IFDB page: Coffee Quest II
Final placement: 32nd place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition
Before I started playing this game, my thought was, “What happened to Coffee Quest I?” After I started playing it, my thought was, “I really really hope I never find out.” Lord, but this game is bad. It’s so depressingly bad that the thought of spending three paragraphs enumerating its faults fills me with a yawning despair. I do care about the constructive criticism thing, but at this point in the comp judging, I find it hard to stick to that ideal when faced with a game like this.
Add to this the fact that the game knows it’s bad — it calls itself a “travesty” in its ABOUT text, and says, “you are welcome to distribute it as long as you can find someone who’s willing to take it.” So what’s the point of constructive criticism, anyway? Why bother offering suggestions for improvement when quality is so clearly not valued? So instead, a randomly selected cornucopia of bad moments:
- Utterly unresponsive NPCs who only act as ATMs or door-locks.
- Zillions of mechanical errors, including lots of my archenemy, the it’s/its error.
- Writing that frequently fails to explain (or even mention) basic points.
- Made-up, unexplained words, or perhaps specialized slang words that I’ve never encountered and aren’t in my dictionary, which amount to the same thing. (“Maureen is the office bint.”)
- Terrible, half-assed room descriptions. (“You are in the aisle. It’s quite dull here.” Yeah, no kidding.)
- Bugs, bugs, bugs:
>ask technician about drive
'It ate my disk' complains the techyThe techy is scared that it may
be his round.That's far too technical for him.That's far too
technical and executive for him.The techy seems unable to grasp the
concept of . - A completely pointless sleep timer.
I guess that’s enough. This game is what Little Blue Men would have been if it had been poorly written, poorly coded, and poorly designed. In fact, entire sections of it seem swiped directly from that game, but in such a way as to drain them of everything that made them interesting. There are a few grins here and there, several of which are apparently unintentional, but overall it’s a pretty grim experience. Just pray there’s no Coffee Quest III.
Rating: 3.1