Human Resource Stories
                     By Harry Hardjono

               Reviewed by John Ferris on PC

At the time of writing this review (mid afternoon in a Grimsby
hotel, five hours until my night shift starts) the 1998 IF
competition results have been out about a week. We now know the
rankings, and Human Resource Stories (HRS) has come in 27th out of
27.

Some form of morbid curiosity led me to download this Inform game
just to see how "bad" a game had to be to get last place. I first
noticed that the game file was only 19k long and I began to wonder
how one would fit a description and parser into 19k.

Obviously the answer is "you don't" and HRS is not what I would
define as an adventure. It is a series of questions that form a
job interview for a computer programmer. The aim of the game is
to answer all seven questions sufficiently right to get the job
with a decent salary. Get one question wrong and you go back to
the beginning.

There are some kind things I can say about this game. The first is
that it works and has no spelling mistakes that I found. Another
is that it could be described as an adventure game reduced to its
elementary form; a series of choices that have to be correctly
chosen to proceed to the completion of the game.

The last kind thing I will say is that the game can be described
as a "failed experiment," one of those novel ideas that just
don't work.

In summary, don't touch with a double-length barge pole.





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