IFComp08: wHen mAchines aTtack
When you enter a game in the comp, you're presenting it as a finished product. You are saying, in essence, "This game is as good as I can make it. Please, judge it."
A lot of entries this year must have mistook the comp for a free-for-all beta test and proofreading session, because they've certainly not done enough of either before entering their games.
But I digress.
When Machines Attack (ignoring the somewhat pointless bizarre capitalization of the title) falls into the latter category. Much of the text is bizarrely phrased or simply grammatically poor, to such a degree that I wonder if English is the author's native language. In any case, there's little excuse for not getting some beta testers and proofreaders before entering a game into a comp.
Some random quotes:
Back to the southeast, you may go along the northern edge of the room, or even enter a hallway drilled into the north of you. Ouch, my north of me.
You follow the receptionist, and seeing that you have caught up to her, walks over east. Wait, what?
You duck under the stairs and join with the eastern hallway. Ouch.
Wow, it's pretty firm and thick, you're also surprised at the length of this thing. What thing? Oh, this rope I just picked up?
You put on the worksuit, and as you do you feel a tight gripping sensation on your whole body, making it slightly uncomfortably for you, but tolerable.
Aside from the grammatical horrors, the game itself makes little to no sense. You're hired by a prestigious but secretive "Space Travel" engineering company. Upon your arrival, you follow a robot - I mean, the receptionist - around the facility, while it - I mean she - tells you what your job will be. Turns out you'll be living in the facility, working 14 hours a day (except for three meals in the cafeteria) and your job is to cut out bits of metal with a joystick to match bad ASCII line drawings. After an exhausting series of >PUSH LEVER NW, you've cranked out a whole two pointless metal bits and it's time for dinner.
Dinner alternates between the surreal and the stupid; the former introduced by a cafeteria server that washes counters with his face and the latter merely reinforced by a heavy invocation of Godwin's Law.
Fast forward a bit, though some awkward scenes involving your boss and a CyberMat. He smashes your work machine, you go to bed and have a bizzare dream, and then the next morning your one female coworker is crushed under a giant metal sheet in what was probably the most unintentionally funny death sequence since I beat Jesus to death with his own cross in one of Panks' games.
At this point, you're probably already a machine, and I'm sure there's some plot involving escaping with your coworkers or maybe just eating them. I don't know, I spent over an hour playing it and I ran out of bile.
The thing is, it's fairly well-programmed. The author's not really an idiot; he had an idea for a plot and is reasonably good with I7. If it weren't for this fact, it'd be a forgettable bad game. Instead, it practically deserves cult status as an awful but memorable game.
3/10. And I hope there's a hall of fame for this.