Amnesia

The Good
The storyline to this game sounded compelling (as well as the cover artwork). I knew it was a text adventure, so I wasn't expecting any eye candy. Unfortunately, my interest in this game waned about as soon as I started playing it.

The Bad
I had respect for Electronic Arts games, so I was expecting this game to be at least as good as a run-of-the-mill Infocom text adventure. I was sadly disappointed. The text parser is horrible: many commands the Infocom engine wouldn't have any trouble parsing, tripped up this game repeatedly.

The story is rather linear, which is usually fine. But the game constrains you as to what you can do. For example, in the opening scene you are in a hotel room and the phone rings. You cannot leave the room and ignore the phone: you MUST answer the phone.

Because of the poor parser and lack of freedom, I stopped playing this game shortly after starting. I didn't have the determination to fight with the game's shortcomings. Any Infocom game I played was much more compelling than this attempt.

The Bottom Line
A frustrating attempt at a decent genre. Okay if you can spoon-feed its parser and don't mind a game that manhandles you.

The Good
The game is so deep, the world is practically endless. The complex commands it can understand is mind boggleing. This game was truely ahead of its time. It sadly gets little mention.

The Bad
Hard as hell to beat, and time consuming.

The Bottom Line
If you like text adventures, play this! If you never played text adventures and think games that dont have polygons(or any gfx at all!!!) suck then play this and a whole new world of gaming will open to you. And yes they still do make text adventure games but they are mostly the online multiplayer type.