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@mizal @castorgreatpoetguy @ninjapitka @TurnipBandit @Bill_Ingersoll @Cricket @Serpent @ghost11 @DarkSpawn @Gower

Not really sure if there's much point in going on with this Book Club thing, as there seem to be less and less comments and reviews each week. (In fact, the only reviews that got left on last weeks game were from me and Bill... And Bill was the one who recommended it.) I get that some people have already played the game, but would be good if the people who already played it could leave just a short comment to sum up what they thought about it. Anyways, here's the link to the last thread if anybody wanted to leave a late review.

So, it's Cricket's turn to choose a game this time. Looking forward to see what you'll pick. ^_^

I haven't had the best month. Just finished reading Paper Mache the other day and will write a review later. Don't you worry.
I pulled the first thing off a list of a few storygames I had made months ago for when I didn't know what storygame to read, and I came up with The Apprentice King. It has a decent rating, and the author's name is Eggfart. So promising.

... Well this one definitely looks interesting. Not sure whether to extend the review time to two weeks to give more people time to finish. Will see how it goes. ^_^

Dang, it's already been a week? My excuse is that I was on business travel, although there was certainly TV watching time that could have been Paper-Mache reading time. I think I'll leave a late comment on last week's storygame. This week's pick is a really fun read btw.

Wow. I have been absent for most of these. I'm going to do this one tomorow hopefully, as it is pretty short, and I'm doing lots of reviews now

Avery how do I join the CYS book club. I would genuinely like to, know-how.

I suppose you just post here until senpai notices you.

SENPAI?!?!?!

Consider yourself noticed. Also I need to remember to change Serpent to MicroPen...

@mizal @castorgreatpoetguy @ninjapitka @TurnipBandit @Bill_Ingersoll @Cricket @MicroPen @ghost11 @DarkSpawn @Gower @Davefaster

There! Now hopefully I'll remember to copy/paste this list instead of the old one. ^_^

Finished my review and will post my comment here.

 

Now let me start off by saying that this is a good story. Though while it may be good, it is not great, and it certainly is not amazing. There is not anything that I can say I dislike about this story, just a lot of average things and this is a very stereotypical adventure. This is a rags to riches story that follows every overused plot point, and is mainly to be played for laughs. If I’m looking at it from this standpoint, I would call it a great story.

 

Though reading through it, I found some parts dragged on for far too long, and while I did laugh quite a bit going through it, a lot of the humor and plot points were random. An example that comes to mind would be the dress in the cyclops's cave. Also a side note, I thought there was only one sage. Guess there is three. That just struck me as a little weird.

 

For all of its shortcomings, I will say that it’s branching is superb. So far it is one of my favorite examples of a branch and bottleneck type story. It very often has big branches that just rejoin at a later point. It also mixes in a good bit of cave of time in the final act of the story, having a lot of endings that are similar to the final one, without being the same as you picked different choices.

 

All and all I would say this story is decent. There is a large amount of effort poured into this story considering it is a comedy based story, and from an unknown author no less! Very surprising, and I’m glad this story was brought to my attention. I will have to say though that this story is not my cup of tea at all, and if it were there is no doubt I would have rated this a 6. If you have read most of the other well known stories, like comedy, and have some time to kill then go for it, but if you don’t fit this then it’s a bit of a wildcard if you will like it or not. In any case just try it and see. It shouldn’t take you more than an hour to read. Also HIS DOUGHNUTS.

 

5/8

Your "wildcard" statement is spot on. The type of humor is quite polarizing; readers will either love it or hate it. I loved it. I rated the story pretty high just on enjoyment level. It definitely could improve with grammar and sentence structure, but that didn't affect my rating as much as a normal story would. I thought it felt authentic. It's a real "username checks out" story. A lot of storygames published try to be too serious or epic and fail miserably leaving the reader with a edgy story sprinkled with cringe(*cough my first game published*). This story was far the opposite and didn't try to be something it's not. Also, there aren't a ton of comedy games on the site and stumbling upon this was a nice surprise.

