Susan by Bill Larkins(1988)

The Little Ugly Evil Guy On My Shoulder's Verdict: Simply put, this is a game about fucking.

The Little Nice Handsome Guy On My Shoulder's Verdict: Excuse me, but did he just say "fucking"?

My Verdict: Did those guys just say "fucking"? I thought this site was nicer than that.

The Review...

Actual Ad Insert In The AGT Times, February 1988

Have today's complex, intelligent adventure games got you down?
Are you an undersexed geek who can't get laid in real life unless you pay for it?
Do you like to dress your pet hippopotamus in women's undergarments?
If you answered yes to any of the preceeding questions, then SUSAN is the game for you. It's easy. It's about getting laid. It'll keep your mind off the hippopotamus. What more could you ask for?

This is not a game you could very easily confuse for "high art." A thousand times nay. The goal is to copulate with your sexy girlfriend Susan. To do so, you must retrieve a variety of objects which Susan will request. You must hazardously brave twenty seven locations, a deadly maze, and your own shame at playing such a silly text adventure game to accomplish your mission. Leave it to AGT writers to come up with a game like this 'un. Just kidding. I like AGT a lot, but, you know, it seems that, uh, there isn't necessarily a very high level of intelligence maintained in a lot of the games which require that interpreter. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. The games always LOOK nice, though. This game, for instance, has really cool cyan text! And after all, interactive fiction is only as good as the visuals, right? Right! Essentially, there's only one hard thing about Susan: the maze. But, as it turns out, that's pretty simple, too. And if you type "help" the game'll even TELL you what to do, so not even a newbie will get stumped by it. Oh yeah, what about when you win? Well...I wonder how this game got an 'R' rating? It's not very explicit. In fact, it's kind of disappointing. Here you are wasting your time running around picking up coke bottles and condoms and chains and crap, but when you win the game, you don't even get to bask in your accomplishments! It's just...over.

Did I mention that this game is a work of "experimentary" interactive fiction yet? The game is a metaphor for life. Susan represents everything we hold dear - our fondest dreams and aspirations. In order to make our dreams a reality, we do lots of stupid tasks which we think will bring us closer to our ultimate goal. But like the protagonist in Susan, once we achieve our goal, we realize it wasn't that much to begin with, and in effect, we've been wasting our time working towards this goal because we'll never get a chance to enjoy it once we've got it. This is the most depressing game ever made.

Simple Rating: 3/10

Complicated Rating:12/50

Story: 1/10

Writing: 2/10

Playability: 4/10

Parser Responsiveness: 1/10(What parser responsiveness?)

Puzzle Quality: 4/10(Nice maze. Tee-hee.)

Reader Remarks

Quentin D. Thompson sprach the following on October 21st, 1999:

By the way, the thing I disliked the most about the game was that Susan was implemented as an object, not a creature. ("Eat the sexy girlfriend? You must be kidding!") Oh well..:-)




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