CANDY by Rybread Celsius A text adventure on disk PCPD 1158 Review by Bev Truter This is another extremely short game programmed with Inform - four locations, three bits of "candy" to find - and should take about ten minutes from start to finish; if you manage to suppress your irritation with the awkward phrasing, poor grammar and hopeless spelling long enough to persist to the end. In CANDY you play the part of a kid who's been dropped off at your eccentric Aunt Lidia's house, where she's meant to be looking after you. As she's nowhere in sight (probably upstairs, having her afternoon nap), you can roam about all four terribly unrealistic locations to your little heart's content, trying to find 3 pieces of candy (read sweets / lollies / chocolates if you're from the U.K.) to win the game with a score of 15. Well...it actually mentions a score of 40 if you type SCORE, but typing HELP reveals that this is an unfinished game, with only 4 locations and a full score of 15, and 1 red herring. (Only one?? Seemed like a lot more to me). The plot (ha!) isn't exactly original either - roam around an ordinary suburban house collecting items. The old AGT game BETTY CARLSON'S BIG DATE (the fixed version is available from Sue) had a similar theme, but better executed. I noticed the author refers to himself/herself as "Rybread Celsius", and this initial spelling mistake sets the tone for the whole sorry game. There's often some small glimmer of humour to be found in playing such outrageously bad games as CANDY, but in this case all I felt was total irritation - the only thing that kept me going was that I accidentally stumbled across the third and final piece of candy after about 4 minutes, and inadvertently reached the end of the game before I could type "Quit". You'd guess the author to be a pre-teen kid from the poor quality of writing; but if you read the lyrics of a song lying about in the kitchen location, you soon realize this is written by an adult with an axe to grind about food and dieting. Shame really, to spoil an already silly little sample game with yet sillier rantings about the evils of dieting. Oh well, back to the game, although "game" is a bit of a stretch for the old imagination. CANDY is one of those hastily programmed sample efforts where even simple rules of logic fail to apply. For example, you are told in the "Foyer" location that stairs lead up and there's an exit to the west. Try going either up or west, and the response is "you can't go that way!" This is an unfinished game, so perhaps the author intends adding more locations at a later stage; but as it stands it's just plain boring to play. Two objects that can be picked up during the game are still doggedly referred to in the location description although you're holding them; the refrigerator mentioned in the kitchen location doesn't exist (try examining it and the game responds "there is no refrigerator here"); and plural nouns are prefaced by the singular "a" - as in "a lyrics of a song". Oh yes, and although you go east to enter the kitchen, you have to exit the kitchen by going east again. This sloppy programming is just sheer laziness, which may be corrected in later versions. But a more serious problem with CANDY is its total lack of intelligence, charm, or atmosphere, and given the author's obviously limited writing skills I don't see any chance for improvement in other future versions. A persistently niggling thought crossed my mind several times - why bother putting a short bit of rubbish like this on the Internet anyway? An even nastier thought was why on earth would the author bother to complete this game (the eventual score will be out of 40 points, apparently) as it has to be one of the most feeble efforts at writing a text game I've yet seen. To sum up: A little pile of pretentious twaddle. - o -