I feel the need to correct your statement... There are actually loads of "comedy" games on the site... But there are very, very few funny games on the site. >.<

There are? Assuming most of them are rated 4 and below, I'm not surprised I haven't seen more.

Yep. Most of them are just hovering above the lucky they haven't been deleted mark. >.<

Think 90% of them can be summed up with:

 

You hear your alarm clock go off. Do you get up?

A. Get up.

B. Stay in bed.

 

B.

You choose to stay in bed... Your house explodes and now you're dead. LOL! That was so random! ^_^

Weird, I never even knew this game existed, and it's fairly high rated.

I think it's worthwhile going on with these, but maybe a weekly schedule is too frequent. There's been contests going on simultaneously with most of these.

True... But I'm not really sure how to go. Bi-Weekly doesn't really seem to make any difference (in that the one time I gave people two weeks to review a game, all of the people who did read and review it did so in the first week, leaving a week of pointless silence), and I'm worried that changing it to monthly will just make people forget about it.

Posting my comment here before I forget:

Well this storygame is something you might expect from an author named “eggFART”. Not surprisingly, the first masturbation joke takes place in the first paragraph of the first act and couple pages later you find the second. It’s simply delightful. The storygame plays upon typical medieval themes such as rescuing/marrying a princess, defeating the villainous character who tries to sex up said princess, and competing in a series of fixed games to win the princess’ hand in marriage... ironically held during a fair.

The first thing addressed must be the humor. It’s full of light-hearted one liners. The jokes sort of catch you unaware and the suddenness of the humor only adds to it. It’s like any sentence could be the build-up to another joke. It’s an effective style and always keeps you interested for when the next joke arrives.

The grammar and writing quality aren’t horrible. They aren’t the best either. There are a few mistakes, but nothing too distracting. The silliness of the whole story covers up for most of the grammar problems. I wouldn’t put it past the author to include the mistakes on purpose. If a mistake is done on purpose, is it still a mistake? The answer is yes you participation trophy losers.

The entire thing gives off a Robin Hood: Men in Tights feel. The villain is more quirky than evil. The main character, or hero of the story, is gullible and easily duped. The princess and the rest of the townsfolk seem rather dumb. There is a ton of suggestive humor from the milkmaid’s jugs to imagining the milkmaid as you’re milking her cows... ok there’s a lot of jokes about the milkmaid LOL.

The entire storygame is filled with ridiculous things happening to ridiculous characters. When you stumble across a centaur farmer who offers his daughter’s hand in marriage in exchange for chores, you feel as if it fits the story perfectly. This was a very fun, silly, enjoyable read, although it’s pretty clear the author took a bite from the forest mushroom before writing. It's like a children's fairy tale meets Harold and Kumar. I highly recommend.

FINALLY! I found all the answers and solved the riddle! The letters I got were H-I-S-D-O-U-G-H-N-U-T-S, so I thought about it long and hard and after much deliberation, I decided that the answer must be… DON’T HUG SUSHI!!! Good advice. It’s raw and slimy and gross. Always use chopsticks.

Now, with that out of the way, I should start listing off all the problems with this story... Or at least I would do if I could think of any. Honestly, there’s pretty much nothing I can think to complain about, and I love to complain, so well done! I am greatly impressed. (I mean, if I’m being really nitpicking, I could complain that, despite the consistently entertaining humour, the author felt the need to include a fart joke near the end… Because everybody loves fart jokes, right? But at least the fart joke was useful and actually progressed the plot in some way… So in this case, while I may not rejoice in the fart joke, I at least respect the necessity of the fart joke.)

So, on to the good parts, which are many! In terms of humour, I’d say this is one probably one of the funniest games on the site! It’s silly… In a sort of Monty-Pythonesk, “Stop that! It’s silly!” sort of way. I was particularly impressed by the Marques’ vast array of baking related puns. Of course, the story is extremely cliche and the romance completely lacklustre, but with this kind of comedy, I think that sort of adds to the story more than takes away from it. It turns the game into a kind of parody of the magical-fantasy-fairy tale genre.

