Kook-U, The Zuni Doll, Acorn Court, A Good Breakfast
           (Four Inform adventures on Disk 1193)

       Reviewed on a 286 and PII 233 by Nick Edmunds

Kook-U

You play the role of a network administrator of Kook University
given the ultimatum of cleansing the network of abusers posting
unsolicited material.  This is a fairly straight forward game with
elementary puzzles and the sort of stereotypical, dubious
characters we just love to hate - which made putting an end to
their activities all the more enjoyable.  There is some possibly
confusing terminology, with regard to the network side of things -
ignore it, it's not essential to the plot to understand this sort
of stuff and if you try to be clever, you'll just end up wasting
time.  Slightly marred by the end puzzle which seems to have been
tagged on as an after thought this remains an enjoyable, well
thought out game.

Although it may be worth mentioning that this game contains, imho,
some unnecessarily graphic description of the material being
posted to the network.  Therefore: handle with care, you have been
warned, etc.

The Zuni Doll

After your recent purchase of a small African doll you find
yourself in a life threatening situation.  Straight out of a 'B'
movie horror story and vaguely reminiscent of an Arthur Conan
Doyle tale, the plot is a brilliant idea.  The main flaw with this
game being that it could have been made into something special.
Apparently the game was originally designed, so the 'About this
game' file reads, as an introductory text to the Inform
programming language and it probably served its purpose well.

The game itself is quite well thought out plot and structure-wise,
if a tad limited with verb functionality, but I feel this is
easily forgivable given the original purpose of the game.  An
enjoyable neat little game.

Acorn Court

This is an elementary one location adventure with no apparent
reason for being there and thus no need for any plot structure. It
involves a few simple, but original puzzles, neat descriptions and
has some limited parser functionality. Not much else can be said
without giving the game away, as it were.

A basic but overall entertaining game.

A Good Breakfast

Originally written as an entry in the 1995 Interactive Fiction
Competition ( no mention of how it fared ). You play the role of
someone suffering the morning after in need of a good feed.  This
game has a few limited verb commands made up for, to some extent,
by some fun descriptions and attitude.  The puzzles vary between
standard and what looks like someone's introductory programming
homework 'Towers of Hanoi' type games. Nice touches are: (a) the
things you may have missed option at the end, and (b) the
references to quotes used section. Possibly a bit extreme to kill
off your character for using expletives (sweary words), not really
what one would expect from a drunkard, either way be careful what
you say in this one.

A decent and enjoyable game.












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