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Funkmaster V Reviews
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7800 Rank: Unranked
Genre: Text Adventure Parody
Awards: Winner of the "First Vagina Joke in 7800 History" Award
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Merlain is a Comedic Take on a Story About Merlin the Magician |
Pros:
Choose Your Own Adventure Style Story Telling
Cons:
I Don't Get Most of the Humor or Inside Jokes |
Watch Yourself- There's a Sly Vagina Joke on This Screen |
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Overview: Atari 7800 programmer Gambler172 is into making book carts... What is a book cart, you ask? It's not that complicated. From what I can tell, it is not really a game, but just a program with different screens that display text and/or simple graphics. It can be a story (like his Journey of Snail), it can be a hodge podge of interviews, information, trivia games, etc (like his ET 7800 Book Cart) or, what is the most exciting to me, a Choose Your Own Adventure style story where you guide the narrative by making pivotal choices in the game. With Merlain 7800, the later is what you get.
What We Gotz Here: This game is apparently a port of another text-like-thingy that was programmed for the Atari Lynx. Gambler172 lead the programming charge here, and he is quite the character. Most of his creations are really unique ideas. My favorite was his Traveler cart (Travi, for short) which went around the world to different Atari users like a slightly more modern Flat Stanley. But most of the time, I am confused at what he's doing. I'm a comedian that gets paid to be funny and make funny stories, and his humor always sails over my head. Is that his fault? Is that my fault? I dunno, but I choose to blame Obama. Merlain is a story about Merlin the Magician... but Gambler172 (Walter, for future reference) changed Merlin's name to Merlain for some reason... why? I think he's afraid of a lawsuit from King Arthur. Again... I dunno.
This "parody adventure" is an odd one. You wake up on a boat... queasy... but really you are in your bed. You are sick, and one of the earliest gags is that you vomit upon yourself. The story changes as you wander through the castle of Gamealot (groan), where bad grammar and inside jokes took me out of the experience repeatedly. If I created one of these text adventure games, I would do an adventure where I was attacking bands of theives and riding horses, not looking at carrots on the kitchen table. This is one reason I had a hard time getting into Merlain, I guess. I did like how one ending abruptly stopped the story and an evil woman makes you have to turn off the system to continue playing. That was a good idea, but I did not do as she requested.
Verdict: At the end of the day, you can probably live without this in your life. But if you are the type of person that enjoys things like B horror movies, Tiny Tim, and rancid milk, it is a train wreck that is hard to look away from for a bit. To me, the humor flies over my head or falls flat. Humor is very tough and subjective, so it should be noted that Walter is German, so his humor is probably more European than American- consider that when evaluating my opinions. There are things I just dont get, like: The Swell of Crystal, vomiting piteously, or what "seeing 3 reflects in the dark" means. I don't know if terms are getting lost in translation, if there's bad grammar galore, or if I am just stupid. On the good side of things, the cartridge (with its green shell) looks badass on a shelf. But being a cart about Merlin... shouldn't the cart be blue since he had a blue hat? See? This is what I mean- the little things confuse me. Another positive is that the first screen features a pretty catchy ditty, but the rest of the cart is devoid of audio.
You may get the humor, and you may love the story. And for that, I'm rating this cart as:
CURIOUS ODDITY!!!
Additional Information: I would like to thank Gambler172 for the screenshots used in this review.
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