IFComp09 reviews: GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!
Man, such a great title. It really needs a good baritone and a ton of reverb:
GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands!
Better yet, it's a Voltron parody, complete with ridiculous robots and unstoppable superweapons. It even provides an actual justification for not having SMITE VILLAIN WITH UNSTOPPABLE SUPERWEAPON as your first move. (As an aside here, I was disappointed that while I could "form" said unstoppable superweapon, I could not in fact FORM GATOR-ON during the sequence where we were, you know, forming GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands.)
Unfortunately, the bit where you are actually doing heroics as GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands is extremely short and only happens at the very end. You don't even spend a significant amount of time as the Fuschia Alligator, which is your component of GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands. You are instead mostly just a squishy human squishing his way through trackless swamps for hundreds upon hundreds of turns because the map is insanely huge and you'd better have been counting your paces between landmarks because otherwise you're never making it back.
Which is bad.
The huge world - and the fact that it looked like it was both taken off a map and that it was in fact actually to scale - could have been good. I mean, come on - this is our secret base! Our home stomping grounds! We should be know them better than this. Are we not a key part of GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands? Even if GO TO SECRET BASE is too blatant, maybe we could have a GPS or something. Surely in the far future protected by GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands they have GPS.
Also bad, but hilarious: after you save the day by beating the snot out of the villain of the hour, if you did so with an ATTACK verb, the author returned false instead of true; the result of this is that after the villain gets the snot beaten out of him by GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands, the day is saved, and your general awesomeness is hailed, we then are politely informed that "Violence isn't the answer to this one." before we get our *** You have won ***. Since this does not happen if you use SWING, I suspect this is unintentional. (A similar bug actually showed up in RESER, the first game I beta-tested - PRAY gave a huge, detailed, game-endingly dramatic response, followed by "Nothing practical results from your prayer." This was funny enough in context to make it into the final version - but in a form that made it clear it was intentional.)
This was perhaps not a high point to end the comp on, but I certainly could have done worse than GATOR-ON, Friend to Wetlands, even if those who come after me would in all likelihood have more fun just reading the last ten screens or so of the included winning transcript.