One Robot by Michael
http://www.axeuk.com/quest/games/one_robot.zip

"You are a robot designed to serve humans, but you turn on them with your two friends and prepare to assassinate the president."

Please post any reviews, comments, requests for help etc. to this thread.

One Robot by Michael Tritz


Blurb: “You are a robot designed to serve humans, but you turn on them with your two friends and prepare to assassinate the president.”

Not the most enthralling introduction to a game I've ever read unfortunately. It’s never really said just why your robot character has decided to assassinate the president. Boredom? Nothing better to do? Or just something the author decided to put but never actually got round to explaining?

Good points

There weren’t a lot of things I could find about One Robot that I actually liked. While not one of the worst IF games ever written, it had more than a few flaws. On the positive side of things, there were very, very few spelling mistakes, a rarity in Quest games that deserves a mention all of its own. It was also an easy game to make progress with as it lacked any real puzzles and just required the player to move from one location to another and perform remarkably simple task. If not for the fatal bug at the game’s end, you could be through the entire thing from start to finish in perhaps twenty minutes.

Bad points

The descriptions: most are way too short and lack any kind of depth. Frequently I’d see things like

YOU ARE IN BOSS'S OFFICE.
THERE IS BOSS HUNTER HERE.
YOU CAN GO SOUTH.

or

YOU ARE IN DETECTIVE OFFICE.
THERE IS RECEPTIONIST HERE.
YOU CAN GO EAST.

which smacks of lazy game writing. Neither the boss’ office nor the detective office might be interesting places, but they need something in them. Aside from anything else, saying things like THERE IS BOSS HUNTER HERE makes for a jarring read.

There was a particularly bad bit later in the game where I found myself in a number of locations called Nibel, none of which had so much as a single description beyond YOU ARE IN NIBEL and the exits listed. The same applied for several dozen locations when I was flying around in a plane called Cheese-Puff 9000 (decent names isn’t one of this game’s strong points) which are labelled as “0,3” “0,4” “0,5” etc.

The game also lacks descriptions for some actions performed by the player. I killed an NPC in one location yet wasn’t told he was even dead nor did his dead body show up. In another, I used an energy bazooka to destroy a gate yet instead of some text informing me what had happened, I instead got a blank line. Was this game written in such a hurry that the author didn’t even have time to write something?

Items: items need to be referred to by their full names, and not just a single word. A frequent problem in games by newcomers to the scene, but still a pain. So if I have, say, the Super Switch Presser 2000, I can’t refer to it as Switch or Switch Presser to save on typing, I have to bash out Super Switch Presser 2000 every time.

The descriptions of the items are poor as well. The Super Switch Presser 2000 is referred to as NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY while the Beam Sword is A LIGHT SWORD THAT DOES SOME DAMAGE. Other item descriptions are every bit as poor.

Guess the verb: another common fault in games by newcomers. At one point in the game I'm required to kill someone (I'm supposedly playing the part of ‘one of the good guys’ but the game requires me to kill this person in cold blood anyway) yet commands like KILL COMMUTER or ATTACK COMMUTER weren’t recognised. Instead, the strangely worded USE BEAM SWORD ON COMMUTER is needed. Elsewhere there was a switch which could only be activated by USE SUPER SWITCH PRESSER 2000 ON SWITCH instead of the more simple PRESS SWITCH or PUSH SWITCH. Even USE SWITCH would have been better.

I also came across a few oddities, the worst being a trio of thugs (all referred to as ‘thug’ incidentally) who calmly stood there while I blasted them away with a chain gun. Due to the weaknesses of the game programming, I was only able to kill them one at a time, yet the remaining thugs never made any attempts to stop me massacring them or tried to run away. What nice and obliging thugs.

Lack of Direction

If there's one major flaw with One Robot, it’s that it lacks any kind of direction for most of the time. You move from place to place, perform simple tasks, and then move somewhere else and perform another task. Most are relatively straightforward and don’t require any kind of figuring out, but seldom is there any kind of motivation behind your actions. You are asked to kill people and steal things without any real purpose being given.

Conclusion

Not a terrible game, but certainly well below average, One Robot features dozens of empty locations that seem to be there for no other reason than to make the game seem far larger than it really is. There is nothing to do in the majority of them and even the ones with NPCs and items are mostly bland and featureless. If all that wasn’t bad enough, I reached a dead end in a location called Observatory (1F) (and that’s the entire description for the location if you're interested) with nothing to do and no exits. The game advised me to hit the switches but as I’d already done that and got nowhere, it looks like I’d come across a fatal bug.

There were enough problems in the game to justify it getting a 1 out of 10 but as that’s a score I generally reserve for totally unplayable messes (which this isn’t) I’ll be generous and bump it up a notch.

2 out of 10

Some of this may be echoing the previous review but...

This was a fairly fun game despite a few grammatical errors. The main problems with this game are a lack of descriptions. There are parts where the descriptions are there and are helpful. There are other sections (the majority of the game) where there are no descriptions. I am speaking of descriptions of the rooms that you may be standing in and most importantly, descriptions of actions that are happening when you use an object on another object. For instance, from the beginning of the game, you are able to use weapons on things. If you use the weapon on the appropriate item, your weapon and the object that you attacked simply disappear with no description of what happened.
This happens throughout the game.
The puzzles were not too hard. Some were too easy. The district area was overwhelming at first because every available exit had been used (n, ne, nw, etc…) But after a few minutes of clicking around, I got my bearings.
Almost mid-game, you encounter a person who offers a bazooka in return for a favor. After you have completed the favor and return to the person, the bazooka is sitting on the floor but if you talk to the person again, he returns the same response as if you had just met him whether or not you’ve already picked up the bazooka.
I played through the entire game in about 10 or 15 minutes, I suppose. HOWEVER, in the final battle, for some reason the code does not work and you cannot advance to the next stage of the battle. After looking at the file, it seems that if you destroy 4 of the objects in the room, the next part of the battle should become available. It does not unfortunately. I don’t know if the game was tested after it was completed. If so, this should have definitely been caught.
In conclusion, the game held my attention to the end of the game. I have not gone to the end of many games in Quest because they either did not hold my attention or they were just not playable due to errors. So that’s a compliment for One Robot.

3 out of 5

I've always been curious as to the way people rate games. You give this 3 out of 5, which equates to 6 out of 10 on the 1 to 10 scale, i.e. an above average game. Yet it has virtually no storyline, no location descriptions for the majority of locations, a fatal flaw at the end that makes the game unwinnable, very poor writing, no depth whatsoever... and so on and so forth.

By the standards of Quest games, it might be considered 'above average', but I doubt the same could be said to apply if compared to games written with any other system.

I suppose 3 out of 5 could equal 6 out of 10 or 12 out of 20 and so on... But on a 5 basis, 3 is dead center.

The "whatever" out of 5 is based on the automatic scoring system that Alex had set up initially to rate Quest games. In my eyes, 3 is average and maybe a little above average.

On a side note, I forgot to mention in my review that I liked the Pierce Botnan joke.

Have you played games written with other systems?

I have played a fair few TADS games, but I don't know about inform.
I used to play tads games on my old Atari.

They were quite fun to play, and all the games I've played I'd rate as at least 6 out of 10.

Then again, there were some really simple games, one involved a tortoise and took me an hour or something. Was quite short, and I could do it in about 10 minutes after I'd done it once.
It was all about you becoming a tortoise and finding a way to turn back into a human.