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The Dinner Party Reviews
Author: Blue Meanie
Date: 2002
ADRIFT 4.0
Reviewed by Evil Bacteria
As much as I hate knowing that someone is using a Beatles reference in regard to
pornography, Blue Meanie has indeed crafted a fine specimen of a game in The Dinner Party. While it's the standard "do your sister plus a few other people"
plot, the scenes are interesting and the game is well written, with a few easy puzzles thrown in for good measure.
The Good Points:
First of all, this game has puzzles that I can actually figure out. It took me a
bit (I suck at IF) but I managed to complete them all. This in itself is impressive, since most puzzles in AIF are either too difficult or uninspired to bother with, or too badly written or too ludicrous for normal people to solve.
The Dinner Party doesn't have this problem, and if you get stuck, you can always
ask the NPCs for a hint or two. While the plot itself has been done to death, the NPCs are fairly interesting characters to deal with, and there are a large
number of them.
You can do a variety of things with each character, and the scenes are well written and lengthy enough to be worth the effort. The Dinner
Party doesn't disappoint; the sex scenes are some of the best you'll find in AIF. The puzzles aren't perfect, but they're certainly not bad; most are
straightforward enough that you shouldn't have any trouble with them, and I've always liked having to earn the sex scenes, rather than just having them handed
to you. Besides, if you get stuck on any of them, you can usually skip it, since
most of them aren't necessary to complete the game.
The Bad Points:
There are really only two things I don't care for in this game: helping your sister with her homework, and the overall pace of the game. Helping with her
homework requires a very unintuitive use of the computer you find in the game, and several times the game jumps from sex scene to sex scene without anything to
interrupt the pacing. Remember, the largest erogenous zone is the brain, and to ignore the brain is to bore the brain.
Overview:
Altogether, The Dinner Party is one of the better AIF games to be offered, combining a skill with words and a wide cast of characters. Your attention will
be held throughout the game, but there are a few parts that get kind of repetitive, since you just skip from one sex scene to the next. Of course, this
is true in most AIF, so it's hard to consider this a severe negative, and overall, it's a damn good game.
Reviewed by A. Ninny
Overall thoughts:
I came away with very mixed
feelings about The Dinner Party. It definitely has its strengths and weaknesses,
which I’ll address – strengths first. I found it to have decent story writing
and object descriptions, a plot that, while hard to believe, was at least
internally consistent, and it provided some very fun romp-ish sex. The game
moves along quickly for the most part, and, with a notable exception, doesn’t
tend to hang the player up too much over puzzles. I found the game to be quite
funny in several spots, which I think led me to enjoy it more than I would
ordinarily – given the content. I’m actually neutral on the quality of the
characters in the game. While they are undeniably flat, they aren’t flatter than
I expected, especially given the type of game (a short romp) that it is.
The main, glaring negative is the massive guess-the-verb sequence that comes
smack-dab in the middle of the game and can really be frustrating, even for
repeat players. I’ll discuss that in more detail in the technical review. Other
negatives include the lack of any real depth to the characters and that some
players may have a hard time enjoying the three incest sequences (one
sister-sister and two brother-sister) that are, according to the way the author
presents them, the highlights of the game.
Sex:
The sex in The Dinner
Party can best be described as unchallenging, but there’s nothing really wrong
with that, especially in a romp. Sex act descriptions tend to be short, and the
(mostly) one-time-through coding formula are designed to get the player to move
from sex scene to sex scene without spending a lot of time with any one of them.
By design, the constant barrage of sex allows the game as a whole to be hotter
than any one particular sex scene, though the scene with the twins is a
standout.
Technical:
This is where The Dinner Party really falls
flat. The game simply is not up to snuff, technically. The main problem every
player will encounter is one single central puzzle in which every action (there
are several in the puzzle) requires you to guess the single correct command.
Even Blue Meanie must have realized that he has a problem, because after the
player fumbles with the commands for a great while, an NPC will finally pipe up
and tell you what to do (I’d be interested in knowing why he didn’t eliminate
the problem in the first place). Aside from this one main giant showstopper, the
game is best described as glitchy. There are numerous misspellings, grammar
problems and problems with clothing, minor bugs with sex commands and similar
issues that get in the way of players’ enjoyment. I also recall that there was a
crashing bug in the game (during the twins scene), but didn’t encounter it while
playing the game for this review. It could be that I updated my ADRIFT Runner in
the meantime, or that the game was updated to correct the bug, or I accidentally
missed issuing the buggy command.
Puzzles/Game play:
None of the
puzzles are difficult to solve. Even the showstopper puzzle isn’t a hard puzzle,
which makes it more of a frustration that you have to work so hard to crack it.
Assuming that you are lucky enough to guess the verbs the first time through
(rush out and buy a lottery ticket NOW!), you’ll find game play to be pretty
easy, accommodating the player’s move from one sexual conquest to the next.
Intangibles:
This game is an advertisement for beta-testing. I don’t know
whether it was beta-tested, but any tester worth his or her salt would have at
least flagged the guess-the-verb puzzle.
Final Thoughts
While I
certainly cannot wholeheartedly recommend The Dinner Party, I can’t in good
conscience advise readers of this review to avoid it either. Keep in mind that
the guess-the-verb puzzle will cause you problems, but I still think most
players’ overall impression of the game will be positive.
Rating: C+
Reviewed by A. Bomire
Overview:
This game was released during a
relative flood of games involving incest, and so was quite a common theme at the
time it was released. As such, for its time it was one of the better games,
which says more for the other games that were released than it does for this
one. For all of its problems, however, it is still a decent game and the average
player will enjoy it.
Puzzles/Game Play:
Most of the puzzles in this
game are pretty straight forward, without a lot of head scratching on what the
solution should be. The head scratching comes in when trying to puzzle out the
exact wording to do what you want. There are quite a few "guess-the-verb"
puzzles in this one, and a few puzzles that are order specific. What I mean by
this last is that if a puzzle is to pour a cup of tea and set it on a saucer,
you have to put the cup on the saucer before you can pour tea into it (this is
an example, there is no such puzzle in the game). You can't, for example, pour
tea into the cup and then put it on the saucer. This leads to some confusion in
some of the puzzles as you try something that should work, and when it doesn't
you're not sure why not. In a few instances, the author helps you out with
friendly messages such as "You need to do this first".
Technical:
On
top of the above mentioned problems, there are a few other technical glitches.
For example, you go into a room where a PC is mentioned as being on the desk.
However, "turn on PC" returns "You see no such thing". But, if you examine the
desk, the PC shows up and is now accessible. This sort of thing can be annoying.
There are also the usual number of items that are in the room description but
don't show up. There is even a case where if you go to the wrong room at the
wrong time, you'll completely mess up the timing on one puzzle and miss a scene.
Sex:
The sex is fairly well written; nothing really exciting, but not
as bad as some games out there. It is varied enough from person to person such
that some characters will do some things, and some others will not. Most
characters in the game are pretty generic, although there are exceptions. One
warning: This game involves a lot of incest, so if this isn't your type of thing
you might want to skip this game.
Final Thoughts:
This game is pretty
run-of-the-mill across the board. If you are just looking to spend a few minutes
playing a game, without any heavy plot or anything, then you might enjoy it.
Rating: C
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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