IFCOMP 2006 - PTGOOD 8*10^23

     XYZZY Response:
     I’m sorry, but XYZZY doesn’t do anything special in this game!

     It’s a “PT” that it’s not GOOD. Har har!!!

     This seemed like a good time to balance out my list. This was by no means one of the games I felt compelled to play (assuming I won’t be able to play every entry in time), but after a great run of selective reviewing, I think I need a couple shorter “bad” entries to prepare me for more. My reasoning is that I’ve played three great games in a row. Especially after the mind-blowing originality of Delightful Wallpaper, I needed a reality check so that maybe I’ll appreciate more good games to come as opposed to finding them somehow flat by comparison.

     I knew that Slan Xorax (er… Johnathan Berman? Sartre Malvolio?) wouldn’t let me down. PTGOOD 8*10^23 is one of the four I skipped earlier on my random list, and it’s predictably dismal. The file size alone (less than 2k) was a good indication that almost nothing would be implemented. The twist here is that you are on a mission to murder Xorax for creating the exact kind of game that this one is.

     I would rather see a twist where Xorax writes a good game (and sorry, no, the title doesn’t count). It’s starting to feel like a joke that has gone on for too long.

     I know you have to sign up within a month of the competition deadline, and that the last week or two require game information to be entered at the IFComp website. I think Xorax must handle this in two phases. First, I think he signs up and enters some silly title and blurb for a game he hasn’t created. Then, on the last day before the deadline, he throws together something unavoidably dire in a half-hearted frenzy to beat the clock. It doesn’t matter what. It’s the authorial equivalent of splashing paint against a canvas, then smearing it a little with your thumb. Whatever rooms and objects and actions work their way into the game, complete or otherwise, that’s his entry.

     That’s why I don’t feel bad when I mock the effort, as I might for a bad game in which the author actually did intend for something better. It sort of feels like a backhanded gift, from Slan Xorax to me: “I give to you the IF equivalent of a clogged toilet. Plunge away as you see fit.”

     Inky’s review tipped me to the existence of a window in the first room. I spent a little while trying to escape through it, but the gimmick is that it only has to be opened for an exit elsewhere to suddenly start working (and it didn’t before). This, surprisingly, makes the game winnable. It’s as underwhelming as I expected, but at least I got something back for my fifteen minutes of bewilderment.

     PTGOOD is far less surreal than the two prior PTBAD entries, but this is neither good nor bad. It doesn’t feel as though Xorax has taken great strides to write a bad game. It just seems like the obvious result of slapping together a joke game at the last minute. I’d like to give it a “1”, but since it can be finished and I really felt no great hatred for it, I give it a “2”. As a joke entry, it can go no higher without reaching into an area that would indicate more effort. It gets a “minus”, though, for mundane suckage.