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Sentinel's Retro Review Hour (Sages are Best):
A Long Walk Home
Alright, this isn’t exactly the most productive use of my time, commenting on ancient stories with long-dead authors and stuff, but it is interesting to look back on this stuff, now that I’m point scrounging like a motherfucker and trying to find my way to Commendment Heaven. All the storygames have been rated and reviewed by people much better and faster than I, and so now I’m forced to turn to Archeology and pick up old Review Real Estate if I want to have fancy stuff.
Not that I mind. Like I said, this is kind of interesting to look back on. This is a late 2014 game, and, knowing CYS in 2014 and the kind of creatures we were dealing with, it’s just nice to see a short little game that’s decidedly average coming out of that era. Granted, I don’t think WC was a major problem until maybe a year after that, but there was a good long period before and after that whole apocalypse where shit games were a major complaint. This may have come in on the front end of that tsunami, or The Epidemic really was that recent. I dunno, putting my archeologist fedora on for a sec, and judging from the posts that call for a WC ban appearing “One Year Ago”, I think it’s fair to say that this was at the beginning of our long-suffering era. Or maybe just a time when I wasn’t looking. Story history is not really my area of expertise. I can’t tell you what was going on in the New Storygames Section of 2014.
There are always the classic mistakes of the old “random” games you used to get around here all the time. There’s the endgame page available from the very first choice, (And of course, the choice remains for a fair bit) but nonetheless there’s an interesting dynamic here.
You’re tasked with investigating a dumpster, and a whole bunch of things can result from this. An epic it is not. Nothing complex happens, nothing extraordinary or engrossing occurs, but it’s just enough. Just enough to keep you entertained for a good minute or two. And, oddly enough, it feels like the most “realistic” story I’ve read in a while. There isn’t that much action in the traditional sense, everyone involved in this has a different story, and, just like in real life, you have the option to refuse the wild path and leave. Yes, you can get murdered by a murderer, but the majority of the endings have nothing to do with that. You rescue a puppy, or you help out a runaway, or you walk out and try not to bother with it. It’s unremarkable, but pleasant in its own right, kind of like life in general.
I’m not sure what more there is to say about it, there isn’t much more to be said, but, y’know, it’s nice to see this. I kind of enjoyed this. Yes, the potential for extreme storytelling wasn’t really capitalised on, but sometimes it’s nice to just casually read a story that indulges in decidedly inextreme storytelling. It was short and sweet, and for its many flaws, there was just something that felt believable about it. Nostalgia may be working in mysterious ways, but for me, this was a solid 4/8, and a worthwhile lunch break to write.
-- ISentinelPenguinI on 1/17/2017 12:52:00 PM
Xkcd quiz
I’d like to think I’ve written the best Quiz Game on this site. I mean, barring the fact that my game is broken, and I hardly remember my answers. However, it was written a long time ago and it’s 4/8, which is almost never happens unless you’re a successful asswank like Kiel Farren. But Kiel Farren is long gone, so I think I might be the only person left to teach you the ways of good Quizmanship… I mean, it was sketchy and barely qualified as a quiz, but screw you, I’m the expert here.
Here’s a query-by-query analysis of the xkcd quiz.
Quick Aside on the first page:
Yeah, I get that this is a fandom quiz, so people who don’t understand the subject matter won’t rate you very highly. This is kind of the big problem with fandom quizzes. However, you need to find some way to engage them outside of the fandom, then. Maybe talk about xkcd, include hints in this dissertation. Tell us about why you like it, and why you decided to make a quiz about it. Nevermind that this is something that I never did, it’s a good idea that I came up with right now.
Question One:
What does xkcd stand for?
Okay, I may have bit off more than I could chew with this whole “Review each individual question” thing. There isn’t a lot of material to work with, here. Although, I guess this is a pretty good question. For those of you who don’t know what xkcd is, I won’t spoil it, but this question, last I checked, was one I looked up years before playing this quiz, and last I checked, took a little bit of digging into the site (As in, a few clicked links) and some reading to find out what the whole xkcd thing was about. Although I wouldn’t quite say the “right” answer is /exactly/ correct, that is basically what it equates to.
Question Two:
What is the name of the author of xkcd?
Awkward wording aside, I can’t really praise or fault this question for anything in particular. It is what it is, though I’d kinda prefer if there were more of an engaging preface to it and these questions, so people who haven’t seen xkcd can actually be engaged, and you don’t need to give them this “DONT RATE MY FANDOM SHIT BADLY” trash that people seem to think absolves them of their literary sins. If you want to make your fandom welcoming to outsiders, you have to, y’know, build a door first.
