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Ghost Town Reviews
Author: Finn Rosenløv (Cowboy)
Date: 2009
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by Jimmy Maher (SPAG
ISSUE #57 - February 18, 2010)
Ghost Town is not, first of all, a remake of the old Scott Adams game, but
rather an entirely new effort that may just be the first IF game I've ever
played that came from my new home of Denmark. It's also a very ambitious effort:
lengthy, heavily plot-focused, and featuring occasional music and some nice
hand-sketched artwork that suits the mood quite well. It's in fact among the
most ambitious creations I've ever seen in ADRIFT. But that, of course, is a
two-edged sword. After being thrilled upon installing Windows 7 to learn that it
allowed me to completely uninstall Microsoft's bloated media player, imagine my
delight when the ADRIFT Runner told me I had to reinstall it if I wanted to hear
the game's sounds. Every time I fire up the ADRIFT Runner it seems to find new
ways to confound and annoy me.
The plot of Ghost Town has you coming into an unexpected inheritance from your
long-dead and heretofore completely unknown great-grandfather, conditional upon
your spending a single night in the deserted old ghost town of Battle Creek, New
Mexico. This doesn't, of course, make a great deal of sense, but it does afford
you a reason to go into Battle Creek and chase and be chased by things that go
bump in the night, as well as giving you the opportunity to meet a hot lawyer
chick, whom you first see from an angle that pleases you very much.
Hot chicks are in fact a pretty important part of this game; you'll meet several
more as it continues. While there's nothing wrong with a bit of harmless
escapism, I found something just a bit creepy about this game's handling of its
women. They are so obviously objectified, so constantly ogled over that I often
felt I was learning more than I really cared to about the author's own
fantasies. Doubtless the reactions of other readers will vary, from feminist
outrage to complete approval. For my own part, I will merely say that the wait
for a truly sexy piece of IF continues.
The writing is rather haphazard, sometimes contradicting itself within the same
paragraph. X ME, for instance, yields this:
Although you actually do know what you look like you decide to run through your
statistics again.
You are male (not a bad thing...) not too bad looking, some women even think you
are handsome.
You stand 6´6” dark hair which is just slightly longer than a crew cut which
suits you just fine. The dark colour goes nicely with your green/gray eyes and
your chiselled chin gives you a determined look that most women find hard to
resist.
You are wearing a pair of well worn jeans which is a little too long so you have
found it necessary to roll them up into cuffs. But hey.. you're an old fashion
guy anyway. A plain white T-shirt and a pair of sneakers complete the picture.
. You are wearing well worn jeans, a pair of sneakers and a T-shirt.
Do "some women even think I am handsome," or do "most women find me hard to
resist?" There's a fairly wide gulf between these two statements, after all. And
yes, the odd spacing and misplaced period are in the original.
And unfortunately the general parser- and storyworld-shoddiness that marks so
many ADRIFT games pokes through in this one as well. You will often spend time
struggling not with the situation in the storyworld but with the interface. At
one point early in the game, for instance, you're riding shotgun with the hot
lawyer chick in her SUV. She tells you to watch out for a certain small path
that should lead to Battle Creek. I struggled for a long time here, as no longer
how long I WAITed the scenery outside never changed. Finally I realized that the
game for some reason expected me to move the SUV about with compass directions,
even though I wasn't even the one driving.
It strikes me that this game was implemented as a linear series of events, and
its author never really considered what might happen if the player did not
follow the path set for her. Although four beta-testers are listed, I at least
once found myself stuck and had to restore due to having completely confused the
game with an unexpected action. Perhaps the testers were playing from the
walkthrough?
It pains me to have to write such a harsh review, because it's quite plain that
much work went into this game. But a lack of final polishing combined with the
general shoddiness of ADRIFT undoes it in the end. A big game like this needs to
inspire faith in the player -- faith in its fairness, faith in its
implementation, faith in its story world modelling, and faith in its author.
This game, alas, does not do that. It's very difficult to persevere with it for
many hours when one is constantly wondering whether each new problem is a
legitimate puzzle, a bug, or just a game of Parser Fun. In the end, I did what I
suspect most of you would do; I gave up.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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