ashowkati:

This week I played The games Dead Like Ants and For A Change.

Enjoying these games would be a huge stretch. But if i had to choose one, i suppose it would have to be Dead Like Ants, simply because i completed it… accidentally. Both game experiences were grueling and immensely frustrating. It probably doesn’t help they they were my first attempts at Interactive Fiction. To be honest, I think Dead Like Ants left a bad taste for the genre, so when it came time for For A Change, I didn’t have much motivation to finish it.

This may contain game spoilers.

I get what Dead Like Ants did. And I actually really liked the concept. However, this doesn’t work well for this genre. Again, this was my first real IF game, so this game might come as a delight to the more experienced or hardcore IF player. It would be like having you die constantly in a game of Mario Bros. only to find out that that actually is how you win. Not very rewarding. I didn’t notice the “points” I was receiving and assumed it was kicking me back to the Queens chamber to try again. I was about to quit the game and give up when I noticed that the last time was different. And I was the queen. I put it all together and realized what had been happening. It didn’t do the best job conveying it. It took me over half and hour before I gave up on the first creature and moved on. Very little of this game was enjoyable. Perhaps this wasn’t the best game to start with in IF, or perhaps I am just not a fan of IFs in general. It is clever. Just not right for me.

I didn’t get anything accomplished in For a Change. Nothing i typed would work or do anything. Even the hints didn’t help me in this one, (as if they helped me in Ants) That was the other frustrating thing. Because I didn’t pick up on the fact that I was really doing well in Ants, the hints angered me even more than the game itself. Text based games offer the least amount of stimulation. At least these two did. There was no discernible tone or theme, and didn’t pick up on the cynicism of Ants. I didn’t even know I was dealing with the creatures until the first one killed me. I can much more appreciate games with at least, some sort of visual element. Neither game was written well enough to get away with it.

Oh man. I don’t know if this was supposed to be funny but it made me laugh! I can agree that some kind of visual stimulation is usually a plus. Maybe you just weren’t imagining hard enough. For A Change was kind of the same thing for me.  I tried a few things and then didn’t get what I was supposed to do, and it seemed like it was going to take FOREVER to get to the end. Either that or I was going to actually get to a good part and then have to go to bed or something. So I just quit and went back to Dead Like Ants. Like you said, the concept of dying to lose is the best aspect of that game.