Category: Reviews

IF Competition: Riverside

Okay: after some discussion with various folks, I’ve decided to go ahead with blogging about IF Comp 2008 games. The consensus from people who weighed in was that they prefer reading reviews spread out over a long time than seeing a big splat of new material right after the comp ends, and that they felt the distributed discussion was better, especially if the full review set was combined in one place at the end.

Therefore: I will follow the same format as last year, which is to say, there is a cut tag before I say anything at all about a game, positive or negative; after the cut tag will be comments without spoilers; after the general comments there will be additional spoiler space, followed by more particular commentary.

In the interests of not accidentally spoiling people via feed-aggregation sites, I have temporarily set my RSS feed to “summary” rather than “full” mode, so that (with any luck) it won’t just splat all this stuff onto Planet-IF willy-nilly. To those people who can’t stand summary-mode RSS feeds, I apologize, and I’ll set it back to the regular format when the comp is over.

We will start with “Riverside”.

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Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, Part 2

Web stats show that my post on Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble is getting a lot of traffic — clearly Mousechief has done something such that everyone is playing this game right now. Which is terrific, but I should issue a disclaimer: my comments on DHSGiT were based on an old demo version of the game, before the full version was completed.

I’ve since tried the new demo, and it is improved over the original in several ways: the cumbersome and confusing introductory stuff is gone, the most boring mini-games have been replaced with better ones, and the dialogue has in some places I think been made a little less arch. (At least, I found it easier to understand what was going on.) I haven’t played the full version yet, but my old critiques don’t necessarily stand.

Some impressions on Introcomp

I tried the IntroComp 08 games and was turned off by most of them on the first playing (and wrote up notes about why). Later I felt guilty about that and gave several a second try. So the comments for some of these are divided into first impressions and second impressions. Sometimes the second impressions are warmer.

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