Question Three:
Xkcd has another site called “What If?” where people send in ____ questions and he answers them. What is ____?
Y’know, Mizal strikes me as the kind of person who would have something funny to say to this question. I just have that feeling. But alas, I am not a Mizal, so there will be not funnies for you. If there was one qualm I have, it’s that the answer is already sort of there in the question, and this is decidedly not a riddle story.
Ques- Okay, fuck it. It’s a quiz, alright? you know how it goes, I don’t want to eliminate the purpose of playing the game for anyone. I appreciate that he’s pulled a Briar_Rose on this one and given everybody profile badges in the form of comic strips. That was pretty creative and pretty thematic, I liked that part. All good quizzes should have one… Except my quiz, I guess…
Tune in next time when I review each invididual question on the ASVAB Test.
-- ISentinelPenguinI on 1/17/2017 1:49:09 PM with a score of 7
Seinfeld Schmeinfeld
As someone who knows nothing about Seinfeld, I can’t say this is really my cup of tea, but it is kind of entertaining to see. The whole thing is very blatant. It’s a 6-question quiz with no introduction whatsoever. You hit the play button and you’re thrown right into those trenches. I can’t really offer much advice that I haven’t offered to quizzes before this one, you need to introduce your subject matter and get the reader interested in some way.
An offer to share the knowledge is only fun for people who have the knowledge to begin with. You’re really banking on the general rating populace to have this kind of knowledge, which isn’t all that great, considering the fact that quizzes are by nature supposed to be a challenge that everybody wants to beat but not everybody can master.
Between simple and aesthetically boring questions, pictures and formatting that’s kind of a pain on the eyes, I have to wonder whether this quiz should even still be published… But that’s just my opinion. Hopefully the sequel that’s never gonna happen will be better than the current Seinfeld Trivia.
-- ISentinelPenguinI on 1/17/2017 2:04:31 PM with a score of 0
Underground Railroad
Ah, finally, I’m moving into newer, edgier territory! Now only HALF of the authors in the storygame I’m reviewing are dormant and never coming back. Historical gamebooks, particularly ones about the Underground Railroad, have always held a special place in my heart, because when I was a wee lad in fifth grade, we often read little Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books as a fun way to “Set the mood” during history lessons, and get an idea of what it was like to be-
“you are slave in the civil war you have been traped in a mansion. As you watch your freinds and family get sold at the slave market you have an idea.You will escape. Do you.”
Okay, I’ll be honest here, this is really not shaping up to be my favorite out of Betaband’s repetoire.
Jokes aside, this story actually holds up surprisingly well in bits, through even some very awkward first impressions. You get more than a fair bit of branching, even though grammar can be tough and the narration is overall very blunt, brief, and detached. You’re still getting your time’s worth in the ambitious level of choices there are. I was only able to get about 3 distinct paths down before realizing a full and specific review was more than I could handle.
Pretty good job, considering the stage of youth this was probably made in. I’m excited to see what Betaband does in the futu-... Wait, it’s already here. Oh, the joy of retro-reviewing!
-- ISentinelPenguinI on 1/17/2017 2:22:55 PM with a score of 0
More like Mario FARTY
Here we stumble upon a true relic of site history. This quiz, the Mario Party Quiz, is at least as old as 2006. That’s truly ancient. I don’t even think Eternal’s been around that long. Unfortunately, rather than something truly revolutionary, we have something a bit more like some pottery fragments. Interesting, and a small-town museum will certainly buy it from you, but it doesn’t reinforce any particularly remarkable facts. Rather, it reminds us of the simple things we already know about this time in the past: Our standards weren’t the highest when maybe only 100 or so stories were on the site.
I won’t lie, the quiz itself wasn’t abhorrent. The grammar was good enough, the questions were brief, but in-depth. The real problem came from a complete lack of reward. There is no way to gauge your knowledge or progress, no in-game recognition at the end. And let’s face it, in-game recognition is the only kind of recognition you’ll get for beating this game, nobody’s going to go about bragging that they 100%-ed the CYS Mario Party quiz.
Nonetheless, the questions were genuinely stumping and require a fair amount of experience with the entire Mario Party series to answer correctly. It’s a solid quiz, and even though it hasn’t taken much more than an overwhelming amount of “Mehhh…” to last this long, it hasn’t aged (too) poorly.
-- ISentinelPenguinI on 1/17/2017 2:46:09 PM with a score of 60
EDIT: Shit, half of these are already featured, but at least it's a complete collection and my selfish motivations for writing and compiling all these are now utterly transparent.