| Home | About Me | |
|
|
DELRON
|
Passion Pit
Reviews
Author: Alan Pilon
Date: 2004
TADS
What does AIF stand for? Adult Interactive Fiction. If you likely to be offended by games with sexual content, you are advised not to open these files.
Reviewed by Kastier
Plot synopsis: For one reason or another, you’ve decided to go out on a blind date with a woman your friend Mark has set you up with, named, Lauren, Eileen, Amy, or who knows what, is a hottie. Unfortunately, you’re short on cash so you had to go to the drive-in theater for the date. Since you’re out in a drive-in with a hottie, might as well try to get lucky. Wee! Writing + Plot: Passion Pit does have a plot and puzzles. It’s the same as most AIF games in that regard. But unlike most, it tries to present the game as a more realistic depiction of life. That is, to get the girl, you have to make her comfortable and butter her up. The concept is a good one, and that could be used to create an entertaining and perhaps, funny game that plays on all the drive-in movie clichés. Instead, this game manages to be nothing more than a boring item hunt with puzzles that are near impossible to figure out without a walkthrough, with a virtually unresponsive parser, and an almost complete lack of anything that could be considered writing. Heck, it didn’t describe even a single object throughout the entire game. Worse, getting to the "reward" in the sex scenes almost feels like winning a marathon race, only to have people throw poop on you at the finish line. I’ll cover this more in the technical section. Score: 1 Technical (design + programming): Passion Pit was created with an early graphical based commercial text adventure kit GCS (I think). It was extremely basic, and produced simple two word parser based games. Two word parsers tend to be unforgiving. What Alan Pilon managed to do here was take that basic two word parser format and make it even MORE unforgiving. Doing simple commands that any NORMAL game would understand (like EXAMINE <object>) often ends up with you getting the following message... "In this adventure, you must FEEL your way, so to speak..." If I ever read that phrase in an IF game again, I’ll probably start throwing rocks. What the heck does that phrase mean? What relevance does it have to the game? It sounds like some sort of hint or something. Is my character blind? With all the lack of item descriptions, he might as well be. I can’t look at the concession stand, I can’t look at my car, I can’t even look at the supposedly hot girl I’m with. How the heck am I supposed to know what to do if I can’t look at anything? It’s enough to make you tear your hair out. Passion Pit comes with a doc file from the author explaining how well received this game was when he put it on the BBS’s back in 1988. It was based on an older game named Drive-in. I wonder if Drive-in could have been any worse than this. Somehow, I doubt it. I guess I can understand the supposed praise only if we recognize that short of a few old Commodore 64 games, Passion Pit is the grandfather of them all. It had almost no contenders. The big question is, is an award legitimate if you’re the only one in the running for it? The only real innovation in this game is that every separate time you play, the girl you’re with changes names and clothing. A neat trick, but totally inconsequential to the playing of the game. Score: 1 Entertainment Factor: What entertainment? Moving around a parking lot full of cars with a move limit and a miserable parser, with no idea of what to do, or which of the verbs I guess will actually work this time, is not my idea of entertainment. This game is frustrating, badly written, and not worth anyone’s time. Score: 1 ----------------------------------------------- The Last Word: Passion Pit blazed the trail for games to come, setting the standard for sucking for the next 16 years. Ok, I’m being sarcastic... sorta. In all honesty, Passion Pit isn’t worth the anyone’s time... unless you’re a masochist, in which case, this will be right up your alley. This is a bad game, that’s poorly written, with an extremely unintuitive parser, and very little to reward you even if you do manage to slog through it far enough to get to the sex scene. Don’t bother. No really. Don’t. Kastier's ranking: 1 out of 10
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
| Any donation would be much appreciated to help keep the site online and growing. | To help make your donation quicker and
easier just click the "Donate" button and you will be taken to the secure Paypal donation page. |
|
| Home | About Me |