All in all, a really, really enjoyable game, and I particularly like how you threw that riddle in there to motivate players to find all the different ending. Definitely worked on me. The only thing I just can’t get my head around was the game’s moral regarding tickling udders. Such mixed signals you keep sending us! Is it good to tickle udders? Is it bad to tickle udders? Will we get kicked in the head for tickling udders? The game gives us no clear answer, and I fear it will forever remain a mystery for the ages.

Avery the answer is His Doughnuts. At the end, when you get the final letter and beat the game. It asks you to solve the riddle, which is what did the baker boy give to the princess on their wedding day night, "HIS DOUGHNUTS" it's another Baker Boy pun. EggFart is a very smart man

... Nope, I'm pretty sure it's DON'T HUG SUSHI. ^_^

Though, now I think about it, the answer could be, "OH, IS HUNG STUD!" Which may have been the Princess's response when she saw HIS DOUGHNUTS ^_^

:D may have been; guess will never know what the correct answer is unless egg fart himself appears randomly on the site and tells us

Wow, that was a wild ride. One choice, boom your dead. I mean this story was really, really funny. The humor was on point and somehow related to the fantasy part. You tied the feeling into everything in the story. The puns were fantastic; the hidden jokes were terrific, and this is the funniest story I have read on this site. I mean the story is very bipolar, with choices on each side of the wild spectrum.  Some options are straight up, and some are kind off like you decided to go to work, boom plane crashes into your apartment. Overall all I can say is that it was hilarious, and I  was dead with the whole tickle udders part of the story. I don't even know what that means not going to lie. 
Now time to complain, oh wait what did you do wrong. The grammar was surprisingly on point for someone with the name EggFart. Everything was tied in, and the commentary was on end. There was a little side quest going on, which made the reader explore all options in the game. You did nothing wrong, and you deserve no shame. I love our story, and I got all the letters for the riddle and found every single way to die in this game. There's a lot of ways to die.
 I like the repeated use of comedy, like the fact that tickle her udders were an option like five times, and finger puppets were used many times. I thought that it helped relate the reader and was repetitively funny. I couldn't figure out the puzzle, but overall this story was honestly one of the best I've read on the site. It indeed specializes in some aspects and lacks in others. It was almost like watching 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I recommend anybody reading this to go and watch. I just loved the silliness, and I don't think you did anything wrong.

My review:

I guess this storygame wasn't for me. I found it amusing, but not funny, and at several points I wanted to shout out:

"It's not '-ith', dammit! Those old-timey vowels are supposed to end with '-eth', as in, 'He writeth it wrongly!'"

"The actual way to spell the rank of nobility used in this story is 'marquis'. Marques was the name of that a-hole I had for a boss a few ago, who made me cringe every time he blamed everyone but himself for his project delays, and consistently typed out 'for all intense and purposes' in every other email."

"Crows and ravens are two different animals. So which one of them stepped out from behind that signpost?"

That said, this was at least competently written, with evidence that forethought went into its branching structure. That alone makes this story more noteworthy than 85% of the other stories here.

I read until I found the main ending, at which point I wasn't motivated to continue. I gather from the reviews that others find this hilarious, but this was no Monty Python.

But... But the baking puns! :'(

Yeah, I admit the story was above-average, and I got it was a spoof. But I was never a fan of spoofs; I'll die a happy man if I never see a Jim Carey or Will Farrell movie. Seth MacFarlane is overrated, and it just kills me that his current project is basically a spoof on one of my favorite TV shows of all times; I want to watch it, but I just can't.

In my experience, humor is one of the most personal genres one can work in. What I consider hysterical another person might consider droll, or vice versa — and even as a teenager I never found scatological humor to be funny. But that's just me. Other people find this stuff side-splitting.

Humor also doesn't always translate well over time. Comedies that were laugh riots decades ago may be cringe-worthy now. Or worse: they have become so esoteric that you would need to take a college course to understand what was so funny.

And I will admit that I am that one person who came of age in the U.S. during the 1990s and secretly disliked Seinfeld. It was a terrible substitute for Cheers. But to admit that during the Clinton era would have resulted in public shaming.

