, make breakfast, feed my dog, shower, and go to the toilet, while describing all my actions in the most detailed way possible? "Feed rover" doesn't work, no, in this game you have to take one bowl, fill it with water, give it to the dog, take the other bowl, open the cabinet, put the food in the bowl, and so on. You cannot "take shower", no, you have to take off your clothes, enter the shower, press some buttons, get out, dry yourself, put on your clothes again... this makes me very irritated.

And then... you have to do it again, only this time it takes you longer because you have to do more. And then... you have to do it again!

By that time, the interminable strings of blue question marks that appear after every other command were a fair representation of my state of mind, as I was asking myself why on Earth I was persevering. So I decided not to. Rover can stay inside today.

Comments

  1. Victor Gijsbers22 October 2009 at 19:34

    I have been told that there may have been an interpreter issue with Gargoyle here that made some apparently important text come out as blue question marks. I'll try to find some other way to run this game, and give it a second chance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Emily Short22 October 2009 at 20:38

    Yeah, if you don't get the blue text, you are pretty much missing the entire point.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ben Cressey22 October 2009 at 20:58

    If you could let me know which version of Gargoyle you're running, I can try to figure out what's going wrong.

    The three likeliest options are:
    - built from source
    - Eric's package from ifiction.fr
    - Sylvain's gargoyle-free package in Debian unstable

    ReplyDelete
  4. Victor Gijsbers22 October 2009 at 21:08

    I'm using the debian package from http://code.google.com/p/garglk/wiki/Packages. If you need any further information, let me know.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jake Wildstrom22 October 2009 at 21:57

    I ran into the question-marks issue in Linux Gargoyle as well. It's a fixed-width font thing, I guess. I ran it under Windows and it was fine.

    And, yeah, you miss out on a lot of critical context if you can't see the blue text.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Victor Gijsbers22 October 2009 at 21:59

    I'm running Windows gargoyle under Wine right now--not ideal (take a long time to load, can't copy-paste), but at least I see the blue text.

    Interestingly enough, last time I seem to have stopped playing at the exact moment where my interpreter issues stopped. :)

    ReplyDelete

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