IFDB page: PTBAD 3
Final placement: 35th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition
When I saw the title, I thought this game was going to be a sequel to Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. Because the acronym seemed to be missing a number of letters, I thought it was going to be a badly-done, amateurish sequel, but a sequel nonetheless. For those unfamiliar with this long-standing IF in-joke, in 1996 Rob Noyes released a very simple game called Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. The title is more or less also the walkthrough.
There are other ultra-minimalist joke games, but PUTPBAD attained iconic status because of the humor of its writing and the sheer ludicrousness of its premise. The joke inspired one sequel by Noyes, which fleshed out the simplicity of the original by adding some more funny stuff. It also inspired a much better joke, Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle, in which a huge number of IF authors collaborated to combine the original with the “one-move IF” concept pioneered by Sam Barlow in his game Aisle.
Well, if this game was meant to connect to any of those, it fails completely, and consequently, I have no idea what the title is supposed to represent. In fact, representation is a vexed issue for the entire game, which bears more resemblance to gibberish like Comp2000’s Stupid Kittens in that all of it seems like offhand, random, unconnected thoughts that make no sense whatsoever. To borrow a phrase from the game itself: “Rather disgusting dada surealist [sic] foolishness.” PTBAD 3 offers a badly-spelled, creakily-coded trip through what purports to be someone’s mind, perhaps someone who was the victim of a severe closed head injury. It’s got a maze, toilet humor, and a complete lack of proofreading. It’s quite a waste of time, though it’s short enough that it at least doesn’t waste much of it.
I wonder, though: why does PUTPBAD work when this game doesn’t? After all, in Baf’s Guide, Carl Muckenhoupt dismisses the original PUTPBAD in almost the same terms (“Would be a waste of time, were it not so short as to be almost nonexistent.”) They’re both tiny, nonsensical games that discard nearly all IF conventions. The difference, I think, is craft. Even though it only consists of maybe 200 words beyond the standard Inform libraries, PUTPBAD is clever, solidly coded, and impeccably written. PTBAD 3, on the other hand, seems as though it couldn’t care less about its prose or its code. And because of that, neither could I.
Rating: 2.9