Many people here rightly hold up Monty Python and the Holy Grail as an exemplar of comedy. That movie is a work of art, and I think it still holds up after [*gulp!*] 45 years because the Pythons weren't commenting on 1974, but on storytelling in general. But who here remembers their other two movies, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life?

The only scene in LoB that still cracks me up is the stoning scene (male actors playing women who are dressed up as men so they can participate in a public stoning; "No one shall stone anyone, even if — and let me make myself absolutely clear! — even if they say the word 'Jehovah'!"). As for Meaning of Life, I probably haven't watched that one in 25 years; the only scene I can recall is John Cleese demonstrating the act of sex in front of a classroom of bored teenaged boys (get it? it's supposed to be funny because it's about teenaged boys who think sex is boring).

What do I think is funny? The Coen brothers would be a good place to start, especially something like Burn After Reading. Getting Brad Pitt to go on about "secret shit" is pure genius.

EVERYBODY remembers Life of Brian! ^_^

Sorry for being so slack on these for the past few weeks. 

I’ve posted my comment for this week’s one.

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My first impressions of this game- just a few pages in- were that it was a light-hearted and cheerful story. This impression was upheld, as I found myself reading through a story that had no shortage of jokes. I enjoyed these little jokes slipped in here and there, and the amusing ways in which I could suddenly and unexpectedly die. Normally, sudden deaths are annoying and take away from the story, but the nature of this story meant that they were funny instead of tiresome.

I liked how the story was centred around the goal of getting the princess. While the whole ‘get the girl’ set-up did make for a bit of cliché, it was nice to have a core goal in the back of my head whilst reading through. However, it also sort of limited the story as there wasn’t much opportunity to branch off and have another adventure that diverted from the main story.

Most characters that I came across in passing were described briefly, and I found it interesting that the princess happened to be the only one that did not happen to possess an unattractive feature, and a LOT of overweight men seemed to appear. 

I can’t help but feeling that this story sort of lacked in ambition. Of course, it works as a decent story as it is, and I did enjoy reading through it. I just feel that the author had a good handle on all the things that make up a good story, but aside from the humour, nothing really stood out to me. The cliché of the pot and array of mostly unoriginal characters, which were mostly entertaining but largely forgettable, could’ve easily been transferred over to create a more original and impressive story. 

Now I’m not sure about this, but I think once you reach the end of each chapter/Act all the previous choices don’t further play into the story. This sort of made the story feel more ‘gamey’ as you had to pass through the stages without dying. It was cool how all three of the Acts each had a separate focus and played a different part in reference to the overall plot of the story.

Generally, I had a lot of fun with this story. However, I didn’t read it all and found that I sort of got tired of the humour after a while. The riddle was an interesting addition to the game. It was largely effective as without it, I doubt I would’ve continued reading to find more endings. 

Evidently a lot of work went into this story, and overall the author did a lot of things that worked effectively. As it stands, the story is good. It’s enjoyable. It just lacks that extra something that makes a story *great*. 

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Reading the other reviews, I think my feelings on this story are mostly similar to Bill’s, although to less of an extent. I enjoyed the story, just not enough for me to find multiple endings after the ‘winning’ one.  The humour also grew stale after a while, and it became a bit of a drag to get through. Maybe I’m un-fun, but I really didn’t think the story was as funny as I had anticipated from the reviews. It had its moments, but was not something I’d ever come back to read again. 

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Got a decent amount of reviews for this one, which is great, but I think I might take mizal's advice of giving people more time to read the games and make the book club a bi-weekly thing. Not so much to give people more time to read it, but rather to give people a break before the next one. Obviously, people do have other stuff to do, and I've got to say, when work gets really busy, I struggle to read a new game every week. Might make it easier to keep up with if we had a little break between games. ^_^

Speaking for myself, I haven't minded the current schedule, as it gives an excuse to take a break from writing and read something I might not otherwise consider. Although I panned this week's choice in my review, I didn't feel like it was a waste of my time. And if there was a week I didn't think I was going to be able to contribute, then I'd just have to take a pass. It's not like there's pressure to read or get kicked off the site...

Any word on when the book club might be coming back to life?

Review posted. Unicorn was the best character.