Re: My impression of the Fyleet Crobe thread

["Adam Atkinson" <ghira@mistral.co.uk>]

On 07-Sep-99 22:57:55, Adam Cadre said:
>Modern IF players: "I don't get it.  Aren't these just collections of 
>brutally difficult puzzles without the reward of lovely prose or an 
>interesting storyline for solving them?  Is it just the authors trying to 
>be difficult for difficulty's own sake?"

And the answers are, more or less, "yes" and "yes". But this is a bit
like the "Heroic Failures" entry on worst book reviews of all time
where someone in a countryside magazine pans "Lady Chatterly's Lover"
because it doesn't offer much insight into estate management and
groundskeeping. Many of the Phoenix adventures made no real attempt
to have lovely prose or storylines. I'm not sure even Sangraal has a
storyline. Maybe Xeno and Spy do: IIRC they're the only Phoenix
games that weren't Zork-style treasurehunts. I've only played the very
early stages of them since I found Xeno impossibly hard, and Spy came
out just before I left Cambridge.

>Original developers: "Pfah.  You think *these* versions are difficult?  
>You were *supposed* to play them after covering yourself with the dozens 
>of live scorpions that came in the box."

Of course, the originals didn't come in boxes. They were on a
university time-sharing system in various publicly accessible
directories.

However, I'm sure User Services would have been more than willing to
cover users in live scorpions on request. The securicup man and/or
Peter Crofts would probably have been only too happy to do this
even without the user asking for it. See JRP1's personal home page for
a collection of tales about these mythic figures.

-- 
Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk)
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